Thursday, 09 February 2012 12:30

Written by Diana Nelson Jones

The answer to yesterday's puzzler is 5452 2nd Ave., Hazelwood. The storefront behind  the possibly tri-pod dog is a market. The words in the window read "Poultry Dressed While U Wait."

They used texting abbreviations in 1936!

How about the above photo? Can anyone identify where it is? There are bonus points if you can name what's there now. (Friends and family of current occupant are not eligible to play.)

Clue: The building hasn't changed that much, especially up top.

Wednesday, 08 February 2012 12:47

Written by Diana Nelson Jones

The Storefront Project will progress, it will, it will!

Just not sure when.

So in themeantime, I’ll try to keep your interest alive: Here's another tease, this one from 1936.

Love the dog.

Can any of you identify roughly which street and neighborhood this is (within a few blocks)? Here’s a clue: You don’t have to cross a river to get there from Downtown.

This picture was taken along a long retail corridor — once thriving, like all of them — that is now a threadbare, retail desert.

The neighborhood will be among the next ones to be added to the Storefront Project, after the Mexican War Streets, which is tentatively scheduled to be on-line Feb. 19 but may be pushed back even further.

Please stay interested. It will be worth it.

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Tuesday, 07 February 2012 11:10

Written by Diana Nelson Jones

Maybe by this summer, dogs in Larryville will finally have their fenced-in play space. The committee for the Bernard Dog Run has raised $30,000 of the $60,000 it needs and hopes to reap another $7,000 from the annual gourmet spaghetti dinner fund-raiser, which is March 2 at the Teamster Hall, 4701 Butler St.

The dog run will be a linear acre on city-owned land between CSX Corp. railroad tracks and the Allegheny Riverfront Trail.

It is named in memory of Jay Bernard, the late co-owner of Jay Designs on Butler Street and a champion of fostering and adopting dogs from the pound.

Some invasive trees and other growth has been removed.

Susan VanAlstine, chair of the dog park committee, said the group got a $23,500 grant for solar lighting from Duquesne Light and expects the installation to cost about $3,000. The fencing will cost between $15,000 and 20,000 (yikes! you could buy a house for that!) and some tree removal remains to be done, which will cost about $7,500, she said.

“For right now. we’re only concerned about the fencing, and our hope  is to be installing it by this summer,” she said. The wish list down the road would includebenches, a water fountain and climbing apparatus.

The gourmet spaghetti dinner fund-raiser is sponsored by the Boys of Lawrenceville, and they are planning for 800 and 1,000 people.

Chris Lugo, chair of the fund-raiser, said the spaghetti dinner is the big fund-raiser but that the committee is hoping to conduct other fund-raisign activities involving neighborhood businesses through the year.

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Monday, 06 February 2012 15:56

Written by Diana Nelson Jones

David Aschkenas is a photographer who sees art in broken shards of ice on a lake and the leaves embedded in them. He sees art in crows feeding and flying up from the snow outside his studio.

When he sees it, so do you: the crow photos are astonishingly gorgeous and make me realize the value of watching things for long stretches of time. Nothing is beautiful if you don't stare at it for a while.

His images are exquisite and stunning and I have been a fan since seeing the first ones last year.

I went to his exhibit at Rodef Shalom today, in part see his images of the synagogue (which will remain on exhibit for several months, from 9a to 5p Monday through Friday) but mainly to meet him and to write about him in tomorrow’s page 2 “Walkabout.”

He brought several of his books, one titled “Highland Park,” one titled “Stones.”

There’s a shot of Highland Park in which the colors of a pink-orange-purple sunrise show through a tree of green and yellow leaves that doesn’t look like anything you would ever see in life as we know it. But it did for a short time, and he captured it.

http://www.daschkenasphoto.com/new%20work/index.html