A day in Shadyside, Pittsburgh, where a genuine toy store thrives

We spent the day in this city of three rivers, in the Shadyside neighborhood where Mary spent her childhood. In our rented one-bedroom apartment, it was nice to decamp and be able to visit Mary's family and have a place to come home to afterward.

Shadyside's Walnut Street is one of the city's premier shopping streets, here we found a very useful Apple store where a pack of geniuses stood waiting to help me with a simple iPhone question. Ten minutes was all my guy needed to set me straight, and it gave him several additional minutes to pitch me on the virtues of the new 11" Macbook Air. That's quite an engineering feat, packing so much power into something that feels like a file folder with a few papers in it.

We ventured out into the sunlight, stopping for jeans at a Banana Republic and at Shadyside Variety Store, a toy shop that's been an anchor on the street since the '60s. I love a store where the owner shows you her favorite toys and everything is easy to get at and play with. Try doing that with the blister-packed commercial-driven merchandise in Wal-Mart or Target.

I wanted to return to the impressive museums I saw when I first visited the city, so we went to the Carnegie Museum where an exhibit of photographs by Teenie Harris, who spent many decades shooting the city's black communities. Using projectors the show featured gigantic images of the black and white shots, which were then viewable in an adjacent room. You can call a number and hear more background about each shot, which was when I learned about "Double V": That meant victory over the Nazis plus a hoped for second victory over racism against blacks. The black newspaper promoted Double V throughout the war.

We ended the night right down the street from Mary's dad's apartment, in a Middle eastern restaurant called Ali Baba's. After the smorgasbord of meze dishes, I asked the owner about the situation in Syria, where he is from. He seemed glad that he was here, a successful immigrant instead of still living in his native land, and shrugged when I suggested there would soon be a new leader over there. So far, the Arab Spring hasn't brought much freedom or much prosperity, so I guess that was why he was less than excited about the future of his country, no matter who ends up being in charge.

Brooklyn's Park Slope on a Saturday night

We’re en route to faraway Pittsburgh this morning, and I’m up early in Kyle and Maggie’s apartment in Park Slope Brooklyn. The busy street, Fifth Avenue, has hundreds of restaurants, shops and cafes, and last night we had to pop into three different places to find one that would seat us in a reasonable amount of time. All the restaurants, first top flight Italian, then the Bogota Latin Cafe, and finally, the Brooklyn Fish Camp had big lines. Everyone here goes out to eat, and every restaurant is narrow, and not that big.

After a seat at a stainless steel bar at the Fish Camp, we got ourselves seated and it was time to enjoy some high quality fish tacos. I had inquired about a wild caught striped bass special and the chef told me the fish was caught off of Montalk. Later as we sipped beers at the bar, they tipped me off that there was only one plate of it left, and yes, I’d take that.

The city, Brooklyn and Manhattan both, always transfer an energy and a liveliness that few other places can impart. The excitement of the crowded restaurant, and the people up and down the street…it’s something that’s good for me once in a while. I always love coming down here and it’s nice to have a mid point before we make the big drive out west. We will be bringing a little weiner dog named Schotze with us, we just hope he’s well behaved and doesn’t bark at people along the route.

A chance to meet an important man in Mary's life

It’s a Saturday morning, I’ve already been to the gym, and I’m in that good mood that comes with a view of nothing but vacation ahead. We’re going on a road trip: first to Park Slope, Brooklyn to visit Mary’s son and daughter in law, and then Sunday, a long drive to Pittsburgh, PA.

I haven’t driven the vast length of Pennsylvania since a roadtrip as a teen, when we drove nonstop from New Jersey all the way to Gary Indiana. I remember thinking how long and large Pennsylvania was, it seemed like the biggest state I’d ever traversed. Our reasons for this visit are simple. I want to meet Jim Cunningham, Mary’s father.

He’s the proud parent of ten children, some of whom are still in Pittsburgh, and others who have settled around the country. I think it’s important to meet the man who my sweetheart Mary is so proud of, with whom she talks on the phone regularly, and so we set off. It might be a bit of a long drive, but in the long run, meeting the man in person is important to me.

We’ll also be experimenting with a really neat concept–we’ve rented an apartment through Airbnb, a service that connects apartment owners with people looking for hotel-like accommodations. The website has become a huge success, with a billion-dollar plus valuation….we wrote about them four years ago when they were just a start-up. I will be writing an article about the rental experience and enjoying a little holiday in the city of three rivers next week.

Read about Airbnb's early days: http://www.gonomad.com/lodgings/0910/air-b-n-b.html

Truth brings the 1800s to the Academy stage

It was a world premier, and the tears of joy on Linda McInerney's face as she stood introducing the show in the corner of the Academy stage showed how much this show must mean to her. It was, as she wrote in the program, the culmination of a big effort that began with a dream. An actual dream set right here, in the regal, spacious theater on Main St. As she gave her thanks to sponsors and supporters, I could feel how happy she was and how the Academy full of beaming faces must have made her heart swell.

This folk opera was a big undertaking....that was clear when the stage filled up with all of the actors, wearing their gorgeous period dress, a cross section of so many 1820s characters. Adding actors to the boxes adjacent to the stage made the scene even more dramatic, extending the theatrical magic to both sides off the stage.

Evelyn Harris, a veteran of the women's acapella group, Sweet Honey In the Rock, has so many songs to sing, it boggles how she could ever remember so many lyrics...she's on stage nearly the whole time. A fascinating sidelight to the dramatic presentation of Sojourner Truth's life was the affection and admiration shown toward her by her master reminding me of Thomas Jefferson's dalliance with Sally Hemmings. Her master keeps promising her freedom in ten years. Promises, promises.

John Thomas as Frederick Douglass was a dead-ringer for every photo I've ever seen of the famous abolitionist. A few of the bit characters, too, like the Pinkster King and the cop, looked perfectly the way I'd imagine them in a history book.

If you love big music, big staging, a full orchestra and costumes that truly bring you back two centuries, go see this production, it will run at the Academy through Feb 18.

Sojourner Truth in Song: the world premier of Truth, Thursday at the Academy

Chris Rohman previews the Slavery-era opera, Truth, in this week’s Advocate. Read the preview here.

On Thursday night we’ll go and see it for ourselves. It’s pretty exciting to have a world premier of such an ambitious show, helmed by Deerfield’s Linda McInerney, being produced so close by. It's a labor of intense proportions, and it will be fun to see how it all comes together.

With one third of workers in the public sector, Greece is doomed for decades

This week in an an op-ed about Sunday's riots in Greece by Brian M Carney a particular sentence stood out and made me uneasy. "Almost every traffic light in the vicinity was out, smashed during the overnight vandalism."

This reminds of me of the eery feeling I got when I visited Berkeley, California ten years ago and people had sawed the heads of parking meters off, leaving their metal stems all that remained down the street.

The Athens vandals also chipped marble from the sides of buildings to create makeshift projectiles. So what are they mad enough about to destroy beautiful buildings like the King George Palace Hotel?
Most logically, their impotence to solve their huge financial problems. The protesters have no idea of how much worse it's going to get in their country.

Nearly one third of the workers in Greece work for the public sector. On many city blocks every other storefront is vacant. In eight years between 2000 and 2008, labor costs for country's private sector rose 62%...compared with 15% in Germany. The government has added thousands of jobs and all of this, plus the wage increases, were paid for with money borrowed from European banks. On top of this there is a nationwide habit of avoiding paying income taxes as much as possible.

I shudder to think of what is going to happen, after there are no more streetlights to damage and all the banks stop lending to the country. It's pretty scary.

How big a house do you need? Need?

The story was titled, 'living very large,' and the photo was an aerial shot of one of Los Angeles' most massive single family homes. It looked more like a hotel, but it indeed was Hyatt hotel heir Anthony Pritzker's newest house, tipping the scales at 49,300 square feet. Apparently these megahomes are the hottest thing in building, even as new home starts hit an all-time low in 2011.

So what do you get when you buy a house that has a master bedroom as big as the average American's entire home? One trend that's spreading are two-level basements. Then you can pack a bowling alley, your staff bedrooms, and lots of garages down there. Honestly, Pritzker's house looks more like the headquarters of the CIA than a comfy retreat, but the other houses in the story looked more like, well, houses.

Take New England Patriot's quarterback Tom Brady and model Gisele Bundchen's new digs. It looks sort of like a house, it's just stretched way, way out across a Brentwood hillside. It weighs in at 18,300 square feet and you drive over a bridge to get there. They have something called a 'morning bar' near their huge playroom, library and many terraces.

A son of Saudi Arabia's king has even bigger plans for his new home in LA. He originally wanted to build an 85,000 square foot Italianate mansion, but neighbors objected. So he scaled it down to a more reasonable 70,000 square feet. The average single family home in the US is now 2392 square feet, about the size of one of these house's master closets.

Some people are the inviters, the organizers, the doers

This past weekend I spent the whole time up in Wendell with the lovely Mary Gilman. The house where I live was taken over by eleven house guests, friends of my daughter Kate from NMH, the prep school where both she and I graduated. Upon my return after my own fantastically busy and enjoyable weekend, I saw that she was still basking in that afterglow of seeing old friends. It sounds like we both had a blast.

Kate Cosme, my daughter, is the organizer. She's the one who gets these reunions done, she's the one who emails everyone again and again, saving the date, getting people off the fence, and bringing all of these people together. She is like me, in that she is always the one making the calls, asking people over, setting up the plans....and when it's me I sometimes think, 'why not them?'

But again and again, when the people all show up and the weekend plans unfold, and everyone is so happy to be reunited, they are so glad that Kate was the persistent one, the one who had the idea and who made it happen. I have been disappointed often that I sometimes think if I don't make calls to get people over, or to make a weekend plan, no one will call me. Some people are just happier being the one who gets called than being the lightning rod, the point person.

It's hard to accept that Kate and I are just like that, we're the ones who do it. People love us for it, despite the fact that sometimes I wish everyone else would do the inviting. But we're always glad it happens.

Mexico's drug wars rage, yet hoteliers keep building more hotels

When we went to Mexico last month, more than a few people voiced concerns about safety. Again and again, some Americans say they are worried about visiting a country ‘where there is so much drug war violence.’ The stats are scary—more than 40,000 deaths since the conflict began, yet in today’s WSJ there was a story about the thriving tourism and business climate that exists in Mexico in 2012. Our plane to Puerto Vallarta was full, and nobody we talked to was at
all afraid to be flying there.

Business owners are savvy. They don’t let short-term problems stop their long term thinking. So that’s why so many hotel chains are building in Mexico. Intercontinental Hotels will launch 46 new hotels in Mexico by the end of 2014. Hilton now has 23 resorts there and plans a 35% expansion. Marriot has nine hotels that will open between now and 2016.

The influx of tourism is coming not only from the US (it’s the number one overseas destination for Americans) but from up-and-coming countries like Russia, China and Colombia. The article also stated that the visitors from these countries spend much more than Americans and stay three times as long….and that’s why Mexican’s tourism ministry is opening tourism promotion offices in Beijing, Seoul, Moscow and Brussels.They have also simplified their visa process and are counseling
hoteliers on what these new visitors like best: Chinese-archeology, Brazilians-shopping, Russians-bling.

While the gunshots keep on coming along the border, in parts of Sinaloa and other regions, overseas investments just keep flowing into Mexico–$18 billion in 2010 and much of this from the US.

Mexico’s just too great a country to let its tourism and business be outgunned by the thugs fighting over their drug territories. 

Mexico's drug wars rage, yet hoteliers keep building more hotels

When we went to Mexico
last month, more than a few people voiced concerns about safety. Again
and again, some Americans say they are worried about visiting a country
‘where there is so much drug war violence.’ The stats are scary—more
than 40,000 deaths in 2011, yet in today’s WSJ there was a story about
the thriving tourism and business climate that exists in Mexico in 2012.
Our plane to Puerto Vallarta was full, and nobody we talked to was at
all afraid to be flying there.

Business owners are savvy. They don’t let short-term problems stop
their long term thinking. So that’s why so many hotel chains are
building in Mexico.
Intercontinental Hotels will launch 46 new hotels in Mexico by the end
of 2014. Hilton now has 23 resorts there and plans a 35% expansion.
Marriot has nine hotels that will open between now and 2016.

The influx of tourism is coming not only from the US (it’s the number
one overseas destination for Americans) but from up-and-coming
countries like Russia, China and Colombia. The article also stated that
the visitors from these countries spend much more than Americans and
stay three times as long….and that’s why Mexican’s tourism ministry is
opening tourism promotion offices in Beijing, Seoul, Moscow and
Brussels.

They have also simplified their visa process and are counseling
hoteliers on what these new visitors like best: Chinese-archeology,
Brazilians-shopping, Russians-bling.

While the gunshots keep on coming along the border, in parts of
Sinaloa and other regions, overseas investments just keep flowing into
Mexico–$18 billion in 2010 and much of this from the US.

Mexico’s just too great a country to let its tourism and business be
controlled by the thugs fighting over their drug territories.