12 Things You Might Not Know about Pittsburgh
A dozen fun facts about our city and region that all begin with the question: Did you know?
If you order a steak “Pittsburgh rare” you get a char on the outside and rare on the inside …
A stretch of the Boulevard of the Allies (between Downtown and Oakland) was once home to a series of screening rooms owned by Hollywood movie studios, where local theater owners would be invited in to preview films. The Paramount Film Exchange building still stands — look for the terra cotta Paramount Pictures logo above the door …
You can still visit home plate from Forbes Field; it’s under glass just inside Posvar Hall on Pitt’s campus. Unfortunately, it’s about 15 feet from the proper location; if it were in the exact historical spot, it would be located inside a bathroom stall …
PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA
Eat’n Park opened its first restaurant in 1949; it had 13 seats and a car hop. The chain now has 61 locations …
PHOTO BY CHUCK BEARD
Pittsburgh has one of the last wooden streets in the world — Roslyn Place in Shadyside. It was built in 1914 and contains 26,000 wooden blocks …
AUSTRIAN NATIONALITY ROOM |PHOTO PROVIDED BY UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
The Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh has 31 Nationality Rooms representing cultures from all parts of the world; most serve as working classrooms …
PHOTO BY BECKY THURNER BRADDOCK AND RICHARD COOK
Lautrec at the Nemacolin Woodlands resort in Fayette County is one of only 25 restaurants in the world to hold AAA’s five-diamond and Forbes Travel Guide’s five-star rankings. It’s the only one helmed by a woman, chef Kristin Butterworth …
PHOTO BY DAVE DICELLO
Pittsburgh’s underground Fourth River is actually an aquifer (rock and sand on top of bedrock through which water flows) formed by glacial flows …
Some of the world’s most valuable information, including data centers, government archives and, notably, the Bill Gates-owned Corbis Image Collection, are contained in a storage facility in Butler County. The climate-controlled, 1.9 million-square-foot Iron Mountain storage center also contains the original film reels from a bevy of blockbuster and classic movies, as well as sound recordings from some of the biggest names in the music industry (the names of which are kept confidential) …
There’s a replica of the catacombs of Rome under St. Patrick Church in the Strip District, below the famous, 28-step “Holy Stairs,” which represent the 28 steps between Jesus and Pontius Pilate when Pilate said, “Behold the Man” and condemned Jesus to death. After a fire in 1935, the catacombs were said to have been destroyed, and the area is closed off …
The nativity scene constructed every year in the courtyard of the U.S. Steel building is the only authorized replica of the Vatican’s Christmas crèche in St. Peter’s Square …
In October 2006, a carpenter discovered a long lost bedroom set used by Abraham Lincoln in a county storage shed in South Park. Lincoln stayed in the former Monongahela House hotel Downtown on the way to his inauguration in 1861, and his room was preserved until the building was torn down in 1935, and the bedroom’s sets whereabouts became murky. The furniture is now housed in the Heinz History Center.
