We left The Old Spaghetti Factory to go find the Arch, turned left, and there it was.

From the direction we were approaching, the moment we broke through the trees in the surrounding park, we were already too close to the Arch to capture the whole thing in a single photograph.

I did like the glint of sunlight at the top against the cloudy early evening sky.

We got tickets to ride to the top and Abby, Katie, and I (3 people) crammed (crammed) into a tiny egg-shaped capsule with five seats (5 seats). Left, Abby, fascinated by the proceedings. Center, Katie, claustrophic. Right, me, acrophobic, next to the glass window looking down into the hollow arch. Quite a team, we are.

The viewing area at the top is spacious enough and it sure seems sturdy … but leaning onto the lower walls to peer straight down out the windows was kinda creepy. Also all of the windows taste like snozzberries.

The view to the west: 6M 25M

A game was about to be canceled by weather and the Arch was an enticing vantage point on a full stadium. 7M 32M

Here’s some of that looking-down-into-the-hollow-Arch I was talking about. The ride down was mostly stairs I can handle, platforms I can handle, dark doesn’t bother me, and then suddenly whoosh that’s a long ways down!

When we arrived we’d been in a hurry to catch the next tram up; but after our trip to the top, we looked around at the construction information. This model shows how the Arch was completed — the two sides built independently with cranes riding up the outsides, lifting each section to be welded and the gap between double walls filled with concrete; then the last piece hurriedly lifted into place because one leg was expanding in the sun.

Outside, one of the floodlights that illuminate it, with me for scale. It was getting dark enough I was half expecting it to turn on and give me grill marks.

We walked westish to Kiener Plaza with its kid-friendly stepped fountain.

It felt darker than this and I love optical image stabilization in my camera.

One last look at the Arch behind the Old County Courthouse before walking back.

From the scene of the high water, Eads Bridge is lovely at night.

The sign outside is unassuming

but the entrance is genteel

and the waiting room ornate.

It doesn’t stop there: even the stairs are beautiful

and stained glass abounds.

The restaurant is obviously built in an old factory

and they’ve done an amazingly tasteful job of blending industrial brick and beam with stately decor.

Parts even evoke a Victorian gentlemen’s club.

These are not people I know. Pretend they’re not there wondering why I’m taking a picture of them.

The food, for its part, was delicious. I ordered The Manager’s Favorite, a plate of spaghetti with choice of four sauces. The marinara was bright and nothing to complain about but nothing out of the ordinary; the mizithra cheese and browned butter, a house special, was very tasty; the white clam sauce was delicious; and the straightforward rich meat sauce was most of all to my liking.

I’d go back in a heartbeat. Eat there a couple of times a week and try to get tired of it, I would.

This CC-licensed image from Wikimedia is the only photograph I’ll display of the house itself because, as stated in the visitors guide,

Photography, painting, and sketching is not permitted at any point during regular guided house tours. Exterior photography, painting and sketching is permitted for personal use only and cannot be sold, published or posted on a website without permission of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

If you know me personally, I’ll be happy to sit down with you and show you my pictures.

But I do have a few other things to share.

The visitors center, store, and cafe are up the hillside out of sight of the house and very attractively done in a style I think of as Modern Zoo. The day grew warm and humid, but the trees and canopies gave shade while permitting breezes through.

The trees along the road were impressive and have obviously been there for a while — Lawrence and I were seeing many trees with 20′ straight and clear spans that made us drool to think of the lumber (responsibly harvested from mature trees starting to die, of course). This tuning-fork-shaped tree caught my fancy; Lydia is for scale.

As to the house …

The living room was about half the size (area, not linear dimensions) that I imagined. The few interior pictures I’ve been able to find published were doubtless taken with aggressively wide-angled lenses and not having paid enough attention to fisheye distortion to clue me into the lens used, I envisioned it larger than it actually is. It would serve very nicely for a family with a few friends over, but Kaufmans wanted to entertain larger groups and the room must have been very active when they did. Most of the rooms, in fact, are smaller than I expected.

The stairs leading from the living room down to the stream were blocked off but visible from both the inside and the outside of the house. They looked beautiful and the landing was perfect for sitting and dangling feet.

I expected the interior to have more quartersawn oak and geometric ornamentation, as I’ve seen in photographs of other Wright houses and in the Allen House. But those are Prairie Style and Fallingwater isn’t. Apart from the integration of boulders present on the site and the flagstone floor in the living room, the interior is surprisingly unsurprising. The bathrooms actually look high-end contemporary.

And the exterior … Standing at the walking path’s viewing spot from which all the photographs you’ve ever seen are taken, Wright’s revolutionary design again amazes me. Using concrete as an aesthetic element, and in a residence, at that; designing with layered slabs, in Fallingwater to echo the rock of the streambed; cantilevering occupiable space and cantilevering over occupiable space. All of these are commonplace in leading-edge architecture of the 1970s.

Designed in 1935. It took four decades for his architectural ideas to reach the public consciousness. Visionary.

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As memory and satellite serve, the tunnel is the straight section in the middle of this map with the green arrow pointing to the center.

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I believe we parked here and then embarked on a short walk to the tunnel that Lawrence and I later estimated at two to two and a half miles. You can check us.

Lawrence and Gail had lit out on the path as soon as we parked; Abby stayed napping in the van; and Katie, Lydia, and I were some ways behind. About the time we thought we maybe ought to be getting to the tunnel entrance, we saw a wall ahead with a hole in it and got excited … but it quickly became clear that this was no 3000′ tunnel.

Nay, it was the eastern continental divide, I believe here:

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So we kept a-walkin’.

The evening was easing in and the woods were lovely, dark, and deep.

And we kept a-walkin’.

At last, another wall with a hole in it; and this one looked more promising.

Yes, definitely more promising. We seem to have been about here:

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We had caught up with Lawrence and Gail by then and the girls ran ahead into the tunnel with them while I stayed behind to take some pictures.

Then Lawrence and Lydia scrambled up the rocks to the top of the tunnel mouth and showed off their lack of acrophobia for the nth time on this trip.

It was getting late enough that none of us felt much like walking all the way through, but we all went in a ways — in my case, far enough to photograph one of those big light fixtures, which wasn’t easy in the dark. We’d had our share of both tunnels and walking that day, so that was enough.

On the way back, Lawrence offered to go the rest of the way alone, attempt to navigate a route in the van, and meet us at the farm by Shirley’s Hollow Road; but we declined his offer and all walked back. Except Lydia, who was jogging ahead, silly thing full of energy.

Lydia missed the signs telling you not to climb the stairs at the tunnel entrances because they’re worn and dangerous.

I expected it to be darker than it actually was. If you think about it, you can easily see a bright light that’s large and less than a mile away, and both tunnel entrances were clearly visible all the way through. The path, however, was not visible without flashlights. And it was interestingly textured with concrete plus mud plus other water deposits plus dripping cold water plus puddles.

On the east end, I went a ways down the boardwalk and watched the watersnakes playing — definitely a disincentive for thinking about walking back through the tunnel in the cold canal in the dark like you’re not supposed to. Then walked back through on the path like I was supposed to.

After crossing this one-lane bridge, I spied a side road going down under a bridge and we went back to investigate.

Here ya go.

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Four Locks Area, Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Park

The ultimate destination of this highway diversion was the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Park, beginning in the Four Locks area.

George Washington created the Patowmack Company to connect the eastern and western states and a series of canals and locks were then built to bypass unnavigable portions of the Potomac River. Mules on the tow path pulled barges through the canal.

At the locks, the lockmaster would lever massive wooden doors into place downstream of the barges, allowing the lock to fill with water and raise the barge to the level of the next section of the canal. Small doors in the large doors would safely drain the water to lower the barges during the downstream journey.

They even built roadways under the canal, which is how we accessed the park.

The park also had a large picnic area and a boat ramp down to the Potomac.

Railroad Bridge

After leaving the Four Locks area, we dropped in at the McCoy’s Ferry area to see whether they had additional interesting locks. That area was actually in a further state of decay, but we enjoyed this railroad bridge spanning the road and gorge.

We climbed each of the three observation towers and the view was amazing.

Looking down on treetops is always … interesting.

Pennsylvania State Memorial

We had driven past the Pennsylvania State Memorial a couple of times already,

but on the last pass of the tour, we noticed people on top. Hey!

An door inconspicufied in the base of one of the towers

opens to a spiral staircase

with windows above the corner statuary

and a landing near the top

opening into a room inside the rotunda

with a nice walkway around the outside. Glad we caught that!

We transferred from regional rail to subway at City Hall station and headed toward Independence Hall National Historic Park.

Independence Hall

The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were both approved at Independence Hall. The tour covers only the two small rooms on the ground floor, beginning with the Supreme Court room.

The second stop is the assembly room where the Declaration and Constitution were forged and adopted. It’s humbling to think of people meeting in such small and simple surroundings, promoting their own interests and those of the states they represented, and in such a short time finding their commonalities and working through their differences to produce documents with such enduring power.

Liberty Bell

The Liberty Bell is near Independence Hall and doesn’t require scheduled tickets to view; just a wait in a long but fast-moving line.

A prior attempt at repair was to widen the crack and plug it top and bottom, presumably to prevent the crack from chattering and again create a rigid waist and sound rim. Not successful.

Visitation Blessed Virgin Mary Church

With no further downtown activities planned, we decided to ride the subway/rail to the end of a line and back. On the outbound trip I noticed a beautiful old church by Huntingdon station and on the inbound trip we stopped to photograph it.

Visitation Blessed Mary Church is a lovely building in a state of considerable disrepair. If its web site is to be believed, it’s still in operation; but it feels like it must be somewhat of a Father McKenzie situation.

We waited a bit at Huntingdon before our next opportunity to board. The inbound and outbound tracks separate a bit here.

Geno’s Cheese Steaks and Return Trip

I don’t even remember exactly what we were planning when we got back to the city; but waiting in the subway we met a very sweet and outgoing young woman (possibly high-school senior) who seconded a recommendation that we try the cheese steaks at Geno’s and went so far as to ride with us to her exit and direct us to the bus stop we needed to get there.

I’m glad to have had the opportunity to try them; but they don’t come close to my enjoyment of the cheese steaks at Reading Terminal Market a couple of years ago. Regrettably, the market was closed for Memorial Day or we’d have had them for lunch.

Leaving supper, we walked past a playground with a long row of beautiful birds in flight painted on the edge, unfortunately defaced by crude graffiti.

We also passed the Beth Hahayim Cemetery, whose sign indicated it was deeded in 1841 for persons who gave their lives during the Civil War.

I found it a tranquil monument in the middle of a busy part of a busy city.

And something in the detached kitchen looks very familiar! Skinnier, though, and softwood. I do like the bevel on the end.

This should give some idea how far above normal the water level was.

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