Pittsburgh/Strip District
From World travel guide
The Strip District is just east of downtown Pittsburgh. Some of the streets are paved with Belgian block - stone used as ballast for empty boats coming from Europe up the Mississippi and the Ohio via New Orleans. Wonder what they took back?
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Understand
The Strip District is a wholesale and retail place for fresh vegetables, fish and meat. Today it also has many restaurants and nightclubs. If you like to cook this is where to go. It has everything from freshly made sausage to bamboo shoots to expensive cooking gadgets and cut flowers. Gourmet coffee places mix with Martini bars and pottery stores and ethnic groceries all jumbled up together. And there's also a beautiful Greek Orthodox church right in the middle of this bustling warehouse district. A fun place to go and street watch on a nice day with a lot of creative marketeers including streetside accordionists.
Get In
- From downtown take Liberty avenue east.
The "Strip" has major architectural sites worth a view (most are an easy walk, the area is really not that large). Among the best is the impressive St. Stanislaus Church on Smallman Street. The size alone indicates a large Polish presence in the neighborhood, though perhaps in the past. Now serving a more heterogenious population, the structure is tribute to faith in the future, hard work and commitment of personal resources to the neighborhood, the city and adopted homeland for thousands of immigrants. The chuch's location, so near to the rail lines and warehouses, suggests that at one time this was a "walking neighborhood" whose sidewalks and brick streets saw the daily tramp of tens of thousands of feet from home, to work, to local shopping and to worship.
See and Do
- The Strip Show which is actually a scene-by-scene script of a movie, The Strip Show, produced by WQED a local public television station. It has information on most of the really unique places in the district. If you like you can buy a copy of the DVD for twenty bucks. It's interesting.
- Heinz History Museum, recently affiliated with the Smithsonian, contains 250 years of Pittsburgh history.
- Allegheny river. A couple blocks north of the strip. Nice restaurants on barges anchored in the river.
Eat
- Primanti Brothers Famous sandwiches. Open 24 hours.
