Charleroi hosts traveling trolley exhibit
Charleroi Area Historical Society will host the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum’s “Traveling Trolley Museum: Streetcar Stories of Washington County” Monday at 601 SPHS Plaza. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
The full exhibit opened Aug.30, 2013, to recognize 60 years since the interurban trolley ran in Washington County. It showcases the lives of those who lived during the era through documentaries in their own words.
“Those who see and hear these stories will be able to get a real sense of what the time period was like,” said Lynne Thompson, the museum’s educator and volunteer coordinator.
During the interurban era of Washington County in the first half of the 20th century, trolleys were not just a mode of transportation for people – they also had very memorable experiences. One person recalled that as a young boy, Charleroi trestles could be scary to him. There also is the story of the fish that rode the trolley.
Light refreshments will be served after the program.
Visitors to the Senator John Heinz History Center Saturday are invited to a Pickle Party to celebrate the Pittsburgh arrival of a fun addition to the center’s newest exhibition, “Pittsburgh’s Lost Steamboat: Treasures of the Arabia.”
As part of the Pickle Party, the museum will offer all visitors free pickle pins and a complementary dill pickle spear. Visitors also can be the first to see perfectly preserved, 160-year-old pickles – still green in their original glass jar – from the massive cargo of the Steamboat Arabia.
In 1856, the Pittsburgh-built vessel carrying more than one million objects hit a snag and sank in the Missouri River. More than 130 years later, a group of modern day treasure hunters rediscovered the Arabia buried 45 feet below a cornfield a half-mile from the river. The oxygen-free environment perfectly preserved most of the boat’s cargo in excellent condition, including fine dishware, clothing and even bottled food, such as pickles and ketchup.
The “sweet pickles” were bottled by Wells, Provost & Co. of New York and loaded on to the Steamboat Arabia in 1856, about 13 years before H.J. Heinz founded his famous ketchup and pickle company in Sharpsburg.
Dave Hawley, lead excavator of the Steamboat Arabia and director of the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City, Mo., will share stories at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. about the famous pickles – including how a fellow excavator took a bite into one of the 19th-century vinegar-soaked cucumbers – along with numerous stories about treasure-hunting and discovery as part of two insider tours of the Treasures of the Arabia exhibition. The insider tours are included with regular museum admission.
The pickles will be on display through the remainder of “Pittsburgh’s Lost Steamboat: Treasures of the Arabia” exhibit, which closes Jan. 4.
For more information about the exhibit, visit www.heinzhistorycenter.org.
NEW YORK (AP) – A stage curtain believed to be the biggest Pablo Picasso painting in the United States is moving to a museum after a dispute over whether it could stay in its longtime spot in the storied Four Seasons restaurant, the painting’s owner announced Thursday.
The 19-foot-by-20-foot curtain, called “Le Tricorne,” is being donated to the New-York Historical Society, where it’s expected to go on display after some conservation work, painting owner the Landmarks Conservancy said. The timetable isn’t clear; the groups still are working out the arrangements.
The agreement will keep the painting, which is so familiar a sight that its Four Seasons berth is known as “Picasso Alley.” The pact also resolves a lawsuit that caused a stir among art lovers and preservationists, pitting the Landmarks Conservancy against a real estate magnate known as an art patron.
“It’s going to be at a good home, where even more people will see it,” conservancy President Peg Breen said. Historical Society President Louise Mirrer called the painting “an icon of New York for more than half a century, embodying both an influential social milieu and an important moment in the city’s cultural development.”
Picasso painted the curtain in 1919 for “Le Tricorne,” or “three-cornered hat,” a ballet created by the avant-garde, Paris-based Ballet Russes troupe. The painting depicts the aftermath of a bullfight.
Although praised at $1.6 million in 2008, the painting isn’t considered one of Picasso’s greatest pieces but stands as a major example of his theatrical set work, experts say.