University of Pittsburgh - Owl Yearbook (Pittsburgh, PA)

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Pitt and Pittsburgh WHEN the Githedral of Learning raises its granite towards the sky, the smoke and fog of Pittsburgh will gray its Stone and blacken the Stretch of its walls. No one who has the ideals of the University in mind ever dreams that, with the building finished, Pittsburgh will somehow' alter itself so that blue skies and cottony clouds will always lie above. After the Cathedral is completed, life in our town will go on, to all appearances, much as it has in the past, unchanged in the externals of living. The Streets down town will be no wider; the fatforics will he no less things of fire and Steam and roaring iron; the traffic of grimy barges on the Ohio will Still sweep west and south; the rumble of trucks and trains and mills will Still surge from the Steel plants by the rivers; and the lights of the flaming Stacks at night will Still cover the blackened sky. Life, complex, nervous, powerful, will go on much as it has in the past. The transformation of the material city is not the province of the college, although, it is true, as beauty comes with the building, the same beauty may spread to our Streets and houses and places of business. But, for the most part, those who trust in the University must accept the town and believe that, although it is not beautiful — while it may have its grandeur,— it is yet a good place to live in, a good place in which to go to school and work and build one's home. To be a good Pittsburgher is to accept its mills, its nervous energy, its industry, and even some of its dirt. The province of the Githedral is not toeffetf a material change in our city although it may well do that. Pittsburgh will never grow better by comparing its crooked Streets with the lazy boulevards of Paris or w ith the languor and beauty of Spain. The Githedral of Learning is concerned not with the physical basis of Pittsburgh but with the spirit that made Pitts burgh and with the people w ho are now making and changing it by living here. This is to say nothing new, and yet it is to say everything. Cities are shaped more by the minds of their dwellers than by the contours of the rivers or the shape of the hills or the established industry.

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their faces burned from the red heat and glare, Stood from morning to night on a little platform and blew glass bubbles on the ends of sticks. The bubbles took shape and became bottles and panes and dishes that were loaded on boats and sent to the west. Each batch of glass got clearer and clearer until at laSt the sun shone through the windows and turned the apples, strung along the darkest rafters, a deeper red even in the rudest cabin. All this could not go on without more people coming across the mountains. Every day another covered wagon lumbered up into the city square where cows pastured near Grant and Diamond.The new cities of Lawrenceville and Allegheny began to make compe-tition for Pittsburgh. The narrow streets became crowded with burly men in working clothes, school children, and ladies in bustles and hoops out looking for a newcap or the latent bonnet from over the mountains. Then, too, traders from the west labored their way up the Ohio to get supplies for the season and to take home to the women folks some new trinket or vivid calico dress. The Pittsburghers of that time, not unconscious of their growth, wrote in the Gazette: “It is inevitable that Pittsburgh become a great city and an industrial center. At last the railroads came, and Pittsburgh went forward with a boom. Bigger mills, using all the new processes and turning out an end' less Stream of iron. Steel, brass, copper, and glass, spread out over all the adjoining lands until Lawrenceville and Allegheny were part of the city. More new industries came to this section, too, until now Pittsburgh is one of the industrial centers of the world. If there is anything to be made, just bring it to Pitts' burgh. She is eternally hurrying, but as the old saying goes, “If you want to get anything done, ask a busy person. And what is more, she is planning to be busier than ever in the future. Shall we move weSt? No! We are too busy. I

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Living men and women are the reasons for industries; industries are never, honorably, the shapers of men and women. The Cathedral is concerned alone with the people, those who want to know more of the world around them and their probable place in that world. The relation of the school to the city lies only in their mutual relation to human beings.The mill and the boy; the boy and the school — that is the connection. And the vital problem is: how will the University relate itself to the boy who must some day find his life's work in Pittsburgh industry? The answer is no easy task. First of all, the University must be more than a gigantic vocational training school turning out graduate oil engineers and chemists and factory managers. That course of Study, getting men ready for specific jobs and a specific salary, is poor stuff if it does nothing for the Student except to make his hands more nimble and his mind more full of related farts. The province of the University is to give that training — to help a young man to make his own way after he leaves school. But this education in the facts of a chosen vocation is not the only thing that a university must do, nor is it the most vital of a university's obligations to its young men and women. A man is not a chemist or a doctor or a teacher all day long. There are hours when the business of his profession is left behind and he has time to read a book or to tike a walk or to talk to someone worth the trouble. And then a man must know more than his profession; he must be able to understand ordinary men and women; he must be able to see new places and look at Strange things with a simple delight in the mere fart that he is alive, and the day is full of sunshine, and the path through the woods is a good path and the sticky mud by the creek is somehow pleasant to feel underfoot. There are winter evenings when legal briefs and chemical formula: and lists of dates are no help to fill in the hours before bed, when a man may read if he has been t.iught to find pleasure in books. Then, if a man will, old Scrooge drags his crabbed feet through the fog of a London Christmas Eve; young Henry Esmond walks the green terrace with the Countess; Tom Sawyer dips his tinned heels in the water of the Mississippi wharves; and the Three Musketeers swagger through sunny France. But there are serious things a man cannot solve through his vocational training alone, and these, too, a great university helps make easier when they come. The [ 4l