Category: Living
Reality show acts as platform for drag culture
Story and photos by Sara Payne Point Park News Service Most Monday nights, Brandon White transforms into the female character Bambi Bulimic. After countless layers of purple glue stick on his eyebrows making a smooth surface, he carefully applies the white powder and brown lines that turn his masculine features into Bambi’s higher eyebrows and [...]
Flock of Cycles rides through Pittsburgh
By Rebecca Lessner The Pioneer Rock n’ Roll was heard echoing down Penn avenue on friday march 15th as Flock of Cycles, a local organized bicycling group, pulled a trailer holding an amplifier and Ipod. The trailer was securely fastened and pulled behind a bicycle, leading fifty of the Flock’s members over the river and [...]
Mr. Sustainability: Court Gould practices what he preaches by living green
By Pete Bridge The Pioneer He purchases all of his clothes at second-hand stores, drives old cars and donates money annually to cover his carbon footprint. In his 9 to 5 job, he spends all of his time trying to help businesses in the area become more sustainable. However, possibly the biggest influence Gould has on [...]
Green game changers: Pittsburgh sports arenas reinvent this once smoggy city’s image
By Connor Mulvaney The Pioneer PNC Park went green by recycling most of the waste created by fans at their games and donating leftover prepared concessions. Heinz Field installed advanced lighting and air conditioning systems to conserve more energy. Highmark Stadium also showed its environ- mental friendliness by using recycled steel to construct the seating area [...]
Over the Bar Bicycle Café Southside restaurant: making tracks of its own
By Rebecca Lessner The Pioneer Marty Maloney and Mike Kotyk noticed a growing popularity of cyclists in Pittsburgh around 2008. This spurred the friends to open their own business called the Over the Bar Bicycle Café, or OTB, a Southside bar and cafe decorated floor to ceiling with murals, upcycled bike gears, wheels, and whole bike-frames. The [...]
Green ways to volunteer
By Sara Payne The Pioneer In three hours, Jeffrey McCauley and 500 volunteers transformed the Strip District’s riverfront from a chaotic area to a more natural space. Leah Thill and seven volunteers planned to lug 50 tires off a North Side hill, but finished with a stack of 170 tires. Without access to nature as [...]
Edible Gardens: Communities taking root through common ground
By Rebecca Lessner The Pioneer Last spring Manchester Elementary School on the North Side started a vegetable garden with Green Up Pittsburgh, and soon the entire neighborhood was stepping in, growing it into something much more than tomato and pepper plants. With the help of Pittsburgh’s Green Team and Chelsea Peluso, the project quickly grew [...]
Breathe Project: Coalition strives to bring cleaner air to Pittsburgh
By Sara Payne The Pioneer Marily Nixon moved to Pittsburgh three years ago with an awareness of the air quality problems the city has, but did not think they would have an impact on her or her family. After a short time in the city, Nixon’s daughter developed walking pneumonia. Not until taking the job [...]
‘Sust-Enable’ lifestyle film shows off diverse experiences
By Audrey Prisk The Pioneer Caroline Savery graduated from Point Park University in 2008 with a B.A.in Cinema and Digital Arts and used her senior film project to create a multiple-part mini-series encouraging others to live sustainably by demonstrating a sustainable lifestyle of her own. “My attitude about it was that living a 100% sustainable lifestyle would [...]
Chinese prisoners relive torture, advocate to end organ harvesting
By Connor Mulvaney Point Park News Service Prison guards horrified Chunying Wang when they forced her to have her blood tested in a Chinese labor camp because she knew it was a precursor to forced organ harvesting, which also meant her execution. Like Wang, Zhen-Jie Yu knew medical tests were finding matches for organ transplants, [...]
