The Places We Keep
Part 3. Why Would Anyone Find Beauty in Smoke?
There are moments in life when two people can stand in exactly the same place and see two entirely different worlds.
Pittsburgh by Night, c. 1920, is an oil painting by Aaron Harry Gorson
One person sees an abandoned building. Another sees memories.
One sees an old tree. Another remembers climbing its branches as a child.
One sees an aging main street. Another sees where they met their spouse, bought their first bicycle, or walked home from school.
The place itself hasn’t changed.
The people looking at it have.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet mysteries of being human. We rarely remember places because of what they are. We remember them because of what they have come to mean.
In the first two essays of this series, we’ve explored why places matter and how artists such as George Hetzel encouraged us to look more carefully at the ordinary landscapes around us. Inspired by the Barbizon painters of France, Hetzel believed beauty could be found along quiet streams, wooded hillsides, and country roads that many people simply passed by.
But what happens when the landscape changes?
What happens when forests give way to factories, rivers become working waterways, and the evening sky glows not with the setting sun alone, but with the light of blast furnaces?
Could beauty still be found there?
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Pittsburgh was one of the great industrial cities of the world. Steel mills lined the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers. Freight trains crossed the valleys day and night. Smoke drifted above church steeples and neighborhoods, while the orange glow of furnaces often lingered long after sunset. To many visitors, Pittsburgh appeared dark, crowded, and dirty. It was a city defined by work.
In 1903, a young artist named Aaron Gorson arrived in Pittsburgh.
It was, at first glance, an unlikely destination for a painter.
Born in what is now Lithuania, Gorson had immigrated to the United States as a young man. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Anshutz before continuing his education in Paris, where artists traditionally sought beauty in quiet villages, rivers, gardens, and countryside. Few would have expected that after such training he would become captivated by one of the smokiest industrial cities in America.
Yet something about Pittsburgh captured his imagination.
Perhaps it was the rivers.
Perhaps it was the rhythm of the bridges stretching across them.
Perhaps it was the contrast between smoke and light.
Or perhaps it was simply that Gorson possessed a gift shared by many great artists: he noticed what others had stopped seeing.
Spend a few moments with one of Gorson’s nighttime paintings of Pittsburgh.
At first your eye is drawn to the warm reflections dancing across the river. Then you notice the deep blues of the evening sky, the silhouettes of bridges, and the soft haze drifting through the valley. Only after you’ve spent time looking do you realize what is producing that extraordinary light.
Blast furnaces.
Steel mills.
Factories.
The very places many people considered harsh or ugly become, through Gorson’s eyes, unexpectedly beautiful.
That is not because he ignored industry.
Quite the opposite.
He painted it honestly.
But he also painted its atmosphere, its light, and its humanity. His industrial landscapes were not simply records of manufacturing. They became portraits of a city and the people whose lives were shaped by it. Today, they remain among the most compelling visual records of Pittsburgh during the height of the steel era.
Mill Along the River, c.1977 by Richard Snodgrass
I often wonder what people thought when they first stood before one of these paintings.
Did they recognize their own city?
Did they see their place of work?
Or did they pause, perhaps for the first time, and notice something beautiful in a landscape they had long taken for granted?
We cannot know.
What we do know is that time has changed the paintings.
Not the paint itself.
The way we see them.
Many of the mills Gorson painted have disappeared. The riverfront has changed. The smoke has lifted. Entire neighborhoods have found new identities. Yet his paintings continue to preserve something no photograph or historical document fully can. They preserve the feeling of Pittsburgh during one remarkable chapter of its history.
That may be one of the quiet gift’s artists leave us.
Perhaps that is why Gorson’s work still resonates today.
Not because most of us have worked in a steel mill.
Not because we have stood beside the Monongahela River at dusk.
But because we all know what it feels like to become attached to a place.
We all know what it means to return somewhere years later and discover that it has changed.
We all carry places within us.
Some still exist.
Some have disappeared.
Some are little more than memories.
The artist cannot preserve every building or every street.
But sometimes an artist preserves something even more fragile.
The feeling of having been there.
As I worked on this essay, I found myself wondering about the places around us today.
What streets are we walking without really seeing?
What neighborhoods, storefronts, churches, or bridges seem so ordinary now that we scarcely notice them?
And who is quietly painting them today?
Perhaps those artists are not simply making paintings.
Perhaps they are preserving tomorrow’s memories before the rest of us realize they are slipping into history.
That seems like a question worth carrying with us.
In the next essay, we’ll turn to another important chapter in Western Pennsylvania’s artistic story and consider whose perspectives have shaped our understanding of place, and whose stories we are only beginning to notice.
Author’s Note
As I’ve written this series, I’ve found myself thinking less about paintings alone and more about the places that quietly shape our lives. Aaron Gorson’s Pittsburgh reminds us that today’s ordinary streets, rivers, neighborhoods, and workplaces often become tomorrow’s history.
That same idea inspired our current summer exhibition, Small Town Sewickley. Through the work of contemporary Western Pennsylvania artists, the exhibition invites us to slow down, look more carefully at the places we know best, and consider what future generations may one day discover about our communities through the paintings being created today.
If you find yourself in Sewickley this summer, I hope you’ll stop by and continue the conversation.
Resources & Further Reading
Aaron Harry Gorson biography and collections at the The Westmoreland Museum of American Art.
Pittsburgh at Night and related works in the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Aaron Harry Gorson: Pittsburgh’s Painter of Light and Industry, Pittsburgh Quarterly.
For broader historical context on Pittsburgh’s steel industry, see the collections of the Senator John Heinz History Center and the Rivers of Steel Heritage Corporation.
Beautifully written. Evocative. Touching. Thank you!