Category Archives: Pro-PGH

Labor Day Party @ the Shadow Lounge

If you are a frequent reader of IheartPGH, you may notice that I like the events at the Shadow Lounge. I really like the events at the Shadow Lounge. This Friday is no exception to that.

Hilary Brown, Justin Strong and Tim Guthrie (who are 3 of the most fun people in Pittsburgh)

Are organizing an amazing evening of labor day fun. And Ms. Hilary Brown has asked IheartPGH.com to be a part of this Soiree! Since I heart the Shadow Lounge and I heart Hilary Brown. I am more than thrilled to tell you about this event.

Friday Sept. 1st, AVA Bar & Lounge (the other half of the Shadow Lounge)
East End Labor Day Party
DJ :: Food :: Dancing :: Drink Specials
The fun start when the doors open at 9pm

21 and over
Dress is Coctail Attire (interpretation of “cocktail attire” may vary, we welcome this). *I am thinking it may be time for the gold lame outfit.

Joe Grushecky – Rock’s best-kept secret

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (CNN) — Music critics place him among the best rock and rollers ever.

Over the past two decades, he’s raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for all kinds of causes, including headlining a sold-out (in 57 minutes!) “Flood Aid” benefit concert last December in Pittsburgh with his good buddy Bruce Springsteen.

He’s a musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, music arranger, recording artist — and he leads what’s been described in top music publications as “one of the best bar bands in America.”

Like Iron City Beer and the DVE morning show, the music of Joe Grushecky is known in every corner bar ’round these parts. Last year, CNN reported he’s rock’s best kept secret. He been rocking for years … all while teaching ‘developmentally disabled, physically disabled and emotionally disturbed kids’ at Pittsburgh’s Weselyn High School. How’s that for no bullsh**, blue-collar sensibility?

The band’s new CD includes collaborations with Bruce Springsteen, including the Grammy-award winning “Code of Silence.”

Mr. Grushecky and the (formerly the Iron City) Houserockers are playing a number of shows in the Pittsburgh area … see him before it gets to cold to party outside with your Ahrns. Check out the free downloads here, so you can sing along with all the more-intelligent-than-average Grushecky fans. The live links just sound fun.

Friday- September 1st
Johnston Folk Festival – Johnstown, PA

Saturday – September 2nd
Conneuat Lake

Sunday – September 3rd
Spot Bar – Steubenville, OH

Friday – September 8th
Mellon Park – adjacent to The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and along Fifth and Shady Avenues in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside area.
Joe Grushecky Solo

About A Fair in the Park
presented by The Craftsmen’s
Guild of Pittsburgh at Mellon Park
5:30-7:00 PM

Saturday – September 9th
Carnegie Arts and Heritage Festival
Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers
Showtime 10:30PM

Git Help Aht: Donate Your Old Computer This Saturday At Heinz Field

It sits in your home office or game room… 50-plus lurking pounds of heavy metal, (Dude! Rawk Aht! What? Oh, sorry… go on…) plastic and other stuff that really shouldn’t go to a landfill, right below a gargantuan monitor that is so old it occasionally picks up transmissions from the 1939 World’s Fair, and a keyboard that when typed on makes a sound like gunfire clacking up in the hollow and you just know that the Hatfields and The McCoys are a-gonna tussle agin’.

Look, it’s not doing you or anybody else any good right now – you’ve long-since upgraded to the Quad-Processor 1.21 jigawatt monstrosity that will let you buy tasteful clothing with incredible ease, allow you to IM with your no-good layabout friends (OMG! STFU!), and even, perhaps, get some friggin’ work done every once in a while. Your new monitor is one of those fancy-pants LCD types which you could hang on a wall and lift with one hand. So the silicon behemoth collects dust, like some long-forgotten relic of a bygone age.

What to do, what to do… You can’t bury it in the back yard, because you know you’ll lie awake at night slowly going mad, the ticking of it’s internal processor clock like some modern-day tell-tale heart reminding you that burying all those chemicals in the ground just ain’t right. You tried to pawn it off on the neighborhood kids and they just chuckled at you, speeding away on their skateboards, listening to “Panic! At The Disco” on their iPod Nanos. Hell, even your mom turned her nose up at it, and she still can’t quite grasp the whole “cut-and-paste foolishness”, bless her heart…

goodwill_logoSo donate it to Goodwill Industries of Pittsburgh. This Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Heinz Field, in Alco Parking Lot #2, you can donate all of your old computer equipment. This is a new program, a partnership between Goodwill and Dell Computers, and they’re doing a Good Thingâ„¢. They’ll even clean your hard drive to Department of Defense standards for free, saving you $20 that day only! Hell, you don’t even need to get out of your car.

They’re going to refurbish any computers that are in decent shape and resell them to raise money for local Goodwill programs. Any computers that can’t be refurbished, or are simply too old will be salvaged for any valuable parts and then disposed of properly, diverting up to 2.1 million pounds of waste from area landfills. The whole program will help up to 100 of your fellow Pittsburghers transition from welfare to work.

So, those are good reasons to do it right there. But wait, there’s more… (Isn’t there always?)

Steelers Quarterback and all-around good human Charlie Batch (See: All the good work he’s done for kids in his hometown of Homestead and throughout the area) is slated to be there helping out from 10-11 a.m. You can register for prizes including a flat-panel tv and gift cards, get a tax write-off for next year, free up some space in your house, and most importantly, drive away knowing that just by dropping off your old, unwanted computer, you helped aht in Pittsburgh. Think Globally, Act Locally… n’at.

This event is sponsored by Goodwill, Dell Computers, City of Pittsburgh’s Pittsburgh Partnership and Allegheny County.

Your $.02 could be worth a lot


Oh baby, if you want to see a better Pittsburgh then this is the event for you! I was lucky enough to attend an earlier version of this 2 summers ago and it was a very interesting and fun Saturday. I am still talking about the cab situation in Pittsburgh.
Anyhow – I am sure this event will be interesting and if you have an idea for something, anything (well as long as it involves Pittsburgh) then this is step one to getting the gears in motion. The good folks at the Sprout Fund have $100,000 to put into grants to fund some of these projects.
So big money aside, this will be a fun day with some fun people – I am planning on attending, and I think I am pretty fun.
Where can I get more info: Check out this webpage http://www.sproutfund.org/Default.aspx?page=engage.home
When: Sat. Sept. 9, 9am-4pm
Where: CAPA High School, Downtown Pittsburgh
How Much: Only $10 and that includes lunch!

From the Sprout Fund Website:

The Idea Round Up is the launch event for The Sprout Fund’s Engage Pittsburgh 2006 initiative.

Engage Pittsburgh 2006 will produce a community blueprint and involve citizens in developing ideas and implementing projects that will achieve positive regional change and broad-based community goals.

By combining dialogue with dedicated funding projects, Engage Pittsburgh 2006 promises to be like no other civic initiative to date.

Lead support for Engage Pittsburgh 2006 is provided by the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and the Richard King Mellon Foundation.

What’s a strength for our community to build on?

I recently found this Dec. 2005 discussion between the City Paper (CP), Wilkinsburg councilwoman Tracey Evans and three Mon-Valley mayors, including John Fetterman of Braddock, Betty Esper of Homestead, and Norma Ryan of Brownsville. I thought this interview provides a creative view of Mon-Valley strengths – it’s not all gloom and doom! (Links added by your truly. 🙂

CP: What’s a strength for your community to build on?

Evans: Definitely the housing stock. Just beautiful houses, the proximity to the city and the accessibility to the East Busway and Frick Park.
Ryan: Our assets are probably our potential for tourism and recreation. We’re right on the river, and we’re in two heritage zones, Steel Industry Heritage and also the National Road. We need to build on our heritage, and maybe bring people out of city life to experience rural life.
Evans: No, no! Keep ’em in the city!
Fetterman: This might sound strange, but I think Braddock’s asset might be its complete lack of assets. I mean, some of our buildings don’t have roofs! Maybe it can capture someone’s imagination. It’s small enough to make an impact, but large enough to get people’s attention.
Esper: I think the asset of Homestead is the history of Homestead, the steel industry.
Fetterman: As mayor of Braddock, I have to say, We’ve got steel!
Ryan: And guys, if it weren’t for the coal from Brownsville, how would you get steel?
Esper: We’re celebrating our 125th anniversary this year. You can’t talk to anyone who can’t talk to you about the history of Homestead. We had the 1892 strike!
Ryan: Are we just that throwaway society, is that what America should be known as? No. Southwest Pennsylvania — the steel capital of the world, the national road that opened the west — as I keep trying to promote, you can really tell the story of the making of America. It’s all here.