Pennsylvania Trial of History
Directory of museums and historical sites operated by the state. Includes map of locations and calendar of events. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission operates the Trail of History, a system of historical sites and museums throughout Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania history, historical sites, archaeology, Pennsylvania Heritage, archeology, state archives, state museum, Anthracite Heritage Museum, Brandywine Battlefield, Bushy Run Battlefield, Commonwealth Conservation Center, Cornwwall Iron Furnace,
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Woman's city centre lane 'ordeal'
The woman was put through a "horrible and terrifying ordeal" after she took a short cut through a lane between 0030 GMT and 0130 GMT on Sunday.
The suspect was described as being between 20 and 25 years old, 5ft 6in, with a medium build and dark, shoulder-length hair.
The woman used Sauchiehall Lane as a shortcut when going to meet friends.
Detective Sergeant Gerry McBride, the officer leading the investigation, said: "This was a horrible and terrifying ordeal for the young woman.
"She had been on a night out with friends and was heading to meet other pals when she was attacked.
"She works locally and frequently used Sauchiehall Lane as a short cut through the town."
Det Sgt McBride said police were checking CCTV in the area and knew that the suspect was with another man in the lane before the woman came in.
He appealed to the second man, who was not involved in the attack, to come forward.
Tours of the city
Sidra Stitch travels alone. When she travels, it is invariably for work. And traveling for work involves walking. Relentless walking. Walking from early morning until well after dark, seven days a week. "I have coffee for breakfast," she says. "I don't spend time in cafes. I never eat lunch."
If she's going to be in a city for a while - London, Paris or Madrid to name three in which she has worn the pavement - she'll often rent a room in an apartment. "I don't live high off the hog."
Stitch walks because when she walks, she finds things. And finding things - novel, artistic, unexpected things that someone passing might not notice - is what it's all about for the San Franciscan, the author of a series of guidebooks that identify and evaluate contemporary art, architecture and design.
For example, she wonders, just how many of us have admired the sailboats moored at San Francisco's St. Francis Yacht Club in the Marina district and missed conceptual artist Peter Richards' installation "The Wave Organ" at the end of the jetty that extends from Yacht Road? "This wave-activated acoustic sculpture is a superb example of site-specific environmental art. It is one of the best-kept secrets in the city and ought not to be missed," Stitch writes as part of a longer description in the 2007 edition of her "art-SITES San Francisco" guide.
And who has been to the UCSF Mission Bay research and teaching campus to see what she calls "the best public art projects in the Bay Area?" She cites as a highlight San Francisco-born artist Richard Serra's "Ballast," a "monumental physically, psychologically and emotionally engaging" steel-plate creation.
Anyone who visits the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park can admire British environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy's earthquake-inspired "Drawn Stone" (also called "Faultline"). But Stitch advises readers that "Stone River," his lesser-known wall sculpture project on the Stanford University campus, is "a more powerful example of his creativity and one of his most engaging works."
After launching her art-SITES European series with "France" in 1999, Stitch took a shot at "San Francisco" in 2003. During her art-inspired walkabouts, she finds some surprise objet-d'avant-garde-art, big or small en route to galleries, buildings, museums or public spaces on her prepared list. All the while, she takes notes and snaps pictures.
A small, svelte woman with angular features that call to mind a Modigliani muse, Stitch can go hours without talking. When she does, it's usually to ask for details to add to her notes. "I really don't travel like other people travel," she says in a tone that is somewhere between musing and amused.
Stitch travels three months for each book, split into two six-week blocks - the first for collecting the content; the second for checking and adding. It's rigorous, but it's fun, she says.
The other nine months (a book takes her a year), "I basically sit at my computer. There used to be faxes and at least you'd hear the buzz. Now, with the Internet, you don't even have that. And people don't talk on the phone these days. It's very hermitic work."
Stitch's upper-story corner apartment, near Buena Vista Park, has a view from the study over rooftops to the Golden Gate Bridge and from her bedroom to the Bay Bridge. "I'd decided to move to the city from Berkeley, walked into this place and said, 'Yes' immediately. It was the light. And I always wanted to live in a tower. You know, like Rapunzel," she says with a laugh.
She shares the light-saturated space with her Tibetan terrier, Tashi, and an eclectic assortment of art pieces, most of which she bought cheap. Some, for example, the large framed Cindy Sherman photo over the fireplace and the Picasso ceramic she picked up in Vallauris on the French Riviera for less than $20 and carried in a backpack all over Europe, have skyrocketed in value.
Stitch's parents, born in the United States to Russian/Polish immigrants, had no interest in the arts. The one creative thing they did, she says, was to call her Sidra - and they could not tell her why, or where they got the name.
On the first of two trips Stitch made, after the Gulf War, as a U.S. cultural adviser to Bahrain, she arrived and found "everybody totally waiting to see what Sidra looked like.
"It was so weird," she says with a laugh. "They took me out into the middle of the desert to show me a Sidra tree. It was very spooky because it was mystical to them - this single tree in the middle of nowhere." Once before, she had been shown an old Persian plate decorated with "this squiggly tree with all these tangled branches." Beneath the tree were the words 'Sidra: The tree of life that grows in paradise.'
Stitch had entered Harvard University expecting to major in French. She was also, from a young age, desperate to visit Europe.
As soon as she got to college, she worked part-time jobs and saved and went after her junior year. "And I was mesmerized. The architecture, the art, the design stuff, the cathedrals, the old buildings, wandering the streets - the whole thing."
On her return, she enrolled in an art history class - and left Harvard with a master's degree in visual studies. She then did her doctorate in art history at UC Berkeley.
Her first post-grad job was teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. At Berkeley she had done a dissertation that focused on Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró.
She moved back to California as chief curator of the Berkeley Art Museum and subsequently won research scholarships to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford. She was still "trying to figure out what I might do because I was not ready to go back to the museum world and I didn't really want to go into academia - and I loved traveling."
Her traveling was spent "exploring the contemporary zone of developing arts and what have you" in countries and cities she visited. "I couldn't use the existing guides because when they dealt with art at all, they dealt with traditional museums and artworks. Rarely did they mention anything contemporary. And I knew the contemporary scene was explosive everywhere in the world.
"Every little nook-and-cranny city was building a museum and there were all these things you very rarely found out about. People blank out when you ask them what not to miss when you go traveling. You get home and somebody says, 'Oh, you were just in London - Did you see ...?' - and you kick yourself because you didn't."
In the late '90s, there was no central bank of information, no Internet. "I kept saying, 'Somebody should do a guide.' "
Her idea was to create art books organized like guidebooks. They would offer neighborhood walks and give people an integrated picture of galleries, museums, exhibition spaces, film centers, avant-garde architecture, urban planning projects and so forth. The more people she spoke to, the more she realized that, to get the project done the way she envisioned it, she would have to do it herself. The late philanthropist and art collector Phyllis Wattis provided some seed money, and Stitch was in business.
Over the years, Stitch watched the London art scene transform and grow "equal to - even surpassing - New York, the financial hub, in terms of where it's happening."
"London is wild," she says, raving about Millennium projects, money granted to the arts, laws changed to facilitate waterfront developments. This summer, Stitch will teach a series at Stanford on London's contemporary art scene.
As for all that touring and walking, they'll have to wait.
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