Photo of the Day: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

With this headline, you’ll have a far better clue than I had that the sculpture you’re seeing is of Fred Rogers, the beloved longtime children’s television star who hailed from Pittsburgh. The statue, at 11 feet tall and weighing some 7,000 pounds, is located on Pittsburgh’s North Shore near Heinz Field.

You may have seen something roughly like it before. That’s because the sculptor, Robert Berks, created a statue with a similar look of Albert Einstein in Washington, D.C.

While the latter statue was one of Rogers’ favorites, this one, despite the fact that the longtime Pittsburgh resident is in his characteristic TV pose of tying his sneakers, is not universally beloved. On one Website I came across, Roadside America, one observer referred to it as “lumpy,” while another, more tart, likened it to “if a mud monster mated with The Thing from the Fantastic Four.”

When I first saw the sculpture when I visited Pittsburgh a month ago, I might have had a better sense of what it was had I known the site was part of the city’s “Tribute to Children.” It takes a bit getting used to, I guess.

Photo of the Day: Iris by the Allegheny

As something of a fan of silent film, I’ve always been fascinated by the “iris shot”—a technique that limits the focus to a circular part of the screen, often used to open (or, even more effectively, close) a scene. This particular image, which I snapped while visiting Pittsburgh three weeks ago, reminds me of that, with the arch providing a kind of architectural counterpart to the film’s circle—along with a vanishing point by the horizon. I took this shot by the Allegheny River. 

The statue at the back depicts Fred Rogers, the beloved longtime Pittsburgh resident who produced the children’s-show favorite mainstay Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood for more than 30 years for the Smoky City’s public television station WQED.