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Sunday, December 09, 2001

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

What will you experience at "Dream Street" -- a faithful rendering of 1955 Pittsburgh or the shifting vision of an ambitious artist restricted by his medium and his message?

	The title photo of the exhibit shows W. Eugene Smith's whimsy at work. (W. Eugene Smith, Carnegie Museum of Art)

The 193 photographs, loosely grouped in subheadings under the theme "Equilibriums of Paradox," aim to capture W. Eugene Smith's argument that Pittsburgh reflected the contradictions of industrial American society.

The most obvious examples are the collection of street signs, from the title one of a rakish Studebaker convertible on what looks like a country lane (it's really near Overbrook off Route 51) to the black child climbing the sign pole of Pride Street in the Hill District.

Others include the partially obscured bulk of the Cathedral of Learning viewed through the smoke of the South Side steel mills, the unsmiling faces of children, the vistas of foliage framing the urban skyline and the solitary figures in desolate landscapes.

Yet many of the photographs reveal singular views of beauty, painterly compositions of lights twinkling on bridges above mysterious rivers, majestic jets of flame illuminating valleys, smokestacks that seem to shimmer in the wake of barges and, most vividly, a collection of faces full of character and strength.

Constantly, Smith played with light and dark, two of Pittsburgh's most obvious elements in the 1950s -- the unearthly sheen of the new Gateway Buildings at dusk, the sooty facade of the old Mellon Bank on Smithfield Street, the gleam of rail tracks lighting the way to the glowering Homestead Works and the dark figures of steel workers caught in the glow of molten steel

Longtime Pittsburghers will seek out landmarks, old haunts long gone, the welcoming smile of Josie Carey, the Home Plate Cafe outside Forbes Field and the mills, always the mills.

More recent arrivals will encounter a kind of fairy-tale land, whose current configuration gives hints of what Smith found 46 years ago.

It was not all pretty or in many cases, worth preserving. Yet, thanks to Smith's vision, we can be thankful for what's left -- a city of unique character that no Disney magician can re-create.

Urban expert Thomas Hanchett, who spoke Dec. 1 at a Dream Street symposium on Pittsburgh in the 1950s, said:

"In a time of the rise of the 'Robinson Township World,' Smith gives us a view of a city we can now appreciate. We're lucky that so much of that world is still here."