Latrobe, PA
In the terminal itself, dinner under crystal chandeliers with the runway out the window. The DeNunzios opened the Latrobe Chophouse in April 2004; Ron and Denise started with a Jeannette pizza villa in 1977, and this is the family's third restaurant. Italian classics and chophouse steaks share the menu, the chicken parm sandwich on a grilled roll has a following, and Ronnie's hand-tossed chopped Italian salad is named for the man himself. The Sinatra Bar keeps the Rat Pack mood, and the Sunset Terrace puts your cocktail beside the runway at golden hour. Open seven days, lunch through dinner, Sundays from 10 am; the rare field restaurant with no closed day. Latrobe is Arnold Palmer's hometown and Fred Rogers' birthplace, both easy add-ons to the trip.
Opened in 1924 as Longview Flying Field, renamed three times before becoming Latrobe Airport in 1935. On April 12, 1939, a Stinson Reliant performed the world's first official airmail Air Pick Up here — snagging a mail container suspended between two poles without landing. A 10-year-old Arnold Palmer was watching from the perimeter; he grew up within a mile of the runway and later learned to fly off this same strip. The airport took his name in September 1999 as a 70th birthday gift. Class D, single 8,222ft runway 6/24, set in the Laurel Highlands 33 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
Frank Lloyd Wright's 1935 house cantilevered directly over a waterfall on Bear Run, in the Laurel Highlands southeast of Pittsburgh. Built for the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh department-store fame as a weekend retreat, Fallingwater is widely considered the finest American house of the 20th century — a horizontal stack of poured-concrete terraces that float over the stream rather than facing it. Smithsonian named it one of "28 places to visit before you die." The cantilevers were already sagging by the late 1990s; a 2002 structural restoration added post-tensioning cables to save the house from collapsing into its own waterfall.
The crash site of United Flight 93, the fourth hijacked aircraft on September 11, 2001 — and the only one not to reach its target, brought down in a Pennsylvania field after the 40 passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers. The plane impacted at 563 mph into reclaimed strip-mine land near Shanksville. The memorial design is restrained and powerful: a Tower of Voices with 40 wind chimes (one per passenger and crew member), a curving white marble Wall of Names along the flight path, and a black slate boulder marking the impact point. Visitor center opened on the tenth anniversary.
The Allegheny River (from the north) and the Monongahela River (from the south) meet at the western tip of downtown Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River, which then runs 981 miles to the Mississippi. Point State Park sits at the confluence — 36 acres of riverfront with a 150-foot fountain at the very tip, marking the site of the colonial-era Fort Pitt (1761) and the earlier French Fort Duquesne (1754) that was the casus belli for the French and Indian War. The Pittsburgh skyline rises directly behind the Point — the Steel City's downtown is wedged into the triangle of land between the rivers, a uniquely compact American downtown bordered on two sides by water. The Roberto Clemente Bridge (yellow), the Andy Warhol Bridge (yellow), and the Rachel Carson Bridge (yellow) — the Three Sisters — cross the Allegheny into the North Shore, where PNC Park and Acrisure Stadium sit on the riverbank.
A 220-degree railroad curve completed in 1854 to get the Pennsylvania Railroad over the Allegheny Front without using a tunnel — the line wraps around three sides of a natural amphitheater, gaining 122 feet of elevation in 2,375 feet of track. The curve made it possible to ship freight from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and on to the Midwest, cementing Pennsylvania as the industrial spine of 19th-century America. Norfolk Southern still runs 50-plus trains a day around the curve. The Nazi sabotage plot Operation Pastorius (1942) had Horseshoe Curve on its target list — three German agents landed by U-boat with explosives, but turned themselves in before getting near it.