Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens

The conservatory was a gift to the city from Henry Phipps, a steel partner of Andrew Carnegie, who wanted to give Pittsburgh's working families a place of beauty and refuge from the smoke of the mills. It opened in the 1890s in the new Schenley Park, its central structure fabricated from iron and glass in the great Victorian glasshouse tradition.

From the start it drew crowds for its flower shows and its collection of exotic plants brought from around the world, some gathered at a world's fair of the era. Through more than a century of Pittsburgh's transformation from steel town to modern city, the glasshouse has stayed open and blooming, one of the constants of the park.

The pleasure of Phipps is walking from one climate to the next without stepping outside. The palm court rises high overhead, the fern room drips with green, the orchid room glows with color, and the desert room holds cactus and succulents from the world's dry places. Between them sit specialty rooms devoted to bonsai, tropical fruit, and other collections.

Threaded through the permanent rooms are the seasonal flower shows, which transform the displays with tulips and spring bulbs, summer color, autumn chrysanthemums, and winter poinsettias and lights. Because the shows rotate, no two visits in different seasons feel quite the same.

In recent decades Phipps has become as well known for its buildings as its plants. Newer wings and the Center for Sustainable Landscapes were designed to some of the most demanding environmental standards in the world, generating their own energy and treating their own water, and turning the institution into a working model of sustainability.

The pairing is deliberate. A place devoted to plants uses its own campus to show how buildings can tread lightly, so a visit becomes a lesson in ecology as well as horticulture. The old glasshouse and the new green additions together tell a story of a city reinventing itself around cleaner ideas.

The wider region is the ancestral homeland of the Lenape, the Shawnee, and the Haudenosaunee peoples, who lived and traveled through the Ohio Valley long before Pittsburgh grew up at the meeting of its three rivers. Displacement pushed these nations westward over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their descendant communities continue elsewhere today.

The glasshouse itself sits within Schenley Park, hundreds of acres of woods, trails, and ravines given to the city in the same era. Many visitors pair the conservatory with a walk in the surrounding park, so the cultivated tropics inside give way to Pennsylvania oak and maple just outside the doors.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.