a paean for pittsburgh

Always like a prison sentence. That's how people'd ask you how long you were in Pittsburgh. Despite the months of March through mid-May (spring doesn't seem to exist in the Steel City), it's nice actually, helped as much by its graceful decline as its poor reputation. I recall a swim in Lake Van, a great inland sea in Turkey, the summer before I was headed to PGH (as Pittsburghers affectionately abbreviate their city). My companion was headed to Stanford, and we met a young French couple. They asked us where in the States we were from, and we told them where we were headed. To her they said, "Oh, we, loooove, Sahn, Frahn, Seesco!" and they promptly exchanged addresses. To me, barely a hint of recognition. A quarter of the world away the trepidation was mounting.

Pittsburgh is green, full of hills, the three rivers, and supposedly has more bridges and viaducts than Venice. W. Eugene Smith made a wonderful collection of photographs of the city. Yet it's a small town, and people strongly identify with their neighborhoods. People are friendly and down to earth- but it's a challenge if you're a woman, person of color, or not straight. It helps to be into professional sports, and to have a polar bear's constitution. It's an Old World city, where streets begin parallel and intersect each other miles later; buildings are darkened by pollution like Edinburgh's; people identify with old immigration patterns- Poles, Russians, Jews, Italians, Irish- not white, Latino, black, and Asian, as on the West Coast. In the end I didn't quite fit in.

I had just returned from Paris, and my image of the US was shaped much by my college years in the SF Bay Area. So, SF is in the US. PGH is in the US. Ergo PGH = SF.

Oops. I don't regret living there just as someone might not regret growing up in the north and building a resistance to colds and flus, and learning to appreciate warm weather. I miss Ali-baba's, a great Middle Eastern restaurant started by a couple Syrian graduate students in the 1970s, where the food was always cheap, fresh, and plentiful.

For some reason, I seemed to be exposed to much Indian culture while in PGH. Oakland district had more than its share of Indian restaurants, and Sree's Foods was a big deal (S. Indian) when they started. One of the larger Hindu temples in North America is down the parkway.

Also, I would like to see again the huge hulks of abandoned steel mills, Pittsburghers' own chateaux or Great Wall. Huge, awesome, empty, forgotten. Can you now imagine what went on in those buildings, through which you could fly a small plane? If you take the scenic route up the Monongahela, you'll see town after town, each with its own steel bridge crossing it, and the mill it probably came out of. And the Superflea at the New Eastland Mall in North Versailles (pronounced 'ver-SAILS'), where you can find folks selling junk on tables in an evacuated shopping mall, circa 1960. You can still see traces of the modernity which the Eastland Mall once heralded. The mills closed, and these flea market vendors are like survivors of the fall of a great civilization.

The most I miss is rowing on the Allegheny with the University Rowing Club at Carnegie Mellon. On painfully cold mornings in the shells, we traveled on the edge of slumber and consciousness, between night and day, water and sky. At times we were met with the sweet and sour, acrid smell of relish made at the Heinz plant downstream, and turning upstream the ozone and diesel fumes from the last industry sparking away. But mainly it was wonderful to watch the sun rise over the river which flowed dark like oil surging pass the gunwales. In the autumn, whisps of fog would spiral up from flat waters, carpeted with red and yellow leaves.

Back