Copyright 2021 by Ed Simon
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition 2021
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
ISBN: 978-1-948742-92-4
Belt Publishing
5322 Fleet Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44105
www.beltpublishing.com
Cover by David Wilson
Book design by Meredith Pangrace
Massive water
flowing morning and night throughout a city
girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.
All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling
of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged
by the heart. Making together a consequence of America.
Jack Gilbert, Searching for Pittsburgh
Pennsylvanias western daughter,
with your tubes of liberty.
Princess of pig iron slaughter,
with your boyfriend Carnegie.
Oh you were stained glass,
you were smoke stacked,
you were laid in cobblestone.
You were trolley car tracked,
And for you the red sky shown.
Loudon Wainwright III, Ode to Pittsburgh
Acknowledgments and Dedication
Ive tried to give a sense of this place in all of its beauty and ugliness, its betrayals and its promise. This is, in many ways, a tremendously personal book. When people read it, I hope that they think that its interesting, that its engaging, that its loving, that its fair. Most of all, I hope that they think that its the sort of thing that, for better or for worse, could only have been written by a Pittsburgher. Its to the generations of Pittsburghers gone, living, and to come to whom this modest volume is dedicated.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Ox and Sovereign Spirit:
Land, People, and Beginnings (c. 300 Million BCE1799)
City of Brick and Tired Wood:
Industry, Labor, and Growth (18001899)
A Consequence of America:
Rise, Fall, and Reinvention (1900 )
Afterword:
An East Liberty Parable
INTRODUCTION
A friend of mine and I were once at the Squirrel Cagewhat locals call that dark, neon cavern on Forbes Avenue with its aura of spilled beer and seventies rock on the jukeboxand wed decided that Pittsburgh was every bit as iconic an American signifier as Manhattan or Hollywood. Those terms mean certain things to people. They have particular connotations, and for good and bad so does Pittsburgh.
The city is indelibly connected to industry, and to all of the exploitative and glorious, filthy and inspiring aspects of that which propelled the American century. Historically its been a blue-collar town, permeated with a no-bullshit toughness. Pittsburghers like that. Sometimes its unfairly positioned as a punchline. Pittsburghers like that less. But if the name has meant anything, its that Pittsburgh is a place where things were once made. Theres something important in that.
When I was young, growing up in the citys east end, mills still lined the Monongahela, though Big Steel was then in the process of collapse. My kindergarten was downtown, in the same building where my father worked, and every morning Id see the mills, not knowing what they were but that they were something important. Now, with some bemusement, having lived over the last decade in New York City, Boston, and now Washington, DC, I watch from afar as Pittsburgh is recast as the next hipster locale, a hidden arts and food city, an unpretentious metropolis valorized on the pages of the New York Times Style section.
I say bemusement because unpretentious as Pittsburgh is (and it is that), I hope that we dont let all of the attention go to our heads. Pittsburgh is stranger and more beautiful than any other place that Ive lived, so that it never feels quite normal anywhere other than within the Three Rivers. I worry that our Sunday Times best might defang us a bit.
Which is why I think of this as an alternative history of Pittsburgh. Such a title necessarily begs the question of Alternative to what? and I hope that a few words might clarify that intent a bit. In some ways, there will be a conventionality to this narrative: who you expect to be here, will be here. Infernal and blessed Andrew Carnegie, the murderous villain Henry Clay Frick, the alienated oddball Andy Warhol, and Rachel Carson with her bright sensitivities. There will be digressions about steel and coal, considerations of the movements of the French and British in the decades before the Revolution. Nothing is particularly alternative regarding such content. In terms of the politics of the piece, any clear reading will show that the book is unabashedly leftish, with an affection for workers, rioters, and strikers, but that in and of itself isnt enough to qualify for the adjective that Im using. Nor should alternative be read as some sort of faux punkish conceit, marketing aimed at craft brew enthusiasts and art house cinema fans. Mayor Bill Peduto can encourage hipsters to move to Lawrenceville on his own time.
Rather, I want you to think of alternative as being an issue of structure, for though all of the usual suspects are mentioned in these pages, Ive not made a claim to completism. Pittsburgh is large and multitudinous, multifaceted, multifractured; it is complex, contradictory, and confusing, so Ive tried to craft my own idiosyncratic Wunderkammer of representative moments. These pieces of a larger historical landscape are laid out chronologically in their beginnings (albeit not often in their conclusions), which I hope provides an impressionistic sense of what Pittsburgh might mean. Think of it as being less of a history than an assemblage of Rorschach inkblots; not a study or an analysis, but a diary, a dream journal, a wooden shelf packed tight with interesting rocks and shells.
To that end, Ive borrowed the favored narrative structure of the great Uruguayan historian and essayist Eduardo Galeano, who in Open Veins of Latin America and Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (among dozens of others) wrote in a fragmentary, digressive, rhizomatic way, telling histories through a series of related and organized snapshots rather than as some grand, teleological thrust of human progress. As with Galeano, who was Uruguayan through and through, and whose books could have been written by nobody but a Latin American, I believe that nobody but a Pittsburgher could have written the book that youre holding. And also as with Galeano, that means a grappling with not just the light but the dark, not just the sweet but the bitter. This is a book with triumphant things in it, but it is not a book of triumphalism. Some readers looking for Steelers lore (which is in here) or a listing of all the citys beloved native daughters and sons (who still get their cameos) might be disappointed.
