Sunday Pages: "Pittsburgh"

A poem by Ali Shapiro

Downtown Pittsburgh.

Dear Reader,

This past week, I found myself in Pittsburgh. I did not choose to come here—business brought me to town—and I suspect that, like me, most visitors to the Steel City find themselves here by circumstances beyond their control. Maybe there is a trade show. Maybe, as is the case with the narrator of the lovely poem I’m sharing today, Pittsburgh happens to lie at the geographical midpoint between long-distance lovers. Maybe the Pirates are on the schedule.

My sense is that most Americans don’t harbor some insatiable urge to visit Pittsburgh—or, indeed, give the city much thought at all. If you were playing Categories, how many U.S. cities would you name before landing on this one? Twenty-five? Fifty? Pittsburgh is the 68th largest city in the country by population, and that’s where it might place in Categories.

And yet, despite not being among the top destination cities in the United States, Pittsburgh has much to recommend it. First of all, downtown Pittsburgh looks like Gotham City. There are cool, Art Deco-era skyscrapers, an interesting crosshatching of streets, cinematic alleyways, and bridges painted bright yellow (“phlegm-colored,” one of my colleagues described the color, not quite incorrectly). I repeated this Gotham City comp all week, only to find that, yes, The Dark Knight Rises was shot here. Not only that, but Michael Keaton is from Pittsburgh.

Wealthy industrialists lived here during the heyday of U.S. Steel and invested in the place, to great effect. The evidence is all around, from the preponderance of t-shirts extolling the virtues of Heinz ketchup to the name of the city’s most prestigious university: Carnegie Mellon. There’s some serious coin in those two surnames, and it was parked here, in Pittsburgh. With commerce comes everything else. The list of notable individuals from Pittsburgh rivals any other city’s in the nation: Jimmy Stewart, Gene Kelly, Andy Warhol, George A. Romero, August Wilson, Michael Chabon, Wiz Khalifa, Gregg “Girl Talk” Gillis. Whatever its current population, this is a city of heavyweights.

Downtown, where we stayed, is the tip of a sword jammed into the sheath of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio—the famed Three Rivers, two words that, with “Stadium,” I can still hear Pat Summerall intoning with great solemnity on some long-ago Steelers broadcast. It is a land of bridges and heavy food and a dialect called Pittsburghese, which we found no evidence of. It is a city of African-Americans, who came here in waves during the Great Northward Migration in the first half of the 20th century, and of Germans and Irish and Italians and Poles and Ukrainians and Croats. Everyone we encountered, from the cab drivers to the waitresses to the miracle-worker chiropractor who fixed my ailing neck to the dudes at the airport TSA, was almost suspiciously nice. The towels are terrible; the people, not so much.

Also, the restaurant scene is elite. Like, outstanding. I found myself checking Zillow to see, out of curiosity, how much a penthouse in one of those Gotham City skyscrapers might go for (answer: a fraction of what it would cost in Manhattan). Because, like, I could totally live here. I suspect this, too, is the impression visitors who randomly find themselves in Pittsburgh walk away with.

The Koppers Building.

One night, I strayed from the Strip to a neighborhood called Polish Hill, in search of what one website assured me was The Best Dive Bar in Pittsburgh: Gooski’s. And so it was! Nestled on a hilly street of residential row houses, with no other businesses anywhere around, the place was a Jackson Pollack of graffiti inside and out. Ashtrays lined the bar and the dark little two-seater booths—apparently, it is still legal to smoke at bars in Pennsylvania. An ominous sign over the bar read: WE DECIDE WHO HAS A GOOD TIME. As I stepped up to jukebox, I felt a momentary frisson of fear that I’d stumbled too far afield—a prerequisite for all proper dive bars.

The bar at Gooski’s.

Already decided to write about Pittsburgh, I researched poems of Pittsburgh. The most famous seems to be “Searching for Pittsburgh” by Jack Gilbert, in which he summons images of “[t]he rusting mills sprawled gigantically / along three rivers. The authority of them,” and

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.

Those lines give some hint at the raw power here, the majesty.

But my favorite of the poems is one called, simply, “Pittsburgh,” by the Michigan poet and comic artist Ali Shapiro. Although I came here for completely different reasons, the poem, for me, captures something of the spirit of the city, which, for me, mutated in a short period of time from Wikipedia entry to emotional connection. I’ve now read it a dozen times, but the emotional wallop at the end doesn’t diminish.

“Pittsburgh” first appeared in Rattle ten years ago, and she graciously allowed me to reprint it today:

PITTSBURGH
By Ali Shapiro

Between you and me
is Pittsburgh, the city of bridges, the steel city, the buckle
on the Rust Belt, birthplace
of Gertrude Stein and setting
of Flashdance. I’d drive East
for five hours and you’d drive West
for five hours and we’d be there, in Pittsburgh,
where the murder rate is 2.61 times
the national average, which means we might not
survive Pittsburgh, but the natural disaster risk
is second-lowest in the nation, which means
there’s a chance. Right outside
Pittsburgh is Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Fallingwater, which its residents called
Rising Mildew, and which is something like what
Pittsburgh would be for us: beautiful
and useless. Pittsburgh is the Paris
of Appalachia and has three more bridges
than Venice and speaking of places
that aren’t Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh
has seventeen sister cities, including
Presov, Slovakia and Skopje, Macedonia
and Saarbrucken, Germany and Da Nang,
Vietnam, but none of these cities
have the Pittsburgh Steelers, or the Pittsburgh
Pirates, or the Pittsburgh Passion, or the Pittsburgh
Riverhounds. And I’m telling you all this
because I know that if we went to Pittsburgh we wouldn’t
see Pittsburgh, wouldn’t stroll
through Beechview or Beltzhoover
or the Strip District or Windgap, wouldn’t know
any neighborhood in Pittsburgh except
the one that contained the cheap chain hotel room
we’d be renting for just a few hours, so that I
could see your face and you could see my face and that’s
what Pittsburgh would look like, our faces, stupid
with relief, tired from driving
all that distance to a city that could
be any city, but isn’t, because we’re there,
together, for the first time, finally, again.

There is magic in all cities. What else is the ineluctable lure of a great metropolis if not a spell—a summoning? Clinical as the term might be, there is might in human population density. Density, we might say, if we like anagrams, makes destiny. I might not have chosen to come to Pittsburgh because of some inherent Pittsburghness, any more than the narrator of Shapiro’s poem (who, incidentally, may not have followed through on her plan to make the long trek to the Paris of Appalachia), but come here I did, just as millions came here before me. People make places. There is magic in the gathering. As Shapiro puts it, Pittsburgh “could be any city, but isn’t.”

I waited last night at the Pittsburgh Airport for over six hours. We were two hours early for our flight, and we were delayed an extra four hours because of the apocalyptic thunderstorms. From the gate windows, I could see the lighting flashing around the tarmac, beautiful and terrifying, like CGI in some Marvel movie—as if the gods of Steel City didn’t want me to leave.

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Photos by Yours Truly. “Pittsburgh” reprinted with permission from Ali Shapiro.