Pittsburgh restaurant serves food from countries at conflict with US (Lawrenceville: condo, crime)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
... people have become more unfriendly and hurried...
What is interesting, as someone like myself that grew up in Pittsburgh, I tend to blame folks like yourself for the "hurried" part of what you wrote. You continually state how slow others are driving in your way and you need to hurry around the city to make better tips. Are you not part of the problem?
Many people move around thinking that their troubles won't follow them, but the troubles usually tag along. Sometimes it takes a while for it to show. I will bet you move back to the DC area at some point.
Are there any other neighborhoods besides SCR's Polish Hill that have the "fluff" businesses he describes without having the basic amenities? All of the yuppie/hipster neighborhoods (Shadyside, Lawrenceville, South Side, East Liberty, etc.) have the basics covered in addition to all the more specialized services.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteelCityRising
I'd pay $1,000/month in rent to live within walking distance of ten storefronts that housed two different sit-down restaurants (maybe one Italian and one Pan-Asian Fusion); a laundromat; a market that carried all the staples and sundries; a library; a gym; a pizzeria; a bank; a coffeehouse; and a bar.
I wouldn't want to pay $1,000/month in rent to live within walking distance of ten storefronts that housed a vegan coffeehouse; record store; comic book store; gourmet dog biscuit store; bikram yoga studio; a place to learn how to do the polka once per month; cupcake store; fro-yo place; gallery showing how fur is murder; and a brunch-spot that charges you $15 for breakfast while you get to hear someone give a lecture promoting "white guilt". You wouldn't use most of those things other than occasionally as a hobby or recreational outlet, so why should you pay as much to live near those things as the USEFUL things?
Move to the South Side. We've got all those places in your first group, as well as half the other ones. You can still get one bedroom (and even some smaller two bedroom) places here for under $1000 a month.
-Ban Smartphones (yes, I'm serious). I don't have one because I don't want to morph into one of these self-absorbed tech-crazed zombies I see running amok throughout the East End as they walk into people on sidewalks while taking selfies of themselves drinking bubble tea or trying to follow Twitter to see if Justin Bieber will retweet a picture of their bubble tea that they tweeted at him while holding up the line behind them at the bank as they try to get quarters to do laundry. My fellow Millennial adherents ESPECIALLY seem to need constant gratification, indulgence, and reassurance, and it's irritating (not just in Pittsburgh, mind you, but it's becoming more of a pandemic here in recent years, too, with all of the "I'm so special" people moving in). I'm not exactly highly intelligent, yet when I try to have an intellectual conversation with many people these days I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall because the person I'm with is so distracted thinking about what their ex is doing on Facebook or what funny cat videos have been posted on Instagram that they can't concentrate or focus---it's like they've reached their mental capacity and can't go any further. I routinely have customers on the phone who honestly tell me they weren't paying attention to me as I read their orders back to them to ensure accuracy because they were distracted by their Smartphones, forcing me to repeat myself and lose business from those on hold who hang up after becoming too impatient. How is this a "good" thing?
Is this real life? I lurk this board from time to time as I'll always love Pittsburgh, even though I only lived there for a very brief time (still visit as much as I can). SCR, you've been very helpful to be before and I know you're a good man, but dude. Come on. If you're serious about banning smartphones, maybe you should find another country that will suit your needs. Like, a dictatorship.
It's laughable to me that anyone could think these "problems" are Pittsburgh specific. If you want to live a growing city, rents are going to rise, there will be hipper establishments, and people will own smartphones and be a little more hurried. There's no such thing as a utopia. Pittsburgh is a great city. I don't even think of Pittsburgh as hip or trendy or whatever. I live in metro DC. I know what a gentrified, overexpensive, pretentious city looks like (still love DC, though), and I can say with certainty that Pittsburgh is still very working class at heart.
And just remember the old saying, "wherever you go, there you are."
Is this real life? I lurk this board from time to time as I'll always love Pittsburgh, even though I only lived there for a very brief time (still visit as much as I can). SCR, you've been very helpful to be before and I know you're a good man, but dude. Come on. If you're serious about banning smartphones, maybe you should find another country that will suit your needs. Like, a dictatorship.
It's laughable to me that anyone could think these "problems" are Pittsburgh specific. If you want to live a growing city, rents are going to rise, there will be hipper establishments, and people will own smartphones and be a little more hurried. There's no such thing as a utopia. Pittsburgh is a great city. I don't even think of Pittsburgh as hip or trendy or whatever. I live in metro DC. I know what a gentrified, overexpensive, pretentious city looks like (still love DC, though), and I can say with certainty that Pittsburgh is still very working class at heart.
And just remember the old saying, "wherever you go, there you are."
No disrespect intended, SCR.
Love that quote, love John Kabat Zinn. I've been thinking that same thing on a few posts of late.
I don't think most of what was described is a Pittsburgh thing, either. Goodness, this town is much less pretentious than many.
You can't categorize people based on one sliver of info that you gleaned from looking at them for a minute. I often drop donation items off at Goodwill on my way to buy my organic veggies at Whole Foods. I may even stop and get a chai and look at my smartphone to see what my relatives around the country are doing.
Some people use a lot of their income on luxury items. Some people bust their arses and get wildly successful to the point the can buy what they want. Fine with me if they want to live large. The only times I care when someone is on their phone is if it's while walking thru a crosswalk, being waited on at a cash register or eating a meal with me. Life's too short to get that rattled by others behavior.
let's create a NEW Pittsburgh that isn't going to eventually just house a medley of shallow people sipping lattes while discussing political topics they think they understand but don't really understand.
Or a medley of equally shallow people who rely on simpleminded stereotypes to comment on the beverage choices of people they think they understand but don't really understand.
Stick that in your fro-yo, Paul.
And the most annoying smartphone user in Pgh is over 60 years old.
Life's too short to get that rattled by others behavior.
Too true- when I figured that out, life got immeasurably better. And writing absurd long diatribes on Internets forums which only really expose your own superficiality is definitely not a productive activity.
Live and let live, SCR, smile at other's absurd behavior as long as it's not hurting you. And enjoy an increasingly vibrant city with more and more opportunities.
Power LOL at transplants who moved here 5 years ago longing for the "old" Pittsburgh as if they have any idea what that actually was.
I get a kick out of this too. At my age, the "old" Pittsburgh is only the late 80's through the 90's. Back when abandoned mills still lined the rivers, when a field trip to Heinz Hall or the Benedum involved walking a group of kids past all the sex shops on Liberty, when you could take the family out to dinner at King's and sit in the smoking section if you so desired. Back when a baseball or football game was in an ugly building in a sea of concrete with fake grass and no view of the city at all, before Pitt was a renowned research institution, back when Schenley Plaza was a parking lot and back when you had to use Fifth to Craft to the Forbes counterflow lane to get on the Boulevard of the Allies in Oakland. Back when almost the whole city sucked, from Market Square to Lawrenceville to East Liberty.
In the past 10-15 years though, we have seen new buildings go up downtown, streetscape projects all over the city that improve safety and remove blight, a continued focus on rehabbing building facades downtown and many old buildings being renovated and repurposed, the Strip and downtown are turning into places people want to live, Uptown may reach a turning point soon and the lower Hill up to at least Dinwiddie has seen some major progress. Point State Park and Mellon Square revamped. Most public housing projects have been razed. The region is getting two new highways with the Route 28 project and the Southern Beltway and some of the outlying counties are seeing an influx of cash thanks to the gas industry. Act 89 will allow the bridge and road construction to go into hyperdrive over the next several years which will make even more roads and sidewalks safer and more aesthetically pleasing. Despite service cuts, the Port Authority has become a more efficient and rider friendly entity and they are making slow but steady strides toward becoming the kind of modern transportation agency you would expect to find in a major city (and I expect some service will be restored in time, but let's face it if you were a rider on one of the buses that showed like 4 riders per trip in that report a few years ago, you aren't getting your bus back).
It's clearly getting better, and we are clearly in another Renaissance...smart phones and cigarette butts are everywhere, it's a cultural thing not a Pittsburgh thing. The litter does appear to be a Pittsburgh thing and I'm not sure more trash cans are the answer. I live in Charleston, SC and there is very little litter, and also very few trash cans. Even in areas of town that are in disrepair, there's not a lot of trash all over the ground. They also have billboards on the highway here saying "our state is not an ashtray" with a phone number to report the plate numbers of people throwing butts out the window. SCR maybe you should try to organize a similar campaign in Pittsburgh, it would at least discourage some drivers from littering. As far as the random person on the sidewalk, why not take a picture of the perpetrator and start a blog where you can expose them? This could also be applied to UPMC employees caught smoking now that the ban has taken hold. Much like the hidden cameras and steep fines will hopefully discourage hillside garbage dumpers, fear of being exposed and fined would discourage some of the other things as well (of course, you'd probably need a smart phone to take and upload the photo). A blog like this would probably get media attention eventually because it would p*ss people off but it would also help serve your purpose.
I get a kick out of this too. At my age, the "old" Pittsburgh is only the late 80's through the 90's.
Pittsburgh is 1000 times better than back in the 80's and 90's, not to mention the 70's.
The litter problem is a Southwestern PA thing. I don't understand it, but there is no changing it. I do have a feeling it has to do with our area being depressed. It is an "I don't care" attitude of a sizable percentage of people. The ghettos are so filled with trash, I don't think the trash people would even know where to pick the stuff up. I see people throw bigger stuff out of car all the time around East Liberty and it is the poor people that do it pretty much ALL the time. Now when it comes to cigarettes, that is everyone from everywhere. I don't know if anyone uses a car ashtray in Pittsburgh. I suspect they all look new. Litter is part of the landscape here and always will be.
Pittsburgh is a way better place to be then when I was growing up. Sure, we still have a whole bunch of problems (infrastructure, neighborhoods in decline, increasingly hostile population), but as a whole there are many more things to do in a safer city. I might be young but I was still around for the downtown smut shops and all of the Southside Works being steel mills among other things. Just ask any old timer, you didn't want to be around here when steel collapsed. The city was a sh*thole then.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
