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I found this exploring through Carnegie-main a bit ago... it's pretty much an attempt at explaining the idiosyncrasies of Pittsburgh 50 years ago - but I think lots still rings true (for better or worse). In any case, I find it entertaining! Hope you enjoy.
"Pittsburgh Is a Great Old Town", an excerpt from "Where else but Pittsburgh!", by George Swetnam , 1958.
"A YOUNG ENGLISH NEWSPAPERMAN visiting Pittsburgh recently became so much embarrassed on being asked to talk, that he blurted out at least part of the truth. W. Harford Thomas, one of the myriad visitors on State Department industrial tours, was trying hard for a compliment when he said: "I knew Pittsburgh only by reputation. I was expecting the worst, but here I find a new, beautiful city."
Many a Chamber of Commerce would have raised its hackles at such a statement, but in Pittsburgh it didn't even cause a ripple. Pittsburghers have long been used to getting left-handed compliments on their city, when they got any at all. And they haven't been perturbed when they got solid insults, instead.
Pittsburghers are a breed of their own, and don't expect outsiders to understand, unless and until they have lived in Pittsburgh a while. Many residents, who were once outsiders, didn't like or appreciate the town until they had lived there. No starry-eyed idealists seek Pittsburgh as a Mecca of desire and beauty. Those who come there to live are drawn by more solid-usually material-motives: Good jobs; good wages; transportation, raw materials; and most of all, perhaps, the fact A that Pittsburgh is a city where people can get things done that are looked on as impossible elsewhere.
Moderator cut: shortened, copyright protection. Please provide a link to the original source
The old Pittsburgh described in this quote sounds so fascinating and oddly appealing...like dreary old London. I wish I could go back in time and see Pittsburgh in all its dark, gothic glory.
"Then is Pittsburg itself. Such days as these are her especial boast, and in their frequency and dismalness, in all the world she has no rival, save London. In truth, Pittsburg is a smoky, dismal city at her best. At her worst, nothing darker, dingier, or more dispiriting can be imagined.”
I don't live in Pittsburgh but I can echo that remark. I got turned onto the city by accident really, and when I finally came to explore it I was amazed! Truly a underrated city in the most extreme sense. I loved how the city is built on and in between mountains and valleys, how the rivers intersect at downtown, and the downtown and many, many neighborhoods are full of awesome old buildings. (I really like historic architecture) I also like how dense the downtown is.Whenever I go home after a visit I can never stop raving about your city! Most of my friends don't believe me, but I have brought two of my friends and they have been converted! Can't wait for my next visit!
I'm going to re-post the whole text as it does appear it is public domain....also since the original is in print and not online at al (the text below was scanned using OCR)... I do hope this is kosher...
Last edited by ctoocheck; 06-23-2009 at 11:18 PM..
"A YOUNG ENGLISH NEWSPAPERMAN visiting Pittsburgh recently became so much embarrassed on being asked to talk, that he blurted out at least part of the truth. W. Harford Thomas, one of the myriad visitors on State Department industrial tours, was trying hard for a compliment when he said: "I knew Pittsburgh only by reputation. I was expecting the worst, but here I find a new, beautiful city."
Many a Chamber of Commerce would have raised its hackles at such a statement, but in Pittsburgh it didn't even cause a ripple. Pittsburghers have long been used to getting left-handed compliments on their city, when they got any at all. And they haven't been perturbed when they got solid insults, instead.
Pittsburghers are a breed of their own, and don't expect outsiders to understand, unless and until they have lived in Pittsburgh a while. Many residents, who were once outsiders, didn't like or appreciate the town until they had lived there. No starry-eyed idealists seek Pittsburgh as a Mecca of desire and beauty. Those who come there to live are drawn by more solid-usually material-motives: Good jobs; good wages; transportation, raw materials; and most of all, perhaps, the fact A that Pittsburgh is a city where people can get things done that are looked on as impossible elsewhere.
Often those who have lived there completely fail to recognize a change in their feelings about the town. Many go right on cussing the city as they did when they came, until some dramatic incident brings them to the startling revelation that they have come to love it with a purple passion. For most of those who stay in Pittsburgh do come to love it. No city can show so many boosters who sheepishly admit that they 'came there reluctantly and spent much of their first year in planning how get away. No revival meetings where "those who came scoff remained to pray" ever changed men's attitudes more completely than a few years' residence in Pittsburgh. Those who came as strangers become so intensely Pittriotic that they beam whenever the name is mentioned. "Pittsburgh” becomes a magic word, even if it is used only in a satire on smoke or millionaires. Men were born a thousand miles away comb the bookstores avidly for "local items" and histories, as if their own forbears had been among Pittsburgh's pioneers. Some of them were.
That is one reason why they and the native Pittsburghers only chuckle over harsh criticisms and insulting remarks. How can they feel anything but a tender sympathy for people who, no matter how clever in other matters, are just a little too obtuse to understand Pittsburgh?
Architect Frank Lloyd Wright has been a tremendous popular favorite in Pittsburgh ever since he said the city ought to be abandoned. Perhaps the Sage of Taliesin, who has ever been a fighter, expected to get up a scrap when he said during a speech at Carnegie Institute: "It would be cheaper to abandon Pittsburgh than to try to make it beautiful," and added that all the other buildings in town ought to be torn down to make a park around the jail and courthouse. Instead, the remark made him the city's darling, urged to come back, quoted on all subjects, and sought as oracle whenever he is discovered in town.
The architect never has recanted his opinion through the years, and recently declared it was “a triumph of understatement.” But as if to prove that even his thick hide is not completely impervious to Pittsburgh’s witchery, he added one more to its list of diluted compliments:
“What a fist this city has! What great power There’s a great animal impulse here, but very little of the spirit.”
Diluted as it was, Pittsburghers took the remark as a compliment, and were grateful to Mr. Wright for coming to Pittsburgh at all.
Nothing pleases Pittsburghers more than to have people come there, either to visit, or better still, to stay. Maybe it started back in the days when settlers were scarce and Indians SO plentiful and warlike that one more neighbor might mean the difference between massacre and safety. But whenever and however it may have begun, the idea of an "outsider" is totally foreign in Pittsburgh thinking. Even when the word was in general use there just after the heyday of immigration from Central Europe, the idea it expressed was almost wholly one of language and difficulty in communication, rather than any feeling of not belonging.
Pittsburgh is without question the most civically and socially hospitable town on earth. True, this civic hospitality is completely divorced from some aspects of personal hospitality. Your Pittsburgher has none of the Virginian's feeling that he must invite any respectable acquaintance to dinner at dinner time, whether there is anything to offer him or not. He makes no bones suggesting that his best friend run along home because the missus is waiting the meal till he leaves. But he completely lacks the feeling that a neighbor-or even a passing acquaintance-is an outsider because he has come to town only a few days or years before.
The word "stranger" is practically unheard in Pittsburgh, except in the matter of recognizing name and face of the person concerned. People who come to Pittsburgh are, more than in any other city in America, taken at face value until they prove themselves unworthy.
The Georgia farmer who was shocked to learn that his brother, who had moved to Athens six months before, still didn't know the names of his next door neighbors, would have understood Pittsburgh thoroughly. You have to be mighty high up or mighty low down in the social scale there if you live next door to a man long without knowing just about all there is to know about him.
This has given rise to a strange departure in journalism in Pittsburgh, where the papers get out more local news with fewer beat and staff reporters than editors in other towns would ever believe. Stories that elsewhere would keep four or five men busy for hours cleaning up details and art are easily handled for the next edition by one rewrite man with a telephone criss-cross, and one cameraman, working alone, to get the pictures.
Suppose that-as not infrequently happens-Harry Jones has, for reasons best known to himself, pumped four bullets into his wife, and a fifth into his own temple. Hardly has the police radio stopped blaring a call to its scout car to go to the spot before a reporter is calling Mrs. Starczynski, next door. In most cities the chance of getting more than the most meager information from her would be perhaps one in seven. But in Pittsburgh it's ten to one Mrs. Staruynski will know, and cheerfully explain, that Mr. Jones is sixty-two and has been in Mayview twice for mental treatment, but came home last week; that Mrs. Jones is about three years younger, but still a very fine looking woman, and her first name is Irma. She'll supply the names, addresses and probably the telephone numbers of their three children, scattered from Dormont to Bellevue, and to offer to lend a picture of Mrs. Jones taken when they were on a picnic together last fall. And then she'll apologize that she really doesn't know them very well, because they just moved in a year ago, after the death of old Mrs. Hunt, who had lived in the house ever since it was built by her husband, a steel mill foreman, in 1936.
And the information will turn out to be correct! About the only hazard to a quick cleanup on the story
is the danger that Mrs. Starczynski's line may be busy because some opposition reporter has called her first.
It matters little what brings a man to Pittsburgh, or from where. He immediately becomes a Pittsburgher, and as such, entitled to all prerogatives and privileges thereunto appertaining. Generals Brehon Somervell and Matthew Ridgway and Admiral Ben Moreell were not the only post-war accessions to Pittsburgh's business life who suddenly found themselves being pushed into drive chairmanships and other key civic spots. Anyone who is willing to work is likely to be called on. In the same way Pittsburgh probably had more foreign-born or second generation immigrants in positions of trust and importance during and after the great immigration than any other major city-and sooner. Today a broker may tell you half his business is done with people whose names he can't pronounce.
The same more-than-southern hospitality that Your clutches newcomers to its heart, often claims them after they are gone, and even embraces some who never lived in Pittsburgh. Actor Jimmy Stewart is from Indiana (Pennsylvania) fifty miles north of Pittsburgh, and singer Perry Como from Canonsburg, half as far the to the south. But to Pittsburghers they are native sons. So, almost, are George J. Gould, who only visited Pittsburgh once in his life, but carried on a fierce battle for the right to build a railroad into it; and John W. “Bet-a-Million" Gates, who never could stand the place, but has large industrial interests nearby. Their names are spoken with affection, and their foibles looked on with the amused reproach a mother feels toward her spoiled child.
Length of' residence has less to do with position in Pittsburgh society or business life than in nearly any other old town in America, or even many younger ones. By 1905, fewer than thirty per cent of the family names in its Social Register were those that had been included in the first City Directory, published ninety years earlier. And after another half century the percentage has dropped under nineteen. Even where the names are the same, it is unlikely that half the families listed would found to be lineal descendants of those which had appeared in the 1815 volume. And even then the town was nearly sixty years old, from the date of permanent English occupation.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a “real” Pittsburgher in the restricted sense a Californian gives the term “native son” or an Australian "fair dinkum." Or rather, the term designates a type, more than a blood or a past.
Your Pittsburgher is as likely to have been born in Ohio, West Virginia, Atlanta or Sorrento, as in Allegheny county. If he is a college man he may have gone to Tufts, Michigan or Ohio State, instead of Pitt or Carnegie Tech. The mere accident f being assigned to the Pittsburgh office of United States Steel, Gulf Oil, or some other corporation makes him a Pittsburgher.
The same things is true of a residence in the swankier districts in or just outside the city. Even with Mount Lebanon, the rickets township in the state, you only have to be able to afford living there. Edgeworth alone remains a little rosewood casket, lapped in memories of Ethelbert Nevin and Mrs. Mary Gould Oliver. Its Borough Council sometimes meets in Pittsburgh’s elite Duquesne Club. But its Oliver Avenue, which ran past Mrs. Oliver’s famous girls’ school, has been changed to Oliver, for a prominent family of today.
In Pittsburgh life has changed too fast for people to get very much set in their ways. Almost before it quit being a frontier garrison town, it found it was outgrowing the Triangle, in the fork where the Allegheny and Monongahela meet to form the Ohio.
People had to move up into the hills or across the rivers if they wanted elbow room, or to get away from the smoke-for even before 1800 Pittsburgh had a reputation for smoke.
Birmingham took over the level south bank across the Monongahela, and Bayardstown-tougher than white leather-grew Up in the present Strip, between Harron Hill and the Allegheny. And Pipetown was occupying the thin line between Boyd's Hill and the Monongahela causing travelers to wonder how the tiny houses of the workers could cling to the steep hillside. So the sons of Indian traders and frontier warriors began to move their homes north of the Allegheny, or up into the Northern Liberties and Point Breeze, in the hills east of town.
But hardly had Allegheny City become a rich man's suburb before it was growing up into a city, too. And while Steve Foster was still penning Southern songs there, an immigrant boy named Carnegie was becoming rich, and mills were growing up to smoke the new residential sections and shoulder them aside. Soon George Westinghouse was drilling gas wells in the midst of Homewood.
And to rattle things even more, the social strata kept changing. Old families kept dying out or going to seed, new ones coming up. Even the Mellons have only been "big rich" for a century, and ninety years ago the Heinz family were still only prosperous tradesmen-respected, but giving no hint of the tremendous energy that was to put their name literally on every tongue in the land. While many another fortune, like that of Arbuckle, the coffee man, rose like a rocket and burned out nearly as fast.
Pittsburghers have been so busy keeping up with their city that they haven't had time to get in a rut or form a rigid caste system.
The very shape of the land, too, has almost forced people who live there into little, friendly groups. With hillsides often too steep for buildings, areas have usually had to grow up on hilltops or in narrow valleys. The city’s pet folk song carols gaily that:
"Pittsburgh his a hilly old town;
The roads and the streets run up and down."
Men who work at the same mill, ride to town on the same commuter train, bus, trolley, or incline car, tend to be chummy and forget to stand on ceremony. Women who go to the same church and neighborhood grocery store stop to talk about things now and then.
The Garfield Parent-Teacher Association and the Knoxville playground work in similar fashion to make people neighbors. Whether the village area is within the city, as Lawrenceville, Oakland, Hazelwood, Seldom Seen, Foggy Hollow, Goat Hill, Beltzhoover, Manchester, Woods Run and Brushton, or separate, as Wilkinsburg, Etna, Sharpsburg, Swissvale, Braddock, Brentwood, Crafton and Carnegie, or even an independent area completely surrounded by the city, like Mount Oliver, the result is much the same.
Elsewhere, these separate village areas might have generated fierce rivalry and hatred, and such a situation did exist between Bayardstown and Allegheny, Mount Washington and Allentown, for a while. But people were so busy thinking about Pittsburgh they had little time for rivalries, and instead developed a deep sense of solidarity that is almost unshakable. It even includes areas as much as a dozen miles up and down the three rivers, with a feeling strong enough that men sing:
"Pittsburgh is a great old town,
Solid steel from McKeesport down."
though the town named is a third-class city, in its own right.
After all, Pittsburgh had to spread out in every way it could, for even by filling ponds and cutting down Grant’s Hill, the utmost to which it could extend the level of its Golden Triangle has been under 300 acres. It has built more than 150 bridges, and many of the 700 others in Allegheny County were built to tie the city to its scores of suburban areas, within the county or outside its limits.
For years there has been a standing bet at Pittsburgh that no car could drive into the Triangle area from any direction, by any course, without crossing at least one bridge. No one has ever claimed the money.
Shut off by natural barriers in nearly every direction, Pittsburgh has become smug and self-sufficient in its own definite area, enough to justify the charge of Architect Wright that:
“No place is more provincial that Pittsburgh – except New York.”
Starting out in a wilderness and fighting against stiff geographical odds, Pittsburghers have come to think in terms limited almost wholly to one single thing: production.
Even before 1800, when Pittsburgh was still just a frontier village, its people were already calling it the “Birmingham of America.” There wasn’t an active blast furnace in Allegheny county when Charles Dickens visited the place in 1842, and he sneered at its pretensions, despite the many iron fabrication works it contained.
“Pittsburgh is like Birmingham in England,” he wrote. “At least, its townspeople say so Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, wagons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its ironworks.”
That was one reason Pittsburghers were so much delighted when a press service, during the blitz of World War II, referred to Birmingham as the “Pittsburgh of England.”
The city’s spirit was running strong from the very beginning, and its destiny was already apparenty by the end of its first half century. Nearly seventy-five years later a wandering newspaperman, Richard Realf, gave the city’s feeling its greatest expression in his “Hymn of Pittsburg,” still treasured in the Iron City despite the fact that no one tolerates his spelling of the name anymore:
“My father was a mighty Vulan;
I am smith of the land and sea;
The cunning spirit of Tubal-Cain
Came with my marrow to me.
I think great thoughts, strong-winged with steel,
I coin vast iron acts.
And orb the impalpable dreams of seers
Into comely, lyric facts.
I am swart with the soots of my furnace,
I drip with the sweats of toil;
My fingers throttle the savage wastes,
I tear the curse from the soil.
I fling bridges across the gulfs
That hold us from the To-Be,
And build the roads for the bannered march
Of crowned humanity.”
That was Pittsburgh three quarters of a century ago, and that is Pittsburgh’s today, steel-hard in its rougher spots, but never turning a cold shoulder towards those who come to do. When William Turnbull and Peter Mamie came from Philadelphia before 1790 to buy Fort Pitt and build its bricks into mills and houses, no question was raised of their being “outsiders." They were Pittsburghers at once. So was John Thaw, who came from the same city a few years later as a bank clerk, and founded one of Pittsburgh's richest families.
Andy Carnegie came to town as an immigrant Scotch boy. But he was the one man who ever occupied such an important place in the city's thinking that the Social Register omitted his first name. There were other Carneges in the book but he was unquestionedly:"MR. CARNEGIE."
Young George Westinghouse sought Pittsburgh because it was the only place he could get anybody to manufacture his patent switch frogs. But no one questioned his being matched with homeborn William Thaw (John's son) and Carnegie as "Le Trois Rois."
It was the same with the throngs of Irish and Germans who came to Pittsburgh during its first century and the hordes from Central Europe and Italy who were drawn into the vortex between 1880 and 1920. Only so long as there was a language barrier was any particular notice paid to their difference in heritage. Now that only a dwindling minority of the old are unable to speak English, "Hunky" and "Wop" are less heard in Pittsburgh than in nearly any other city. Jokesters sometimes call Squirrel Hill "****'s Peak," because of the number of Jews there. But it is a fancy ghetto, which claims many of the finest homes in the city, and Jews hold many top places of trust and prominence in Pittsburgh's civic, commercial, political and industrial life. Segregation is almost completely unknown except that Negroes are still pushed into the teeming Hill district, a situation many agencies are seeking to correct.
These things have been brought about by natural rather than any important crusades, for Pittsburghers are seldom zealots about anything but production. They love Pittsburgh's reputation for production, and revel in the signs of it.
"By all means make your first approach to Pittsburg in the night time," wrote a traveler of the early 1880’s, "and you will behold a spectacle which has not a parallel on this continent. Darkness gives the city and its surroundings a picturesqueness which they wholly lack by daylight. It lies low down in a hollow of encompassing hills, gleaming with a thousand points of light, which are reflected from the rivers, whose waters glimmer, it may be, in the faint moonlight, and catch and reflect the shadows as well. Around the city's edge, and on the sides of the hills which encircle it like a gloomy amphitheatre, their outlines rising darkly against the sky, through numberless apertures, fiery lights stream forth, looking angrily and fiercely up toward the heavens, while over these settles a heavy pall of smoke. It is as though one had reached the outer edge of the infernal regions, and saw before him the great furnace of Pandemonium with all the lids lifted. The scene is so strange and weird that it will live in the memory forever."
The glow of the steel mill has hung over Pittsburgh through most of its history-and so has the pall of its smoke. When Henry Heald of Delaware visited the city in 1819 he noted that: "The first impression on coming in sight of the town was rather disagreeable: a dark cloud of coal dust hovering over it, the blackness of the buildings, and on a near approach, the smell of the stone coal made our entrance very unpleasant."
It was at Pittsburgh thirty years later that Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, writing an ode on the spirit
of America, noted that:
“It charms the waste and paves the rushing stream
And scarce allows the sun a vagrant beam.”
In fact, there seemed to be an endless stream of visitors passing through Pittsburgh, and complaining about its smoke. Long before radio and TV comedians were on the air, their vaudeville predecessors were cracking most of today's jokes about Pittsburgh smoke.
But the smoke was no joke, and no figment of the imagination. On many a day when clouds hung low to keep it down, smoke was so thick in the air that street lights had to be turned on at midday, and day could hardly be told from night. Willard Glazier, who had urged approaching the city by night, described a murky day in autumn there:
“The buildings, whatever their original material and color, are smoked to a uniform, dirty drab; the smoke sinks, and mingling with the moisture in the air, becomes of a consistency which may almost be felt as well as seen. Under a drab sky a drab twilight hangs over the town, and the gas lights, which are left burning at mid-day, shine out of the murkiness with a dull, reddish glare. Then is Pittsburg itself. Such days as these are her especial boast, and in their frequency and dismalness, in all the world she has no rival, save London. In truth, Pittsburg is a smoky, dismal city at her best. At her worst, nothing darker, dingier, or more dispiriting can be imagined.”
When Dr. George Washington Lang, later head of the Allegheny County Medical Society, was a young intern in Philadelphia, he stopped aghast as his scalpel laid bare a great black mass in the chest cavity of a vagrant on whom he was performing an autopsy.
"What in the world is that?" he gasped, and the hospital veteran head surgeon had a good laugh.
“That," he explained,” is something you should learn to know, being from Pittsburgh. It is what we call “Pittsburgh lung,” a blackened lung condition which results from breathing smoke. Your own probably looks much the same as this."
The vagrant, when identified, turned out to have been a Pittsburgh man. And the young doctor was relieved to learn that Pittsburgh lung was apparently a harmless condition, and that some respiratory troubles were less frequently found at the Iron City than in regions of purer air.
Since production means power, and power in a coal country has always meant smoke Pittsburgh has long looked philosophically on the cloud that overhung it. But its own people have not been content to lie down under the smoke problem. As early as 1815, citizens were writing letters to newspapers, urging the "general and spontaneous adoption of some plan for smoke abatement." The job was a difficult one, and took more than another century and a quarter to achieve. But in the past decade Pittsburgh has pioneered in successful smoke control, and the city has not had one of its "dark days" for several years now.
Until science could help make smoke control laws possible, there was little that Pittsburghers could do but grin and bear the smoke, and even jest about it. And that is what most of them did.
Among the rich there were always some who took another course-to make their pile and get out- Through the years there was a trickle of such people who felt their status required them to live in New York, Boston, or even abroad. One of the first was Mary Croghan, only child and heir of William Croghan, Jr. who and married British Captain Edward Schenley and eloped to England, eventually taking one of Pittsburgh's largest fortunes there with her. Of' such, too, were some of the Thaws, and Andrew Carnegie, and Charlie Schwab, and Henry Clay Frick, though his daughter, Helen, has found she couldn't stay away, and spends a good part of her time back in the city of her birth.
But lately the tide has turned, and Pittsburgh's richest families have stayed with their city, and poured out their wealth to help in solving its problems, so that been such names as Mellon, and Heinz, and Buhl, and Crabbe, and Jamison and Kaufmann loom large in the rolls of Pittsburgh's civic leadership and charities. A
Perhaps because the gifts and the holdings of the Mellon family have been largest of all, cynics have tried to dub Pttsburgh "Mellon's plantation." But as the Mellons themselves would be first to agree, Pittsburgh is not, and never has been their seigniory. People used to call it "Andy Carnegie’s Town," partly because of his gifts, too, and before that "Turnbull's Place," but Pittsburgh has never worn any man's collar, and from present indications, it never will.
Pittsburghers have grown used to the effete who feared being contaminated, and the radicals who always wanted to change something, but they were deeply puzzled once when a West Coast professor called their land a "tragic area."
They could see some of the things on which he based his remark – the smoke, mine-scarred hillsides, polluted streams, flood dangers, and the history of industrialization and labor war. But to them, these didn’t add up to his result. A lot is already being done about smoke control and stream pollution, they objected. Despite labor’s battles, men always flock to Pittsburgh because it is recognized as a good place to earn a living. As for the ills of industrialization, they though “The Deserted Village” went out of date years ago!
The very solution of some of the problems had proved a blessing, with flood control dams bringing wider fishing and recreation chances, and smoke control introducing by-product coke opens, whose chemicals sometimes proved as valuable as the coke they made. Things have often been like that around Pittsburgh, working out to far-distant, unforeseen and amazing results.
After all, what other city ever elected a semi-vagrant as mayor while he was in its own jail? What ever had a major bank dedicated to a dog? Which attained its majority without even knowing which state, or colony, it was in?
What other city can claim such important and widely varying contributions to the amusement field as the first black-face minstrely, steam calliope, Ferris Wheel, nickelodeon, and the origin of commercial radio broadcasting?
And where else but Pittsburgh could it ever have happened that a radio station could steal and broadcast major league ball games for weeks, with the ball club and a station which was paying exclusive broadcast rights finding themselves equally powerless to stop it, or to find out how it was done?
Anyway, weren’t
Last edited by ctoocheck; 06-23-2009 at 11:19 PM..
...Anyway, weren’t the city’s troubles, as well as its virtues and surprises, part of the reason that its favorite folk song had the refrain:
"Lord God, Pittsbughl"
Whether other people approve of Pittsburgh or not, people in Pittsburgh like it the way it is-and they are convinced it is that way because that's the way they like it! Who cares if Architect Wright disapproves of the great Point redevelopment program that is making the world stand open-mouthed? Let him call the new buildings "ant hills," if he will, and cry, "centralization at its last gasp." Pittsburghers can still agree he was right in 1935 when he said: "If I were remaking this city, the first thing I'd do would be to get rid of that damned smoke." And they are grateful that after his outburst at centralization he reflected on his harsh remarks: "I'm sorry I made them. It's a dynamic town. I'm glad to see Pittsburgh enter the awakening."
Pittsburghers do resent the movies' attempt to hold up their city as a hot-bed of Communism. They know Communism hasn't a ghost of a chance in Pittsburgh. William Z. Foster, Alexander Berkmann, and many another old-timer in the Communist movement tried to crack the town long ago, and failed. It will be a long time before Allegheny County goes anything but either Democratic or Republican in an election-unless there should be a middle-of-the-road third party.
Its people are far too well satisfied with their jobs and their living for many of them to want any radical change.
They recognize that there are people who look on Pittsburgh as a town where Capital exploits Labor, and who would urge them to revolt against their bread and butter. They give a respectful, even appreciative hearing, to such poems as James Oppenheim's "Pittsburgh," written forty years ago:
“Over his face his gray hair drifting hides
his Labor-glory in smoke.
Strange through his breath the soot is sifting,
his feet are buried in coal and coke.
By night hands twisted and lurid in fires,
by day hands blackened with grime and oil,
He toils at the foundries and never tires,
and ever and ever his lot is toil.”
Pittsburghers remember that Oppenheim didn't live in Pittsburgh, but contemplated their city from such vantage points as St. Paul and New York. Radicals may sneer at Pittsburgh as bourgeois, but Pittsburghers find bourgeois living both comfortable and satisfying. Few of them would go far out of their way, either to get rich or to become apostles of an idea. They would rather get a new television set with a larger screen, or win an award for winding more armature coils in less time than anyone ever could before them.
Pittsburghers are so much impressed with their ability to perform that they even forget to be impressed by it!
They appreciate, but don't really approve such remarks as that of Edward A. Weeks, editor of the Atlantic Monlhly, on a visit a few years ago. "I'm amazed at the audacity and speed of Pittsburgh's progress," he said. He needn't have been amazed. Things always happen fast in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburghers know that. They have an immense and inclusive confidence in-as well as affection for-the city about which they proudly sing to an old-time barbershop harmony:
“I live in that city, that is built
among the hills,
Where smoke is always pouring
from those big rolling-mills;
And steamboats on the river,
go paddling to and fro:
Where the old Allegheny
and Monongahela flow.”
Some people may not understand it. But Pittsburgh is like that. And the things that make it like that began a long time ago."
Generally, I like these "see ourselves as others see us" types of writings. However, I do have some issues with some of this piece.
I'm probably one of the few posters on this forum who was both alive in 1958 and in Pittsburgh. I was old enough to make some observations of my own, 8-9 years old.
"Your Pittsburgher is as likely to have been born in Ohio, West Virginia, Atlanta or Sorrento, as in Allegheny county. If he is a college man he may have gone to Tufts, Michigan or Ohio State, instead of Pitt or Carnegie Tech."
Even now, about 83% of Pittsburghers were born in Pennsylvania, all the more surprising b/c of its close borders with both Ohio and West Virginia. Granted, WW II did stir things up a bit. My father met my mother, from Wisconsin, because of WWII. There were a few other women in our church from the midwest, but that perhaps has as much to do with the fact that the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is a midwestern based relgion. I knew a few "war brides" as well, two from Germany in our church one from Belgium. However, the vast, vast majority of the adults in my life were born in Pennsylvania, with a few from Ohio and West Virginia.
As for the college "men" (sic), I checked my high school yearbook for the colleges the faculty attended. Now I know there are some (you know who you are) waiting with bated breath at their keyboards to tell me that a high school faculty is not representative of most college graduates. However, I posit that in 1958, teachers represented a large percentage of college graduates. My father was an engineer at USSteel, and although he had a master's degree, many of the engineers he worked with had not even attended college, and one at least had not even graduated from high school.
I have a 1965 yearbook from Beaver Falls High School. You can rest assured, many of those teachers were working there in 1958. In fact, some of them were working there when my father went there, in 1927-31. Of the 66 faculty members whose colleges are listed, 30 went to Geneva College in Beaver Falls. 5 went to Slippery Rock, 5 to what is now IUP, 4 to Clarion, 3 to Pitt (which was a private school at the time), 3 to Penn State, 2 each to Grove City, California of PA, and Carnegie Mellon (was Carnegie Instititue of Technology at the time). 1 each went to Edinboro and Duqusne. In other words, 87% of the teachers at BFHS went to colleges in western Pennsylvania. 4 went to colleges in eastern Pennsylvania (Gettysburg, Wilson and E. Stroudsburg), 2 to colleges in Ohio (Wooster and Youngstown State) and a big two to states outside Pennsylvania/Ohio (Iowa State and the U. of Maryland).
Now that only a dwindling minority of the old are unable to speak English, "Hunky" and "Wop" are less heard in Pittsburgh than in nearly any other city.
I don't know about that. As a kid, I heard every epithet possible about eastern and southern Europeans, usually preceded by the word "dumb". As recently as the early 1980s, a neighbor of my parents called my husband a "Dumb Swede", thinking it was funny. DH didn't mind, but I was embarrassed.
When Dr. George Washington Lang, later head of the Allegheny County Medical Society, was a young intern in Philadelphia, he stopped aghast as his scalpel laid bare a great black mass in the chest cavity of a vagrant on whom he was performing an autopsy.
"What in the world is that?" he gasped, and the hospital veteran head surgeon had a good laugh.
“That," he explained,” is something you should learn to know, being from Pittsburgh. It is what we call “Pittsburgh lung,” a blackened lung condition which results from breathing smoke. Your own probably looks much the same as this."
The vagrant, when identified, turned out to have been a Pittsburgh man. And the young doctor was relieved to learn that Pittsburgh lung was apparently a harmless condition, and that some respiratory troubles were less frequently found at the Iron City than in regions of purer air.
I think someone was pulling the authors's leg with this one. Just ten years after this was written, I was a student at the Pitt School of Nursing. I never heard of "Pittsburgh lung". I even googled it and couldn't find anything. Nothing that turns one's lungs black is "benign", and I don't know what respiratory problems were less frequent in Pittsburgh than in regions of better air. Pittsburgh, like every large industrial city, had a high tuberculosis rate.
Pittsburghers do resent the movies' attempt to hold up their city as a hot-bed of Communism.
Now that is something I never heard of. Oh, I heard of communism all right. Us kids talked about communism because our parents talked about it all the time. We had air raid drills in school, we were convinced that Beaver Falls would be bombed b/c of all its factories, including one that made the plates that US money was printed on. My mom, an RN and a Red Cross member, went to disaster preparedness meetings and decided we needed a bomb shelter. While no one knew any communists (that I am aware of), many people thought their neighbors and co-workers were running off to "cell" meetings. The idea of all those steel workers in Beaver County actually doing that is laughable to me, now. I remember when a kid on my jr. high school bus called our bus driver a communist. She pulled the bus over to the side of the road, stopped it, got up, faced us and said, "I am not a communist, get that straight!"
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Whole text again... public domain
part two....
