The 20 Minute Good Life-Where in Pittsburgh? (Oakmont, Shenandoah: buyers, theater, high school)

[Fiddlehead]

Very cool Ctoocheck!

Loved all the examples. I have never been to Dresden, Rome, or Pittsburgh, but I did a lot of traveling in my younger days as well. A couple years in Uppsala, Sweden, and a few months in Galway, Ireland are my only experiences living abroad. You are right about the timing, frequency of things. My impression was that Europeans enjoyed taking smaller, more frequent shopping trips, with big trips once a week or so. So, the pedestrian friendly downtowns were well-used. And come to think of it, I do recall riding on some cool funicular thing within the city of Oslo, Norway once.

From the images and everyone's comments, Pittsburgh certainly does remind me something of a European city, with all the fine architecture in homes and businesses and compactness of the central city. Not like the spread out cities we have out west.

[ctoocheck]

Pittsburgh certainly does remind me something of a European city, with all the fine architecture in homes and businesses and compactness of the central city.

I really think it is pretty European. It is quite an old city for the US, at least, which probably explains a lot too.

Brendan Gill, writing in The New Yorker, said, "if Pittsburgh were in Europe, people would go miles out of their way to see it."

Now if only we could convince a bunch of people to move back into, and invest in, the city/neighborhoods instead of leaving the region or sprawling into it, as well as providing reliable public transport, (as well as keeping excessive gentrification at bay) things might be really grand.


ps. looking for that exact quote above, I found this article, where it was quoted. It's kinda clever, I would check it out!

[Fiddlehead]

Great article. It really conveys a feel for the soul of the city, and it even gets us back on thread. The author talks about the feasibility of walking from the North Hills through downtown and south to Mt. Washington.

[BrianTH]

Very nice article.

By the way, it just occurred to me that I see the opportunity to cross one of Pittsburgh's significant bridges (mostly over the rivers, but including things like the Bloomfield Bridge) as a significant plus for a given walk. The views are usually interesting and the length is typically in a sweet spot--long enough to be a bit thrilling but not so long as to be tedious.

[Impala26]

I'm still holding out hope that some day in the future, Pittsburgh experiments with new transit options and private-public partnerships to develop better neighborhood-centric mixed used areas. If this were the case, I think fewer people would feel compelled to shop/etc. in suburban areas. The re-development of the Homestead Waterfront is an excellent study in this. The Waterfront does excellent business, but it's still car-centric and for the most part neglects it's parent town of Homestead.

For this city to really to step into 21st Century urbanization, the next logical step is redevelopment of its many depressed and virtually vacant inner neighborhoods. I'm just not sure how the city, private enterprises, etc. could go through areas like Homestead, Beltzhoover, Homewood, Uptown, The Hill and do this. The mid 20th Century ideas for wide-scale redevelopment pretty much hastened the problems they sought to solve. I think the problem is that either political party champions concepts that do nothing to fix these problems. Dems favor failed gov't-run housing while Reps. favor the free market which just feeds suburban areas. Not trying to get political, but to me it just seems like there are few politicians concerning themselves with this pertinent issue.

It is my opinion that many of these issues would need to be addressed in order for Pittsburgh to be considered inherently more "walkable".

[BrianTH]

In the last couple decades various entities have come up with a pretty good set of tools to use in successfully revitalizing economically depressed urban neighborhoods. It is slow, often contentious, work, requiring joint action by multiple stakeholders, but the basic path is pretty well marked at this point. And some formerly depressed Pittsburgh neighborhoods, such as East Liberty, have already gotten pretty far down this path.

[juliegt]

Originally Posted by Fiddlehead

Very cool Ctoocheck!

Loved all the examples. I have never been to Dresden, Rome, or Pittsburgh, but I did a lot of traveling in my younger days as well. A couple years in Uppsala, Sweden, and a few months in Galway, Ireland are my only experiences living abroad. You are right about the timing, frequency of things. My impression was that Europeans enjoyed taking smaller, more frequent shopping trips, with big trips once a week or so. So, the pedestrian friendly downtowns were well-used. And come to think of it, I do recall riding on some cool funicular thing within the city of Oslo, Norway once.

From the images and everyone's comments, Pittsburgh certainly does remind me something of a European city, with all the fine architecture in homes and businesses and compactness of the central city. Not like the spread out cities we have out west.

Life in Sf was similar. You went to the grocery store every day. When you needed to buy more than you could carry, the grocery store delivered. And this was a working class neighborhood - nothing fancy. I didn't realize it until I was much older that I was living a very different life than the typical suburban life of that era. It really was more similar to the European lifestyle simply because it was a small older city and driving was difficult. As a kid I longed to live the suburban life I saw on tv, but now I am grateful that I didn't.

[juliegt]

Originally Posted by Fiddlehead

From the images and everyone's comments, Pittsburgh certainly does remind me something of a European city, with all the fine architecture in homes and businesses and compactness of the central city. Not like the spread out cities we have out west.

Originally Posted by ctoocheck

I really think it is pretty European. It is quite an old city for the US, at least, which probably explains a lot too.

Brendan Gill, writing in The New Yorker, said, "if Pittsburgh were in Europe, people would go miles out of their way to see it."

Now if only we could convince a bunch of people to move back into, and invest in, the city/neighborhoods instead of leaving the region or sprawling into it, as well as providing reliable public transport, (as well as keeping excessive gentrification at bay) things might be really grand.


ps. looking for that exact quote above, I found this article, where it was quoted. It's kinda clever, I would check it out!

Amen!

I read the article you referenced. I'm a huge fan of Willa Cather, but I haven't read Paul's Case. I'm going to to find it and read it. Thanks!

[Fiddlehead]

Originally Posted by Impala26

I'm still holding out hope that some day in the future, Pittsburgh experiments with new transit options and private-public partnerships to develop better neighborhood-centric mixed used areas. If this were the case, I think fewer people would feel compelled to shop/etc. in suburban areas. The re-development of the Homestead Waterfront is an excellent study in this. The Waterfront does excellent business, but it's still car-centric and for the most part neglects it's parent town of Homestead.

For this city to really to step into 21st Century urbanization, the next logical step is redevelopment of its many depressed and virtually vacant inner neighborhoods. I'm just not sure how the city, private enterprises, etc. could go through areas like Homestead, Beltzhoover, Homewood, Uptown, The Hill and do this. The mid 20th Century ideas for wide-scale redevelopment pretty much hastened the problems they sought to solve. I think the problem is that either political party champions concepts that do nothing to fix these problems. Dems favor failed gov't-run housing while Reps. favor the free market which just feeds suburban areas. Not trying to get political, but to me it just seems like there are few politicians concerning themselves with this pertinent issue.

It is my opinion that many of these issues would need to be addressed in order for Pittsburgh to be considered inherently more "walkable".

This seems to be one of the big American failings of the 20th Century. It would be great if Pittsburgh could be one of the cities to reverse urban blight and in the process shrink the environmental footprint of the city.

This whole notion of rekindling an old, beautiful city is such a new way of thinking for me. Out West, I keep thinking of the metastisizing cities of the sun belt like LA, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, expanding far beyond their resources should allow, spewing thousands upon thousands of acres of huge tract homes. What a contrast....

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by Fiddlehead

It would be great if Pittsburgh could be one of the cities to reverse urban blight and in the process shrink the environmental footprint of the city.

I suspect that process is well on its way at this point. Even as of the 2000 Census, while the Metropolitan Area as a whole lost population, the Census-defined Urbanized Area (a density-based region which includes the City and major suburbs) actually gained population, meaning the rural areas and exurbs collectively lost population. And I strongly suspect that in the 2010 Census, regardless of what happens with the net Metro Area population, this same basic pattern will persist. Moreover, I suspect that the City itself has also started gaining population again, or at least will do so in the very near future. So overall, I think we are indeed concentrating the local population, and in the process likely reducing the per capita environmental load in relative terms.

Edit: By the way, urban authorities in Pittsburgh (and many other cities) undoubtedly made a lot of disasterous mistakes in the past. But to be fair to them, a combination of things like federal and state policies that strongly favored car-oriented development, the contraction of employment in various formerly labor-intensive industries, and migration patterns that led to rising racial tensions, all created an outflow of population from central cities that no one really had experienced before or knew what to do about. And although urban authorities are doing better in policy terms these days, they also have the benefit of a lot of those factors no longer operating, or at least being offset by other considerations, such that they are starting to get the wind at their back again.