Is Braddock really that bad of an area? (Pittsburgh, Swissvale: homes, places to live)

[PreservationPioneer]

Originally Posted by jay5835

Are you notoriously frugal among your friends and family? I'm not picking on you. I find this fascinating.

Yes. Well, I find that by being frugal and saving money, I have so much money in savings that I can have a better lifestyle than anyone else my age. I always have money and I'm never broke, unlike everyone else I know. And when I want to be extravagant, I have the money from being frugal elsewhere to do it!

[jay5835]

Originally Posted by alleghenyangel

Yes. Well, I find that by being frugal and saving money, I have so much money in savings that I can have a better lifestyle than anyone else my age. I always have money and I'm never broke, unlike everyone else I know. And when I want to be extravagant, I have the money from being frugal elsewhere to do it!

I ask because I have a friend who is The Cheapest Person I've Ever Known (and I'm not trash-talking him; he's proud of it, and he'd tell you himself) and even he wouldn't live in Braddock. Actually, he stays away from McKees Rocks, too. We had a $25 coupon for some Italian restaurant (and my friend lives on coupons), but he wouldn't go there. He didn't like the neighborhood.

When you and RR get going talking about these neighborhoods, I have to say I get a little apprehensive. I'd hate to read about you getting killed in the P-G some morning.

[happywithbraddock]

Soot, schmoot! Everyone in western PA has soot aplenty. Being so close to the mill, Braddock gets plenty of soot. We also get frequent slag fragments dropped from the slag trucks smoking in the middle of Braddock Avenue. But the kicker is that we get the tiny particulate slag and the coke fragments that get blasted out the top, sides and seams of the blast furnaces. Let me be specific. There's this stuff you buy to sandblast with called Black Beauty. Black Beauty is slag. It does an amazing job of sandblasting metal and concrete. Braddock gets a 3 - 20 micron rain of Black Beauty 24/7/365. Soot is powdery and brushes off with minimal damage. Our "grit" sands everything underneath it when you sweep it up. Just look at our cars. Don't even try to "out-grit" us. Right JimmyEv?

[MissShona]

Originally Posted by happywithbraddock

Sorry, Alleghenyangel, you're dead wrong. Nobody does grit without gentrification better than Braddock. We have Pennsylvania's only still operating steel-making mill. We actually have "grit", as in black dust that coats everything. Mckees Rocks is going to have to try a little harder if they want to steal our title of "grittiest borough." I challenge anyone (besides Clairton) to the white sheet challenge. We'll each hang a white sheet in our back yards and see how it looks in six months.

It is my understanding (but maybe I'm wrong), that the Clairton Works no longer make any steel; they just process coke (no NOT the drug, the substance they burn in order to process steel). I am up the hill from the mill, but I don't notice any issues with smut being in the air. I have been in and out of the city....but I was born here 30+ years ago and even as a child I don't remember that. My mother does though (but she is older than me...obviously).

The issue with Braddock and many other run-down mill towns is economics; not crime so much. Yes, there is crime; but there is also a huge population drain. I mean I get home from work at 5 pm and can drive up and down streets in Clairton and see very few people or moving cars. The stuff you see on the news in mostly hoodrats and hoodlums just doing what they always do. Such people don't work or are spawns of people who don't work, so they make huge waves for the tiny populations in these towns.

I feel much less safe in places with high crime AND high population (like New York, Miami, some parts of Cleveland, Washington D.C.) than I do in Clairton...without a doubt!

[PreservationPioneer]

Originally Posted by jay5835

When you and RR get going talking about these neighborhoods, I have to say I get a little apprehensive. I'd hate to read about you getting killed in the P-G some morning.

In McKees Rocks or Braddock? Both neighborhoods are relatively safe, in my opinion. I regularly walk and drive around McKees Rocks and I have never been concerned or alarmed. Braddock may have more problems than I am aware of, though.

I think many people have an irrational fear of neighborhoods. Kind of like my irrational fear of spiders. The only neighborhoods I have walked around that have made me a little scared were Upper Manchester and the Bluff. I have not and will not walk around Homewood or Hill District without a buddy system.

I don't know why McKees Rocks gets such a bad rap. The Stowe part (West Park/ Norwood / Presston) is about as quiet and safe as a low-income neighborhood gets IMO. McKees Rocks proper and the Bottoms don't scare me, either.

I like to be the change I want to see. Part of it is an experiment to see just how bad allegedly "seedy" places like McKees Rocks really are. They are totally liveable, in my opinion. I love it here, and to be honest, after putting much thought into it, I don't want to move from this neighborhood (although I am currently in love with the West End, the Bluff, and East Deutschtown / Spring Garden, so if a cute row-house becomes available in one of those neighborhoods, I will pounce on it).

[jay5835]

Originally Posted by alleghenyangel

I like to be the change I want to see. Part of it is an experiment to see just how bad allegedly "seedy" places like McKees Rocks really are. They are totally liveable, in my opinion. I love it here, and to be honest, after putting much thought into it, I don't want to move from this neighborhood (although I am currently in love with the West End, the Bluff, and East Deutschtown / Spring Garden, so if a cute row-house becomes available in one of those neighborhoods, I will pounce on it).

Maybe it's an age thing. My friend has all these years on you, during which he's had time to be afraid, let's call it, of your neighborhood. I'm the same way about Greenfield, because of how I began thinking about it 30 years ago.

Anyway, I'm happy to read your adventures in urbanizing, and looking at the pics.

BTW, have you ever eaten at Prima Donna? http://maps.google.com/maps/place?oe...21969707141463

[jay5835]

Originally Posted by MissShona

It is my understanding (but maybe I'm wrong), that the Clairton Works no longer make any steel; they just process coke (no NOT the drug, the substance they burn in order to process steel).

I've been told that the kind of sulfur-y, burning smell you can smell on Sunday night/Monday morning in the East End is from the cleaning of the Clairton coke oven(s).

[happywithbraddock]

Let's be brutally honest about Braddock and other "seedy" areas. If you don't know your neighbors by name and routinely chat with them about their lives and the neighborhood, you don't have a chance in a place like Braddock. You HAVE to care about your neighbors and they HAVE to care about you. You HAVE to know your neighbors and they HAVE to know you. OR you will get robbed eventually. It's just how it is. Cut-off from all local contact, the hoodrat rumor mill always kicks into overdrive and guys start telling each other how they heard from a friend that knows somebody that saw you had a 100" LCD screen or that you kept ten grand cash under your mattress. My neighbors have told me the stories they've heard gossiped about how I grow pot in the greenhouse on my roof. And my neighbors, who all know me pretty well, can then tell the gossippers that I haven't even finished the greenhouse and there's nothing growing in there and I don't even smoke out. That makes sure I don't wake up some night with ten guys trying to break down my front door because they heard I have a hundred pot plants growing in that greenhouse on my roof. You get five or six households that care for each other, watch out for each other...there's no neighborhood so bad it can defeat that.

[Herodotus]

Originally Posted by alleghenyangel

Then why are large parts of the North Side (Manchester, East Deutschtown, etc.) in ruins? Also, explain the Bluff.

That's the point. If there aren't enough gentrifiers to fill those areas, how on earth is Braddock going to attract any? Pittsburgh isn't growing. The limited number of urban pioneers are going to go to the areas that already have some momentum. If Pittsburgh were booming, and houses in the Mexican War Streets were going for half a million, gentrifiers with less money would have to look at the places you mentioned. That's why in NYC, once Park Slope and other well built, but rundown parts of Brooklyn picked up, people began to look at lesser places like Williamsburg. When there is a surplus of housing in a region, the least attractive of this is going to be abandoned.

[Aqua Teen Carl]

I watched the film Martin last night and it was shot almost entirely in Braddock in the 70's. Even then Braddock was a depressing area that George Romero chose due to the fact that it was symbolic of "the erosion of the American dream".

All the time that's passed from then and it's still in the same shape it was with very little change. I'd be quite surprised if the area ever changed completely.