Читать книгу An Alternative History of Pittsburgh - Э.Д. - Страница 8

A friend of mine and I were once at the Squirrel Cage—what locals call that dark, neon cavern on Forbes Avenue with its aura of spilled beer and seventies rock on the jukebox—and we’d decided that “Pittsburgh” was every bit as iconic an American signifier as “Manhattan” or “Hollywood.” Those terms mean certain things to people. They have particular connotations, and for good and bad so does Pittsburgh.

The city is indelibly connected to industry, and to all of the exploitative and glorious, filthy and inspiring aspects of that which propelled the American century. Historically it’s been a blue-collar town, permeated with a no-bullshit toughness. Pittsburghers like that. Sometimes it’s unfairly positioned as a punchline. Pittsburghers like that less. But if the name has meant anything, it’s that Pittsburgh is a place where things were once made. There’s something important in that.

When I was young, growing up in the city’s east end, mills still lined the Monongahela, though Big Steel was then in the process of collapse. My kindergarten was downtown, in the same building where my father worked, and every morning I’d see the mills, not knowing what they were but that they were something important. Now, with some bemusement, having lived over the last decade in New York City, Boston, and now Washington, DC, I watch from afar as Pittsburgh is recast as the next hipster locale, a hidden arts and food city, an unpretentious metropolis valorized on the pages of the New York Times Style section.

I say bemusement because unpretentious as Pittsburgh is (and it is that), I hope that we don’t let all of the attention go to our heads. Pittsburgh is stranger and more beautiful than any other place that I’ve lived, so that it never feels quite normal anywhere other than within the Three Rivers. I worry that our Sunday Times best might defang us a bit.

Which is why I think of this as an alternative history of Pittsburgh. Such a title necessarily begs the question of “Alternative to what?” and I hope that a few words might clarify that intent a bit. In some ways, there will be a conventionality to this narrative: who you expect to be here, will be here. Infernal and blessed Andrew Carnegie, the murderous villain Henry Clay Frick, the alienated oddball Andy Warhol, and Rachel Carson with her bright sensitivities. There will be digressions about steel and coal, considerations of the movements of the French and British in the decades before the Revolution. Nothing is particularly “alternative” regarding such content. In terms of the politics of the piece, any clear reading will show that the book is unabashedly leftish, with an affection for workers, rioters, and strikers, but that in and of itself isn’t enough to qualify for the adjective that I’m using. Nor should “alternative” be read as some sort of faux punkish conceit, marketing aimed at craft brew enthusiasts and art house cinema fans. Mayor Bill Peduto can encourage hipsters to move to Lawrenceville on his own time.

Rather, I want you to think of “alternative” as being an issue of structure, for though all of the usual suspects are mentioned in these pages, I’ve not made a claim to completism. Pittsburgh is large and multitudinous, multifaceted, multifractured; it is complex, contradictory, and confusing, so I’ve tried to craft my own idiosyncratic Wunderkammer of representative moments. These pieces of a larger historical landscape are laid out chronologically in their beginnings (albeit not often in their conclusions), which I hope provides an impressionistic sense of what Pittsburgh might mean. Think of it as being less of a history than an assemblage of Rorschach inkblots; not a study or an analysis, but a diary, a dream journal, a wooden shelf packed tight with interesting rocks and shells.

To that end, I’ve borrowed the favored narrative structure of the great Uruguayan historian and essayist Eduardo Galeano, who in Open Veins of Latin America and Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (among dozens of others) wrote in a fragmentary, digressive, rhizomatic way, telling histories through a series of related and organized snapshots rather than as some grand, teleological thrust of human progress. As with Galeano, who was Uruguayan through and through, and whose books could have been written by nobody but a Latin American, I believe that nobody but a Pittsburgher could have written the book that you’re holding. And also as with Galeano, that means a grappling with not just the light but the dark, not just the sweet but the bitter. This is a book with triumphant things in it, but it is not a book of triumphalism. Some readers looking for Steelers lore (which is in here) or a listing of all the city’s beloved native daughters and sons (who still get their cameos) might be disappointed.

What follows are forty short fragments, organized roughly from the earliest to the latest (even while the final content of those sections can range further afield), which attempt to catalog as much as they can the major thematic concerns of Pittsburgh. A single fragment is a monad, reflecting both past and future in a (hopefully) surprising manner, with the ordering of events moving upward and downward like a vein of hidden coal studding the earth’s crust in unexpected and unexplored ways. If there is any logic to history, that compendium of one thing after the other, it shouldn’t be the teleology of progress, but that every damn thing is connected to every other damn thing. A moldering leaf in a prehistoric marsh is nineteenth-century coal; the river confluence espied by a French explorer becomes the major waterway of American expansion; the site where a steel mill or slag heap once sat is where the newest luxury condominium sits. The set pieces change, but the set stays the same.

Narrative continuity is supplied by the book being divided into thirds, with each section loosely connected to a line from the Jack Gilbert poem which acts as the epigraph of the book. Gilbert was an East Liberty man through and through, and indelibly marked by the city (as we all are, since we can’t really leave) so that his “Searching for Pittsburgh” is its own impressionistic history in miniature. The first section, “Ox and Sovereign Spirit,” looks at Pittsburgh primeval, from the ancient Pennsylvanian Period of 300 million years ago, when the terrain and resources of the region were established, until the turn of the nineteenth century as the city positioned itself as the first metropolis of the frontier. Throughout this section, it’s my intent to give a sense of how much place—rocks and rivers, mountains and valleys—defines the entire tenor of Pittsburgh. The second section, “City of Brick and Tired Wood,” tells the story of Pittsburgh’s industry throughout the nineteenth century, the ways in which both capital and labor transformed the exploding city. What’s conveyed are the ways in which demographics and growth altered Pittsburgh. The final section follows the story into the twentieth century, from Pittsburgh’s greatest economic and cultural success through its decline. Appropriately enough, it is titled “A Consequence of America,” for if the city’s narrative is anything, it’s that of the nation in miniature.

Returning to that bar conversation with my friend, part of what Pittsburgh indelibly connotes is an overreaching Americanism, the city’s history from frontier settlement (established on Native ground and through violent means), through the Industrial Revolution, the convulsions of labor and capital, and the paradigm shifts of the twentieth century being almost prototypically American. That’s been narratively useful, because sometimes circumstance compels me to extend consideration beyond the confines of the actual city proper. Graduate of the Pittsburgh public schools that I am (all twelve years), in personal interactions, I’m often loathe to acknowledge places that aren’t actually in the city as being such. When writing a history, however, I must be more ecumenical, since Pittsburgh’s story can’t be told without also considering Homestead and Johnstown, or for that matter (if we’re to fully grapple with the “consequence of America”), Philadelphia and Washington as well.

If I were a bit more hubristic, then I might lean into that claim concerning the consequence of America, because Pittsburgh is arguably the kiln that made America—in all of its canker and gold, all of its filth and glory. If the city is differentiated from other places, it’s that the microscopic view of focusing on Pittsburgh still lends itself to a history of the nation of which it is a part. Manhattan is a metonymy for culture and power, Hollywood with entertainment, Washington with government. Pittsburgh is a metonymy for America. If there is one overreaching argument to An Alternative History of Pittsburgh, it’s nothing more profound than this is a consequential place, this is an important place, this is a place that matters.