Tuesday, April 01, 2003 6:14:31 PM Joe Coluccio

A Tribute to Picksburgh

Late Friday afternoon last I had barely dropped my duds when I was forced to make a trip city side. Out at the car I turned the ignition key, roiled the motor up.

The entire week prior maps and people had been guiding me around the unknown environs of York PA. Go South on I 83 and turn East on Route 30 and you will find, for example, the Harley Davidson plant. A world of Soft Tails and Fat Boys. How remarkable, head due south! and then turn due east! These directions are the things dreams are made of when you are from Pittsburgh.

Legend has it that the roads here follow old wild deer and perhaps domestic oxen paths. Around the hills. Into the dark hollars. Along the edge of the creeks. Then came an industrial overlay of tarmacadam on the animal stamped frontier corduroy and the Roebling's steel rope that created bridges over the gaping valleys. Streets with no good reason now could end abruptly at a cliff edge and start again one half mile to the south only to hiss and cross their own existence several times like some mad Moebius Strip. No cartographer from the nether regions could create a more tormented landscape. Vespucci rolled over in his grave

My God, the frantic thought came into my brain, what if it was my charge to tell someone new to the city how to get to say East Liberty from say Penn Hills?

No verbal instruction could be devised. You'd have to lead them in a caravan down Lime Hollow up Verona Road to Lincoln and Nadine down Allegheny River Boulevard to Washington Blvd past the old state police barracks, where I in a moment of extreme shame and perilously low self image bumped the curb and was denied my driver's license on my sixteenth birthday, up over Negley Run to the Circle that forever forbids you access to what was, I swear I remember it, at one time an area as vital as and as beautiful as any City Reverie. I, a long time native, (raised on Carver Street in my younger day) can find entry to the new and devastated East Liberty (Sliberty to the cognoscenti), but this poor posited new comer to the region would be forced to circle forever looking hopelessly for some means of entrance. 'Course if they were lucky enough to divine the magic entry and slip into the realm of Sliberty, there wouldn't be much to greet them. Glorious glimpses of the past in pasted shut buildings. Ah! Three Cheers for Urban Renewal!

Pittsburgh (more generally Western Pennsylvania) is truly renowned for "you can't get there from here". We revel in it. Highway planners take it into serious consideration. (Go ahead try to get to the east end of the city from I 279 South, our newest highway.)

We have, all of us tied, clumped and dried to this region, maps in our minds that are as complicated as a fishing line tangle. My shoe laces, cut in several places where they have been grazed by the shoe eyelets and bound again with a sturdy half hitch knot, tied in a pretty bow, outline a path less complicated than the way I drive to work every morning.

I believe that this mass of misdirection makes the people here uniquely capable of keeping tabs of overwhelmingly complex and chaotic situations. I predict that many citizens of the city of Pittsburgh will become preeminent thinkers in this new millennium characterized by the innovative laws of chaos. Hell, if the thrumming wings of a butterfly in Tokyo can change the global patterns that make weather seem nigh impossible to predict to those who live in areas where east crosses north crosses west crosses south with tedious predictability, it is a snap for the denizens of this city, where SSWNE is a legitimate direction, to provide a deft yet incomprehensible analysis of the insect incited typhoon.

That being said, tomorrow, I travel to Turtle Creek by way of Wilmerding.