Pittsburgh: always looking back

I have been going to Pittsburgh just about every year since 1976 (a little less frequently in recent years). The city has transformed itself, I know. The downtown area, the neighborhoods surrounding Carnegie Mellon and Pitt, they’ve become urban-presentable, in ways that Milwaukeeans can only dream about (sorry – not enough home-state pride, I know).

But that first visit, now almost 30 years ago, was the one that defined the city for me and I haven’t been able to shake it. I can’t think where else I am so unmoved to make adjustments over time. Pittsburgh is now as it was introduced to me then, by members of the family I’d married into.

Today as I pack my bag to catch a flight to this steely city, I’m thinking about that first encounter with it.

I always thought it was like no other American city (I am making no value judgment here). It’s so hilly! And so many rivers, hemming it in, tightly, from all sides.

But it is because I learned about it from people who had lived for several generations in the once-tight ethnic communities, that I see it from the expanse of time. Pittsburgh postcards in my head show steel mills, Kennywood (the amusement park where I was told you took *your girl* on a Saturday evening), the Incline for a panoramic view, and the river boat rides for polka dancing. I know where you once went to get Italian cookies and Jewish breads, where the Croatian clubs were and what took place within. Sure, I visited the Warhol Museum and the Pitt International rooms. But the city is really, for me, the city of postwar times, when young adults were making up their future within its blocks.

Maybe each generation, ours included, has a fascination with the lives of people who entered adulthood just before we were born. Maybe that’s why I’m stuck on examining so minutely the years immediately after the war (just prior to my birth), on both sides of the ocean.