Will Culture Vultures
Invade Old 'Steel' Town?
By Richard Carreño
[Writers Clearinghouse News
Service]
Pittsburgh
This is a 'zombie' city. After 5
pm, downtown, or the 'Golden Triangle,' loses its lustre. Worker bees by the
thousands turn off the lights, abandon their high-rise office hives, and head
home. With few downtown residents and even fewer downtown condos or rentals, the
Golden Triangle oozes its life-blood and turns into a urban desert. Until the
next morning, it's a land of out-of-town conventioneers, in-and-out suburban
threatre goers, and, increasingly given the local and national economy,
out-of-work hookers. A variant of Newark maybe. But with tall, very
tall, buildings.
In this ossuary-like setting dwell Pittsburgh's great and good -- and
long dead. You can hardly not encounter, as you roam the the Burgh, as
Pennsylvania's second largest city with about 300,000 living souls is
affectionately monikered, the names of such past historical luminaries as Frick,
Carnegie, Schenley, Heinz, and Mellon.
'Would that by Bunny Mellon?' an associate inquired when we passed
the BNY Mellon Bank Building. Actually, that would be 'Bank of New York Mellon.'
But never mind. The Mellon family's vestigial presence (Mellon Square is
downtown's hub) is still strong here, even if its financial interests --
including those of Bunny Mellon, Paul Mellon's widow -- have been long been
sucked dry by BNY.
The after-5 wasteland has not gone unrecognized. City government,
led by the Mayor Luke
Ravenstahl, a thirty-two year-old locally-touted wunderkind, has underscored the
importance of a downtown resurgence, reaching out to culture vultures far and
wide in a 'be downtown' campaign publicity blitz.
One result of that has been the rebranding of twelve-block
along the Allegheny, long under the radar as the city's theatre district, as a
new, improved, and expanded 'Cultural District.' Sponsored by the Greater
Pittsburgh Arts Council and Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, more than a half-dozen
theatres have been renovated, including Heinz Hall, home of the Pittsburgh
Symphony Orchestra; the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts; and the August
Wilson Center for African American Culture. New restaurants also now dot the
district's main drag, Penn Avenue. (One night during my visit, the district
sponsored an evening arts crawl. It's a beginning).
In fact, even without Babbittry, downtown has a lot going for it.
Bold architecture and dense street-scapes, with about 150 high-rise towers,
frame a tightly-packed urbanized centre-city. Many are post-modern gems. Others,
old, wondrous piles, rusticated stone hulks like the old Penn/Union (now Amtrak)
station (1900-1902), designed by Daniel Burnham, and the Allegheny County
Courthouse (1888) by Henry Hobson Richardson (Boston's answer to Philadelphia's
Frank Furness), speak to the city's monumental, empire-building past. Scores of
mammoth bridges span the Ohio, Monaghela, and Allegheny, connecting the city's
downtown and East Side with its an urban North Shore and residential South
Shore. Two suspension bridges were built by famed 19th century bridge
architect/engineer John Roebling, best known as the builder of the Brooklyn
Bridge.
For the casual observer, though, Pittsburgh is a legacy city, a place
that was. Through its early and mid-20th century heyday, well before
the Burgh sobriquet, it was known as the 'Steel' or 'Iron' city. It was then,
too, a head-office city -- now the former HQ -- of such bed-rock
capitalists as Gulf Oil, Alcoa, Westinghouse, and, yes, U.S. Steel.
Make that also a city of
odd exceptions. It's one of the few municipalities in the United States of its
age (founded, 1758; chartered, 1816), if not the only, sporting the suffix
'burg' that retained the 'h' in its name. Think colonial Williamsburg, Virginia,
as the template.
In fact, nomenclature got serious in the late 19th century when the
federal bureau that signs off on such things declared that 'Pittsburgh' had to
revert to its original colonial spelling as 'Pittsburg.' Between 1890 and 1911,
so it was. Officially at least, until Pittsburghers decided to reclaim what was,
in fact, the city's original original name. When General John Forbes
christened the strategic military outpost, on the the peninsula where the fork
of the Monaghela and Allegheny rivers meet the Ohio, it was said that he
introduced the 'h' and pronounced 'Pittsburgh' in his native Scottish burr as if
it rhymed with 'Edinburgh.' That one, obviously, didn't stick.
Another anomaly is the city's northeastern social and cultural
sensibility. This, though the city is high in the Allegheny Mountain range,
close to Midwestern cultural currents. Still, Pittsburgh is less Midwestern than
Northeastern. More Boston than Akron. Its cultural icons.
Frick, Mellon, and Carnegie (pronounced, incidentally, in the Pittsburgh way, as
Car-NAY-gie, the last syllable rhyming with 'knee') are all 'Eastern' names,
identified with Eastern institutions from libraries, museums, and to
foundations. (Exceptions: Anti-abortion billboards dot the
landscape, orange juice is served at breakfast, and streets are
clean).
My interest in visiting the city recently wasn't connected to turning
over old stones, much less old grave stones of Pittsburgh's illustrious
old-timers. High on my list was getting touch with the roots of another dead
Pittsburgher, albeit, a more recent one and one hardly less in keeping with the
hand-me-down stories of Pittsburgh's founding ancestors, who owned, managed, and
ruled the city through the last century.
Such was Andy Warhol (1928-1987), the godfather of America's Pop Art
movement, who moved, in the 1950s, from the Golden Triangle to New York, to
create what he dubbed mischievously the 'Velvet Underground.' Born Andrew
Warhola, Warhol was Catholic, ethnic, and gay, different by light years from the
rich WASP lifestyles of Pittsburgh's blue-blood heirs. Warhol's memory
and art are now showcased in an eponymous museum, housed in a a seven-level
former factory building on the North Shore..
Warhol's claim on the city is not the only modern one. Native
Pittsburghers also include author Annie Dillard, conservationist Rachel Carson,
historian David McCullough, and arts maven to the Parisian Lost Generation,
Gertrude Stein. Who knew? (Actually, as far as Stein was concerned, I did
know).
In addition, the city is still economically better than most, with
the financial (PNC Bank HQ),legal (Reed, Smith HQ), and educational (Carnegie
Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh) sectors alive, well, and kicking.
(Even Chatham University, a small, bustling women's institution, has its Mellon
connection. The school's administration building was donated by Paul Mellon. It
was his family home).
Also thriving, at least competing, are two, count 'em,
two independent daily newspapers, the
Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review. (The Trib is owned
by Richard M. Scaife, a buy-in member of the Mellon clan).
Opened in 1994, the Andy Warhol Museum is one of 'Carnegie Museums of
Pittsburgh,' a brilliantly executed complex of four institutions, including the
Carnegie Science Center, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the
Carnegie Museum of Art. Normally, I get to visit museums gratis, given my
journalistic creds. This time, I went 'civilian' and still visited three
Carnegie museums -- I skipped the Science Center -- for free. You can too. If
you have a reciprocal museum membership. (Mine was that of the Philadelphia
Museum of Art).
The Art Museum, a strong regional institution in a fresh, new
building, has all the right moves of place that wants to sit at the adult table,
alongside encyclopedic museums like the PMA and the Met and, even, the National
Gallery in Washington, founded by Pittsburgh financier Andrew Mellon and
nurtured by his son, Paul Mellon, the legendary art connoisseur.
The Art Museum's current 'main stage' exhibit, called 'Impressionism
in a New Light,' running until 26 August, intertwines 'the visual dialog'
between Impressionism on canvas and in photographs. More than 150 works are
represented, including a good smattering of pictures by Cassatt, Cezanne,
Renoir, and Van Gogh from the museum's permanent collection, and photographs,
prominently by Stieglitz and Steichen, on loan from the Met. The thematic trope
worked. (The Stieglitz and Steichen pictures were familiar, hot off the heels
from a their Met show, which I saw in New York late last year).
Unfortunately for the Burgh, the Art Museum, the Natural History
Museum, major universities, the main branch of the Carnegie public Library, and
other first-class institutions, are located in the city's Oakland neighbourhood,
a vestige of when in the early 20th century Oakland was the bedroom hood for the
city's power elite. Even today the neighbourhood is remote, thanks a truncated
light-rail subway that was never extended East from downtown.
Had these venues been sited in the Golden Triangle, of course, the
energy that now infuses the East Side residential neighbourhoods with tourist
and student-related frolic could have been transfused to that downtown area.
Much-needed new blood. For all those culture vultures the city is now eager to
cater
to.
|
The only person I've 'known' to have an account at Brown Brothers Harriman was a long-forgotten character in a John O'Hara novel. You get the idea. But the Main Line was derailed long ago, and it's not surprising that this vestige of that past Wasp elite is downsizing.
