Third Take on the Town at Three Rivers

My friend G is a big Frank Lloyd Wright fan, as is my wife. I liked the house, too, especially for all its unique features, the clever corner windows, cube upon cube, which open out to let in the breeze on hot days. Given the cookie cutter Levittown reality of post-war ranch house suburban America, it would be great if more of us could enjoy the unique features Wright built into this house in adapting it to the terrain. Yet I’m not quite as gung-ho on Wright as G and Mrs. Ombud are.

 

When Wright was first invited to Pittsburgh to design something for the City, he looked at all the old, vertical Victorian era architecture and purportedly said they should tear it all down and start over.

 

Prairie school is fine, with all its horizontal extensions, but I like the vertical forms of cities such as Pittsburgh. I think they’re beautiful, too, and I’m not sure if those low ceilings of Fallingwater wouldn’t start feeling claustrophobic, for me, after a while.

 

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One night we went out for dinner with G and his daughter, M, who is now studying at Pitt. In talking to them I asked about local phrases or accents – I remember in college learning that Pittsburgh is one of the places where the “intrusive r” occurs – people insert an r into words such as wash, pronouncing them warsh.

 

M laughed and mentioned hearing slang unique to the area, such as the phrase “yinz”, synonymous with the southern “y’all.” My friend G winced, and I sensed it wasn’t a term ,uch used out in their town, so when M went to college it was the first time she met students who used the term unselfconsciously.

 

The very next day we walked up and down a part of Pittsburgh called “The Strip,” a wonderful area of ethnic shops and restaurants, many with sidewalk table set up selling their foods, gifts, and wares.

 

It was fun, tasty, and the closest thing to a touristy area we found in Pittsburgh. One of the t-shirts we saw had numerous idiomatic local phrases, including “warsh,” and “The Mon” and “Yinz are in Stiller Country, now” (for Steeler country, the football team).

 

It summed up some of the insular feeling of Pittsburgh for me, a mix of Brigadoon and rugged blue-collar America.

 

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G remembers what Pittsburgh was like when the steel mills were still booming, the orange glow along the horizon after dark, the loudness of the mills, the strange noise resounding over neighborhoods of molten metals expanding and contracting.

 

It was, apparently, incredibly dirty during the boom times. At the Frick house, called Clayton, the docent told us that they kept three sets of curtains, swapping them out every other day. One set of curtains hanging, collecting soot, another set laundered and ready to be hung, and a third in the wash – the air was that filthy. For hungry immigrants from the old world, pollution was the price of having full bellies and the chance to get ahead, to give your children better opportunity.

 

A lot of people had lung disease. Of course cigarettes were common after world war two (and manly), so steelworkers would spend their lives providing for families, getting kids through school, then often suffer ill health in their 50s.

 

When G graduated from high school he went on to the University of Pittsburgh, a starving student just eeking by, while his friends got jobs as “steel-hunks” (mill laborers) and put down payments on the latest Detroit hot rods, cruising around the river valleys, roaring along in the American dream.

 

And then the mills closed – and there is still a hard-bitten bitterness, a sense of having been sold out by the politicians, in the blue collar ethos of western PA. Pittsburgh has bounced back, to some degree, building a new metropolitan community on banking, high-tech, health care, and higher education.  But that working class ethos is still very much a part of the culture.

 

With the air clean now it is a beautiful region, and worth a visit if you have occasion.  Seeing my friend again provided the initial reason for us, plus I wanted to see a ballgame at PNC Field.

 

We stayed at a priory converted to a hotel, called  the Priory Inn. It’s not far from the baseball stadium, in the north side, and has a nice view of downtown Pittsburgh across the Allegheny. (It also helps to not mind the sound of coal trains rumbling along the nearby tracks, too.)

 

As Mrs. Ombud napped that Saturday afternoon, I flipped through the hotel’s guide to nearby restaurants and attractions – we were just blocks away from The Penn Brewery! My friend G had taken me there years ago, so when the Missus roused herself we drove over and found out they were doing a preliminary Oktberfest before their main celebration the next weekend.

 

Bonus!

 

I ate so much at the Penn Brewery’s Oktoberfest I had no room left for food at the ballpark that evening. Not that I’m complaining – it was great fun.

 

And that Saturday evening we saw a Pirates/Cardinals game. PNC Field is gorgeous – although our tickets were downstairs, we went to the upper deck just to enjoy the view across the Allegheny river facing downtown Pittsburgh as the sun set and the lights came on. Mrs. Ombud enjoyed the Pirates video on the high tech digital scoreboard, and I enjoyed calling out “Yo, Yuengling!” to a passing beer vendor and having a cold, frothy malted beverage delivered right to my in my seat. No getting up and queuing in the concourse for an inning, as we have to do in California. (None of the ballparks in California permit beer vendors in stands.)

 

Pittsburgh is definitely much more a traditional culture, that much closer to the old world in both proximity and personality.  As I mentioned last post, there is a more insular feeling to the area than we find here in the Bay Area of California. Most of the people I know out here have personal and familial connections to other areas of the country, and there isn’t the same jargon here, used here and nowhere else, as there seems to be in Pittsburgh. 

 

We didn’t get to everything we intended to do – including taking the incline trains up Mt. Washington (across the Monongahela river from downtown Pittsburgh). And if I were to go back I’d like to see the Fort Pitt Museum.

 

I’m not sure when we’ll get there again, but there’s always that daydream of retirement and a slow, easy, amble around the countryside, not in a hurry, taking what each day brings and enjoying what different regions have to offer at a leisurely pace.

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Addendum, after drafting these posts:  Our local paper here in Alameda ran a column this weekend by another Bay Area resident who recently visited Pittsburgh:  Ginny Prior, who bills herself as The Happy Wanderer.

Her write up is pretty good. And who knew vacationing in Pittsburgh was catching?

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