The Paris of Appalachia Pittsburgh in the Twenty-First Century

[RamboLiberal]

by Brian O' Neill local author & Pittsburgh Post Gazette columnist

I began this book years ago, before Americans became familiar with phrases like “toxic assets” and “foreclosure tsunami.’’ As the cataclysmic financial events of 2008 and 2009 unfolded, as the nation’s wealth vaporized, we in Pittsburgh found ourselves in the unfamiliar position of holding fairly steady.

Don’t get that wrong. We will suffer, too. There have been layoffs. Our pension funds imploded with everyone else’s. But because Pittsburgh didn’t have the population pressure in the past few decades to goose home prices skyward, we didn’t have the real estate crash that so many other American places endured. As the joke here went, “you can’t get the hangover if you were never at the party.’’

So even as we prepare for hard times and read of the troubles in Sun Belt communities and in Michigan and Ohio, there has been a bit of a “been there, done that’’ feeling hereabouts. With the rest of the country, in effect, falling back to meet us, people may be reading this book in a different way than I expected when I began.

We are now in such uncertain times, I can’t know how the nation will look a week from now. But I know Pittsburgh has come through tougher times. There’s comfort in that, and, odd as it sounds, it’s possible the rest of the country can learn something from us. If this book isn’t a hopeful story, I’ve done something wrong.

http://www.parisofappalachia.com/parisofappalachia.com/The_Paris_of_Appalachia.html

Each chapter in this compact and well-designed book, replete with current and past photographs of city scenes as needed (plus a beautiful cover reproduction of a painting of the cityscape by Ron Donoughe) could easily be read as a personal essay.

There's a chapter about LaMonte Pruitt, a high school and college basketball all-star, whose pro basketball career was ended by injury.

He worked thereafter for Union Railroad and, when laid off, supported himself by shining and repairing shoes until he was recalled by the railroad. O'Neill sees in Pruitt's decision to stay in Pittsburgh (regardless) the essence of whatever it is that weds many people like Pruitt to the city. He calls it rebounding in Pruitt's case, but, in many other lives, including his own, it was an acquired fidelity.

Are rebounding and acquired fidelities the central pillars of strength of those who live or return to live here by choice? In chapter after chapter O'Neill confirms and re-confirms this. There's his neighbor Tom Barbush, who thinks the minimum but key requirement for a "neighborly" neighborhood is knowing who your neighbor is. Tom abjures garage door openers, parks his car curbside so that he can possibly meet something more than the walls of a garage when he comes home.



Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09314/1012087-148.stm#ixzz0ZJscPuTr