The Paris of Appalachia

Our tour guide, George, counts them off on his fingers. "You got the City of Bridges. More bridges than any city on earth, including Venice. The City of Tunnels. The City of Champions. The 'Burgh. The Steel City. The Dirty 'Burgh. Hell With the Lid Off. Sixburgh, because of the Six Super Bowl Championships."

He pauses for effect. "Also it's the City of Nicknames."

Woa, I think. Where have I just landed?

One Plus One is Now Three

It's Pittsburgh P-period-A-period, muh friend.

One of the women on our tour is from Baltimore. She told her husband she was going to Pittsburgh for the weekend. He asked her why on Earth would she want to do that. (It's not unreasonable. My mother had the same question).

"Because it's close and I've never seen it."

Amy and I did a quick survey and found 75% of our tour group came to Pittsburgh for just that reason. (There were four of us on the tour, two of whom were Amy and myself, but nonetheless.)

Still, I can imagine the consternation of those questioning our sanity. They imagine we are vacationing here:

This is Pittsburgh in the 1940's. When you must keep your neon signs lit in the daytime, you've got problems.

My father recounts visiting Pittsburgh for a training in the late 1970's. He established a ritual where he would start from his hotel, walk down the street until he hit a black building, and turn left to get to the training facility. One morning he follows this ritual and starts walking. He walks and walks and walks until he hits the river. "Something isn't right," he says. He turns around and retraces his steps, only to find a building being hosed down with millions of gallons of water ... the formerly black building is now white.

Now that is a Pittsburgh you might not want to vacation at. 2020's Pittsburgh is a different animal. In the span of 40 years, you go from the above hot mess of fire and brimstone ... to the cleanest city in Pennsylvania. But "clean" tells you nothing but the absence of dirty stuff. What exactly is it now?

The divine weirdness of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania manifests itself in the name of three bridges that span the Allegheny River. The bridges are all yellow, all have exactly the same structure, and are each within 2 or 3 blocks of each other. They are, from west to east:

• The Roberto Clemente Bridge
• The Andy Warhol Bridge
• The Rachel Carson Bridge

You got a baseball player, a counter-cultural multimedia artist and an environmentalist. An awkward cocktail party, that.

Or not. Chips, dips and mini hot dogs have bonded more motley crews than this. You are a city that needs to reinvent itself because your major industry has left, and you have one night to do it. What is the theme of your cocktail party?

Pittsburgh is a city that throws up hands and says, "I dunno. It's complicated." Because it is.

So Now What?

While we're talking complicated, let's talk about the rivers. Pittsburgh is the City of Three Rivers, (and why not? It's the City of Everything Else). Anyway, you got Three Rivers Stadium and all that. The Three Rivers are the Allegheny, the Monongahelia (That's mon-ON-go-hee-lah), which meet to form the Ohio.

But that's not how rivers work. When the Missouri joins into the Mississippi, it's not called something else. It's called the Mississippi. The rule is the largest of the two adjoining rivers gets the name, right? In Pittsburgh, the Allegheny is the largest, so it's really just two rivers.

This is yet another Pittsburgh curve ball to keep things interesting. My sense is that the Pittsburgh ethos is adamantly, defiantly non-conformist. You expect Pittsburgh to be something and it is something else.

Our tour guide, George, explains that Pittsburgh character is based on the 6 c's: creativity, camraderie, competition ... and ... uh, something, something, something.

I mean, I believe George. But once people start getting more than 3 traits, then they're best handled by novelists, not bloggers.

He's explaining how Pittsburgh has survived the gutting of its most important industry, the steel mills. That story is necessarily complicated. There are many, many rust belt cities that didn't make it, and I have to think those cities tried for easy answers to urban problems.

Pittsburgh was a mighty city, population-wise. At its peak in the 1940's, the city proper was around 700,000 people. Now it is around 300,000, and after 50 years of declines, the population is starting to rebound.

Our neighbors used to live in Pittsburgh, and they explained the allure. You are in a city built for 700,000 people, but only 300,000 now live there, you feel a little more "spread out", a little more extravagant. There are problems with that - the infrastructure is aging, and you must take care of it with a lower tax base.

The people that did actually stay, as George was alluding to, are of hale and hardy stock. The steel industry has been replaced by "eds, meds and software", namely the colleges like Carnegie Mellon and Pitt, the pharmaceutical research, and peppy tech startups like DuoLingo and Uber.

Throw Potatoes at the Problem

300,000 people must have sustenance. And since this is my blog, obviously I'm going to run this subject into the ground. What food powers the ol' Pittsburgh ticker? In a word, carbs.

The Pittsburgh Sandwich - By which I mean the Primanti Brothers sandwich. It is two thick slices of Italian bread, a vinegar-based slaw, and provolone cheese. There is meat in there, but it is undefined. Amy and I put Bratwurst in ours (the sandwiches are very large, so we did splitsies), but you could do corned beef, pastrami, chicken, steak, ham, bologna, fish or a big block of tofu (just kidding) .

The defining thing is French Fries. Shove some french fries in between the meat and the cheese, and it transforms the sandwich into something divinely inspired.

"But Craig," you say, "isn't potatoes and thich Italian bread just a big starch bomb?" To which I reply, "Yes, you're point being ... what?"

OK, I get it. I don't want to be the obnoxious diner in the movie Big Night that orders risotto with a side of spaghetti. There is such a thing as too many carbs at once. But the Primanti sandwich tip toes right up to the line of propriety and somehow does not cross it. That is the beauty of the Primanti Brothers Sandwich.

Legend has it that the sandwich was invented for truck drivers who must eat their lunch one handed, and therefore couldn't sacrifice their other hand into an envelope of fries. That is a common theme in Pittsburgh. Even though the steel industry is gone, it leaves its shadow in very strange places.

The Pittsburgh Salad - Take a salad. Throw french fries on it. Top with dressing. End of story.

This horrified me. One of the best things about French Fries is the crunchiness. That's why I don't seek out poutine, or even the more basic cheese-fries. It just sounds like a bad idea.

Still, in the Primanti brothers sandwich, the coleslaw dressing leaks just ever so slightly into the french fries, keeping them just crunchy enough. Good chips in the UK are like that too, with just enough malt vinegar to break through the greasy barrier. I was ready to give the Pittsburgh salad a try, which we did at Union Grill up by the University of Pittsburgh.

It was damn fine. In fact, so fine that even with cold lettuce below and cold dressing above, I vacuumed up the salad before the fries could even get cold and soggy.

The Pittsburgh salad reminds me of my days at the University of Nebraska, which my Friday lunch ritual was salad and french fries at the Burger King of the student union food court. This was back in the Reagan 80's when universities were quick to sell out to any franchise that would listen, so they could get back to their core mission: collecting tuition.

And the great thing is you can get a Pittsburgh Salad anywhere. It may not be called that, but every restaurant has salad, and every restaurant has fries, right? Dump your french fries on top and voila! Hell, you can even do it at Wendy's!

Perogies - By now, you are sensing a pattern. You can solve every problem by throwing potatoes at it.

My first wife, Kathy, was not a lover of cooking. She wasn't particularly a lover of food either, and once said, "If I could just take a pill for lunch like the Jetsons, I would do it." When I met her, Kathy's typical dinner was spaghetti and corn.

You cannot get anymore starch than pasta and corn ... unless it's pasta and potatoes. In our first years of cohabitation, Mrs. T's Perogies were a staple in our diet. They were quick and easy on days we'd come home from our evening lap swimming ritual. Boil some water, toss in some perogies, melt a little butter (if you're ambitious), and in 10 minutes you have dinner. Top it off with Ben and Jerry's Rainforest Crunch to offset the effects of lap swimming (and by that I mean "healthiness").

There are not as many Pittsburgh pierogi institutions as before. We satisfied our perogie fix with Sweet Potato Perogies at a fantastic restaurant named Eyv in Deutschtown on the North Shore. Eyv's is totally vegetarian, yet they try to pick up the neighborhod vibe with their perogies and haluski.

Haluski, by the way, is another Pittsburgh staple - cabbage and noodles and onions, cooked until they are stringy. They are like your Christmas Tree lights when you pull them out of the box every year. No matter how neatly you put them in there ...

If You Are So Inclined

If you were a steelworker in Pittsburgh, you lived over the Mount Washington hill. Early in the morning, you'd walk over to one of the 40 inclines going down into the Monongahela River shore, then catch a bus or the subway over to the mill. Then you'd trudge back home at night. You'd do this 6 days a week ... you'd like to get away with 5, but Carnegie won't let you.

Times have changed. There are only 2 inclines left. The Duquesne Incline mostly runs on its all its original parts. Its riders are mostly tourists now. And you can actually see the city of Pittsburgh. from the top of Mount Washington ... not just a smoke fog.

I have more to say on Pittsburgh.... Stay tuned.