Living: Airbnb in Garfield, Pittsburgh, PA
Working: Catapult Lawrenceville Pittsburgh
Laundry: Butler St Coin-Op Laundry, Lawrenceville
This Week in Laundry I hipster in Pittsburgh.
“Pittsburgh’s the new Portland”
I overheard this whilst in Seattle.
I already knew Pittsburgh was cool, from the two times that I’ve been here before.
Though both times, once to play a show with the Vices, and last year for the TEA’s SATE on the Carnegie Mellon campus, I was focused in the small area where I was staying, working, or playing. Depending on your preferred perspective.
I knew already I needed to see more. So it was on the list of places to visit, long before I overheard this statement on the streets of that city cool – Seattle.
And now, here I am, in the city built on steel. The city of bridges. The city of rivers in the hills. Where the Allegheny and the Monongahela converge to form that great river the Ohio. Downstream the water flows under the historic John A. Roebling Suspension bridge – the precursor to the Brooklyn Bridge – straddling Cincinnati Ohio and Covington Kentucky. A cornerstone of a former life once lived only for a week when I stayed in Cincinnati and commuted to Covington.
Up that river and two weeks later I find myself in the laundromat. Just three blocks from the Allegheny – where Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center overlooks the banks.
Pittsburgh shines with a wealth of interest for a whole variety of reasons. From technology to art. From revitalization to historic preservation. From the old east coast Italianate buildings still lingering on the city’s hills, to the new towering establishments of modern architecture. And the cost of living.
Houses sit on Penn Ave on the Garfield/Bloomfield border – echoes of both an era of wealth and dilapidation – and ripe for reclamation.
A notice of condemnation on the one hand – and a building permit on the other. Penn Avenue is blooming.
I’ve been fascinated with the major US metropolitan areas, ever since I started traveling – ever since I started carefully selecting the places to visit. Pittsburgh persists as largest major US metro that actively continues to shrink in size – despite all it has to offer.
And that may have more to do with the outskirts of the city still trickling away. Long gone are the days when this city was a mecca of US Steel. But with help from the investments in infrastructure and education, the city serves as a tech hub. And thanks to the endowments of Heinz and Steel, there remains to this day a substantial strength of focus in the arts.
Google holds a major stronghold here. And Uber recently poached the majority of the Carnegie Mellon robotics researchers focused on autonomous vehicles.
The Punk scene’s quite healthy here as well. Roboto’s in my neighborhood – a legally organized DIY all-ages space. A rarity as one might find – but very valuable to the community of musicians and music lovers alike.
ROBOTO – DIY, all ages, and compliant
Even my coworking space is organized through collaborative membership. It resembles in operation a makerspace, rather than a for-profit business. Payments are organized by suggested tiers, rather than fixed firm pricing.
And there’s no want for the alternate lifestyle here. It’s a parade of high-value restaurants like Tender and The Vandal. And cheap pizza joints. Dive bars, and brew pubs. And a sea of tattoos and piercings. It warmly reminds me of my favorite areas of Chicago – except set amongst the rolling tree-lush hills playing host to the historic housing.
Shishito peppers and grits – creme and pickles – lunch at The Vandal
Pittsburgh shares in the crowning of cool – the brother of Austin, Portland and Seattle. The unbrooklyn – the cheaper-than San Francisco. Those strongholds of affluence, change, and progressiveness scattered across the US where bikes, coffee, tattoos, beer, and artisanal liquor collide with art scenes and book scenes and bar scenes and music scenes.
The landscape towers just beyond the downward slope to the Allegheny River
And tech art scenes – my kind of scene. Assemble, a youth oriented tech art education space, sits just blocks away from Roboto in Garfield. Or Deeplocal – a brand oriented maker-tech-art-experience firm to rival LA’s Two Bit Circus or San Francisco’s Obscura Digital.
And let’s not forget the pinball.
Homes on the hills of Lawrencville
I have yet to explore the local makerspaces – but hope to find time to before I leave.
There’s history in this city – you can feel it as you walk around. And not just in the houses and apartments in the tightly packed neighborhoods flowing through hills in cascades of ornate roofs. But in walking past the Allegheny Cemetery. Or the Allegheny Arsenal – a park that once hosted the most important artillery manufacturing site in the Civil War. And the deadliest civilian incident.
An entrance to the Allegheny Cemetery – 300 acres – 124000 in memorandum – 1 entry in the national register of historic places
There’s newness in the city too – just walking past the Children’s hospital, or the modern architecture on the Carnegie Mellon campus, you can’t help but feel it.
And the Catapult, this week’s coworking space, plays host to all kinds of friendly. I already met a software developer working in a startup living out of a van subsisting on Soylent. It serves as a reminder that my lifestyle could be much more extreme that it already is. The whole space is filled with interesting people doing interesting things – and all very inclusive to have me there.
There are even pockets of the theme park world here in Pittsburgh. Disney Research, an outward branch of Imagineering R&D, holds a small division associated with the Carnegie Mellon university – though as I understand its quite a bit smaller than the Zürich contingent. There’s a program at Carnegie Mellon called the ETC, founded by a gang of Imagineers for the purpose of teaching those skills necessary for the next generations of theme park inventors – though the program has since lost the founding spirit, and more recently moved towards serving the video game industry.
And there’s Schell games, the flourishing studio of Jesse Schell, ex-Imagineer and founding ETC member. Just down the street from the ETC. Schell Games often supplies their services and development efforts to the parks – chances are you’ve played on some of the attractions they worked on if you’ve been to Disney World any time recently – though they could never claim to have had a hand in such endeavors.
And where do I fit in all of this? Nowhere really – I’m just passing through. And happy to be a part of it all, if only briefly. In this dynamic city.
Yet somewhere in the energy of this city there lies a hope. A sense of possibility brought on by productivity. It’s bringing out the best in me. It pulls me forward, and I work through different prototypes or business models. As I piece together what comes next after all this travel.
Is that brought on by the buildings? Or by the people? Or is it my past here – that the moments that have brought me to Pittsburgh in the past were moments fueled by creativity, collaboration, camaraderie, and movement toward the future – buildings of my better self despite the shadows of my failures.
I have no answer, and no need to spend energy on creating one. For my time remains focused elsewhere. It sets its sights on the future. For the future I am bound.
As for this week in laundry – today’s wash is through. Again – quite quickly. I’ll take the extra time to meander through the neighborhood – maybe swing by Roboto, or grab a drink at Mixtapes. And dream of the future. That is, after all, what this travel here for.
Sailors’ and Soldiers’ WWI memorial in Lawrencville
Deby September 3, 2016
Thanks for a window into your world, Andrew.
Andrew September 4, 2016 — Post Author
A friend who’s lived in the city for a couple of years explained to me, after I posted this, that “Pittsburgh’s the new Portland” holds roots in an Onion Joke, many years old, long before it somehow circulated through the local consciousness to pop out as a serious statement issuing from someone’s mouth on the streets of Seattle.
I find it interesting that this years-old joke has somehow become slightly less so. And my intent is merely to document the observation – words spoken in earnest in Seattle – experiences walking the streets of Pittsburgh.
But it seems many in Pittsburgh take offense this comment – maybe because it was first a joke before it was serious. Maybe because they don’t want the comparison to another distinct and different city. Maybe it’s because they don’t want the gentrification.
There’s been many themes on this cross country trip that have risen to the surface. One of them is the march of gentrification, the accompanying displacement, or aggressive policies against further development, and the unique manifestations of these elements in each place I visit.
As a tech tourist, I participate in this gentrification. Most of the places I visit and enjoy for their unique qualities, emerging or emerged art scenes, and the coffee and food scenes that follow are places affected by the ever present march of gentrification, revitalization, and displacement – by any name you wish to call it – by whichever perspective you wish to take.
In many circles gentrification takes a pejorative form, much as the term ‘hipster’ carries the pejorative sting as well.
So it’s interesting that the hipster and gentrification often march hand in hand. And that the hipster is also the most likely person to cast gentrification in pejorative forms.
Am I guilty of participating in gentrification? Absolutely. As an affluent middle class software developer traveling the US, visiting coffee shops, bars, restaurants, airbnbs, and the like setup in former areas of poverty, I can’t avoid this.
Am I going to do anything to change this? Probably not. What are my options? Start staying in hotels in the suburbs? Or high rises downtown? Or in places where I feel unsafe? Where my limited collections of possessions are at higher risk of theft? My car’s already been broken into once on the trip.
And so I am guilty of every pejorative cast of the term ‘gentrification’ and I do nothing to stop it. Gentrification sits at the intersection of the urban, the interesting, and the affordable. Unavoidable – and I do nothing to avoid it. And nothing to denounce it.
Because in truth and evidence I enjoy it – I benefit from it. Every cup of coffee, every art gallery or museum, every craft beer or well mixed cocktail, every stroll down the street in which I enjoy the benefits of the gentrification in that place, I support it. Though my enjoyment, I benefit from it. These are unavoidable truths.