Metro Pulse/Gamut/Pittsburgh

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A few comparisons with a once-big city

by Jack Neely

In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, near where two rivers join to form one of America's great rivers, there's a hilly, rainy, green city. What you notice first is that it's a city with a lot of bridges, where brick and marble Victorian architecture still hangs on between the concrete-and-glass modern buildings of the last century.

From its founding as a fort in the latter 18th century, the city was a western frontier outpost manned by Presbyterian Scots-Irish. These hardy folk, who included prominent families with the rare name of McClung, dominated the city's society for a century, until immigrants began to move in, many of them attracted to work in this unusually industrial city.

With dozens of factories in its heyday, the city became famous for its soot. Old-timers who remember the place before World War II all tell the same stories, about when the soot was so bad they had to change their white shirt at mid-day.

As industry declined, the city cleaned itself up. Meanwhile, the local university expanded its student population into the tens of thousands and became a much bigger part of the city's culture.

Today it's still mainly a provincial working-class town, but with a good many newcomers from other parts of the country, enough academics and bohemians to be visible, and a pronounced redneck fringe. In this city the plural for you is you'uns, often elided into something that sounds like yinz. Older folks are known to say crick for creek, and spicket for faucet.

It's a big sports town, and you see sports memorabilia and hear sports conversation everywhere. If you find an especially sports-minded sentiment-alist in a bar, he might mention the names of local heroes of the past, like Johnny Majors. An old-timer might even remember the baseball glory days of Billy Meyer.

If you were visiting the city today, you might visit the Strip, and the City-County Building, or you might walk down Market Street to Market Square, a rectangle of Victorian buildings which host restaurants, small shops, and bars.

Some think Market Square has gotten a little shabby over the years. Right now, an out-of-town developer is re-envisioning it as a prettier place with new trees, fountains, and a permanent pavilion—and actual residences over the shops, plus a new grocery. Planners argue about the place of automobile traffic on the square, generally agreeing that it should be restricted. Earlier plans had called for a cineplex near Market Square, but they proved problematic. Several recent plans for Market Square have suffered from grassroots opposition, especially those "top-down" plans that came out of the mayor's office without much public discussion.

But it's a pretty nice place already. On nice days, idlers hang out on the benches beneath the trees. Once a week in the summer, the square hosts a free rock 'n' roll show that draws hundreds to the old place, for the music and the suspension of open-container laws.

The city offers much in the way of performing arts, some of it sponsored by Alcoa, a major local employer. It has also been home to more than its fair share of famous novelists. The kids almost uniformly complain that there's nothing to do, though there seems to be plenty. There are several local rock bands who play in nightclubs near the university. You might watch a football game in the big stadium near the river, or visit the city's famous zoo. Or cool your heels by the fountains in the riverside park, or take a ride in a riverboat in the shadow of the steep bluffs that form the south side of the city.

The mayor, a bespectacled middle-aged guy who's been in office as long as some people can remember, is struggling with a municipal financial crisis. Preservation is a controversial issue. The young people complain than the older elite are ham-fisted pragmatists who don't get it. Through a lot of wheel-spinning and well-intentioned failures, downtown is doing better than people in the suburbs like to think. Those neighborhoods are balkanized, separated from each other by steep hills and dense foliage. People in one neighborhood may know little about the people in another. One of several poorer neighborhoods, as it happens, is called "Knoxville."

But the city is not Knoxville. The city is called "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."

I spent a few days there earlier this summer. They might, at first glance, seem tough to compare. Pittsburgh's more than 400 miles north of here, after all, well into Yankee territory. It has a much-larger proportion of certain European immigrants, especially Italians, Czechs, and Poles, than Knoxville ever did. And it's much bigger. There was a time when Pittsburgh was six times the size of Knoxville.

On a sunny Friday morning, downtown Pittsburgh can seem the liveliest place in the world. People are playing saxophone and guitar for tips, hawking popcorn to passers-by. Stop on the crowded sidewalk to look at any of Pittsburgh's many weird old gothic buildings, and somebody may run into you from behind—a condition that old-timer Knoxvillians tell skeptical youngsters was once true of this city.

That's the way it is over a wide swath of downtown Pittsburgh—or the Triangle, as it's called, because it exists in the peninsula where the Monongahela and the Allegheny converge to form the Ohio: Across dozens of square blocks, you see self-important businessmen striding in packs, hip-hop boulevardiers, gorgeous Slavic women in power suits, moms with kids, retired couples, shopkeepers calling out to potential customers, waitresses cooling their heels before the lunch rush, teenagers trying hard to seem like they don't think it's cool to walk on the sidewalks of Pittsburgh. It feels exciting, like a big city.

The funny thing is, though, that in 2003, Pittsburgh is just under twice the size of Knoxville. In the daytime, at least, its liveliness seems disproportionately greater.

What's their secret? Well, it ain't free parking. I surveyed more than a dozen parking garages in the Triangle: prices range upwards of $15 a day: Vol game-day rates, just to park on a regular weekday in downtown Pittsburgh. The lowest price I found for all-day parking in downtown Pittsburgh was equivalent to the highest price anyone ever pays for all-day parking in downtown Knoxville. And in Pittsburgh, that price, $8, was an "early-bird special."

Gary Rotstein is an old friend of mine, a colleague at the UT Daily Beacon, a lifelong Pittsburgher who's been a reporter for years at the Post-Gazette. He explained to me that most people he knows don't often pay to park. They ride the bus: even people who wear coats and ties and have cars at home ride the bus. I left him waiting at the bus stop with two other reporters, one of them a UK grad who made a derisive parting comment about the Big Orange. The Pittsburgh bus is $1.75, expected to rise to $2 later this year. At $1, KAT is a relative bargain. Pittsburgh also has a limited-route subway with comparable fares.

Parking and transportation costs are higher in spite of the fact that Pittsburgh is otherwise pretty cheap. It's still mainly a working-class place, after all. Property values are low. In one sit-down restaurant, I ordered a big hot-sausage sandwich for $2.75. That and an Iron City passed for a meal. Beer is pretty cheap, too, and untaxed.

Those are two of Pittsburgh's advantages: a cheap, distinctly local sandwich, and cheap, distinctly local draft beer. Another is that downtown walking seems easier. Posted maps remind those who need reminding that nearly everything in downtown Pittsburgh is within a 10-minute stroll. Walk around downtown Knoxville, you might spend 10 minutes just waiting to cross streets. I'm convinced the lights change faster in Pittsburgh. Pedestrian traffic is like a river that doesn't stop and hardly slows. And Pittsburghers don't much seem to mind walking. In Knoxville, people are known to drive from downtown to the Old City or Volunteer Landing, and one who's willing to walk more than four blocks in one trip is generally considered an eccentric, maybe a leftist. On my long hikes in Pittsburgh, I began to notice that some of the people I was walking alongside were the same people I was walking alongside 'way back there. On a hunch, I shadowed a random young lady in a business suit. From where I first spotted her, she walked 11 blocks, just like it was a stroll to the water cooler, before slipping into an office building.

When people insist that downtown Knoxville retail is dead and overdue for burial, I argue, usually talking up the potential for galleries and boutiques—but first feel obliged to throw them a bone and concede, well, the modern downtown will never be where people go to buy a pair of socks. That era, I explain knowledgeably, began to end when Sears pulled up its stakes downtown in the '40s.

But what do you see for sale in downtown Pittsburgh? Well: socks. Piles and piles of folded tube socks, sold like hot dogs by a street vendor. Of course, they also have hot-dog vendors, and coffee vendors. Especially in that section of Penn Avenue known as the Strip, very much unlike Knoxville's Strip, shoppers walk the street from produce market to Italian grocery to Asian shop, arms laden with long pepperonis and big gasoline-size cans of olive oil. Pittsburgh's Strip is, as far as I know, the best-smelling place in the world.

Downtown Pittsburgh also supports a couple of big, old-fashioned things we've been conditioned to believe are dinosaurs, in a downtown, at least: department stores, at least one of which—longtime Pittsburgh landmark Kaufmann's—appears to be thriving, even though we're here in the 21st century, and everybody knows that the era of the downtown department store is over.

And then there are art galleries, and upscale yuppie boutiques, some cheek-to-jowl with ethnic groceries and Pittsburgh's equivalents of J's Mega Mart or Star Sales. Pittsburghers still come downtown to buy practical stuff, necessities, and even junk—there are wig shops and porn shops. The proprietors of the upscale galleries and boutiques aren't necessarily happy about that, but there they are.

After enjoying a lively stroll around downtown Pittsburgh, I'm no longer as concerned about the specter of what's long cited as the worst-case scenario for our Market Square: the tacky T-shirt shop. I've never seen a tackier T-shirt shop than the one prominent on Pittsburgh's own version of Market Square. If I were to quote some of the T-shirts on display in their window, we'd get complaints, and some of them would be from me. It's not pretty. It doesn't add much to the place, but somehow it doesn't ruin it, either.

Market Square is, unlike Knoxville's, an actual square, and doesn't have as may of its original Victorian storefronts preserved. But the old places seem to be the liveliest places, hosting a couple of charming Italian bistros that sell frittata for breakfast on outdoor cafe tables, a couple of upscale bars, and the tin-top-bar joint that instantly became my favorite oyster house in the world, though I never tried the actual oysters there: the Original Oyster House. It claims to be over 130 years old, same location, and seems it.

And that's another unanswerable question. Why are America's larger cities more successful in keeping their landmark businesses open than we are? Pittsburgh's hardly older than Knoxville, but the first three Pittsburgh restaurant/bars I walked into were each older than the oldest bar or restaurant in Knoxville. Restaurateurs I know confirm that Knoxville is a fickle place, and readily turns on its own. My friend Rotstein confirms that Pittsburghers are famously old-fashioned, and fiercely loyal; they'll keep going to Kaufmann's to shop, even if they have to battle traffic and pay to park for the privilege.

They'll also turn out to support public events. When I was there, Pittsburgh was in the thrall of the popular Three Rivers Arts Festival, an annual three-week arts party attended by thousands all day and into the night. Overtly, it bore a strong resemblance to Dogwood Arts, even the parts of it that people most readily ridicule: the funnel cakes, the corndogs, the chicken on sticks. There were kiosks with artists selling their work over here, and live music over there. The difference was not in the quality of the food at the festival, which was identical to Dogwood Arts', but in the quality of the art and music. Not avant-garde—there's not much avant-garde about Pittsburgh, maybe less than there is about Knoxville. The art was mostly stuff you might buy for your mother's living room, and the music was pretty retro. But it was all competent, some of it was very good, and, most importantly, none of it was embarrassing. The music was a combination of regional jazz and bluegrass bands, and a few big headliners, like Joan Armatrading, playing to thousands in the park for free. Though sanctioned and assisted by the city, the festival is funded primarily through private sources.

Downtown Pittsburgh is no ideal. Some of the urban hinterlands around the Triangle are featurelessly bleak. Downtown retail, despite the fact that there's much more of it than in downtown Knoxville, isn't what it used to be, and is believed to be deteriorating. The Triangle itself very nearly shuts down every evening—not at 5, as some used to say Knoxville did, but around 9. Many downtown Pittsburgh restaurants that are open for lunch just go ahead and stay open until 8 or so, and many downtowners have supper before going home. However, at 10 or 11 p.m., it may be easier to find a beer in downtown Knoxville than in downtown Pittsburgh. Weekends downtown are tombishly silent. A few restaurants do stay open through the weekend, but most are the familiar fast-food chains.

Considering how quiet it is during non-business hours, it's not surprising that few people live downtown, perhaps fewer than in Knoxville, though there's a push to change that. Where Pittsburghers do live is in the dense old neighborhoods, which bear little resemblance Knoxville's neighborhoods. Several of Pittsburgh's residential areas support pocket downtowns of their own, with their own restaurants, stores, and pubs. It makes sense to go on home at 7 or 8, especially when you live a short stroll from your favorite bar. Pittsburgh's still a fine, honest place to live, even though the city has declined in population, now half the size it was 50 years ago.

Pittsburgh is like Knoxville in many ways, trying to catch up with more-progressive cities in downtown residential development, in bike-trail mileage (they've just got 17, so far), and struggling to find ways to keep the talented young in an old city with a reputation for stodginess. I went to a party hosted by something called the Sprout Fund, a philanthropy which seems dedicated to convincing young people of the once-unlikely proposition that Pittsburgh Is Cool. They held a three-story party in an old school near the end of renovation: beer—local beer, of course—was free, and each classroom hosted a different medium of art: giant-sized puppetry in one room, interactive graffiti in another, slide-show art in another, most of it specifically Pittsburgh-related, and—I kid you not—writers manning old typewriters in another. A rock 'n' roll band played in the old gym. If it was a little corny, it's hard to deny that it was also packed.

Among many other projects, the Sprout Fund coordinates and encourages street musicians because they liven up the streets. In Knoxville, rare street musicians are scorned, harassed, and feel lucky if they're not arrested.

Comparisons are limited, because some differences are profound. Pittsburgh's City County Building is not a modernist glass-and-concrete bunker, but a century-old marble palace, festooned with rococo ornamentation. Pittsburgh is still a relatively compact city, with lots of dense neighborhoods near downtown; it hasn't sprawled as irrevocably as Knoxville has. In Pittsburgh, the bluffs on the south side of the river are higher than our southside bluffs, but they're regularly climbed by cable cars, giving citizens a chance to look down on their city and see, in spite of everything, how beautiful it is.

In Knoxville, breakfast-counter waitresses call you "honey." In Pittsburgh, by marked contrast, they call you "hon." Sure, there are differences. But I spent my three days there contemplating an undeniable family resemblance.