August 9, 2021

My first couple of trips to Pittsburgh were in-and-outs. Twenty years ago I went with our son Michael on a college visit to Carnegie Mellon University during his senior year. It was January, mild at home in Virginia, we didn’t bring warm coats. In Pittsburgh we found a snowstorm and single-digit temperatures. He dropped CMU from his list.

Ten years later, in the dregs of December, I dropped off my daughter Laura, who moved there for a new job. We unloaded her gear in her rented place. I then scrambled back onto I-376 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike to escape an oncoming blizzard. The snow was piling up as I got out.

Eleven months later, in icy January, we went back for a weekend to see her, she showed us around. We visited the Strip District and waited in a long line at a famous deli to buy cheese. Crowds of local people lumbered around in their parkas. The scene recalled for me the flaring streets of James Joyce’s Dublin. We climbed Duquesne Heights for the spectacular, panoramic view of downtown, set off by the fast-flowing, slate-gray Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers. That was when she told us she was taking a job in California. When we left for home the next morning the thermometer was at -10F.

Laura moved back to Pittsburgh a while ago. She’s helping to implement a program called MovePGH, run by the Pittsburgh Mobility Collective, a public-private collaboration, the first in the country to offer public transportation with a few keystrokes on a cellphone.

Last weekend we drove up. Coming from the south (see August 2 post), you follow I-79 to I-376 through old industrial districts. Suddenly the highway runs onto the Fort Pitt Bridge, one of the city’s famous yellow bridges, and the downtown skyline bursts into view.

We stayed near downtown on Forbes Avenue, the wide thoroughfare past the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, but spent our time in Shadyside. It’s a place be in Pittsburgh for folks, young and old, who like a lively pace, a big-city restaurant and retail scene. Shadyside is one of the city’s many livable neighborhoods. Oakland is intensely urban, anchored by hospitals and universities. Squirrel Hill is residential and cosmopolitan, home to a large Jewish community, and once the home of Fred Rogers—it’s the real Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.

The Strip, in an old factory district just north of downtown, is packed with bistro-type restaurants and ethnic food shops nearly always crowded with locals and tourists.

Shadyside, like other Pittsburgh neighborhoods, helps tell a story of Pittsburgh. The city was built by the coal, coke, and steel industries. Generations ago the night sky above the mills glowed red, the air was gray with soot that sickened people and shortened lives. Around the 1950s the heavy industry economy went into a long decline. The wage-earning factory and mill employees endured hardship. The city lost population.

U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, Alcoa, and PPG Industries, among dozens of other big-metals companies, all still have work in the region, but the big mills shut down. Over time the skies cleared. In recent decades healthcare institutions and technology businesses came to the city, attracted by the high-tech base at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon. Educated young people moved into the renovated old urban neighborhoods. Today, on Walnut Street in Shadyside, restaurant patrons relax at sidewalk tables. Up and down the street are William Sonoma, Gap, Apple, J. Crew, Banana Republic, others.

We went for a little jog Saturday morning. We passed the many facilities of the U-Pitt Medical Center or UPMC, which dominates the area. We walked early Sunday morning to St. Paul’s Cathedral on Fifth. The streets were quiet except for a few cyclists and runners. Hospital staff people, just off shifts, waited for buses. We passed the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum, the soaring 42-story Cathedral of Learning, the huge Parthenon-knockoff Carnegie Institute.

Driving up Forbes and Fifth toward Shadyside, we got a look at the massive old homes of Pittsburgh’s elite. The city claims Andrew Carnegie, who funded the technical college that became Carnegie Mellon, named also after Pittsburgh native philanthropist Andrew Mellon. Another Pittsburgh original, H.J. Heinz, founder of Heinz Company, removed additives from ketchup and lobbied for food purity. Everyone knows about Andy Warhol and Gene Kelly. Dr. Jonas Salk founded the Virus Research Laboratory at UPMC. Henry Mancini and Rachel Carson grew up near the city.

We walked Shadyside’s narrow one-way streets, passing the impressive brick and stone houses set off by neat arrangements of roses, impatiens, and hydrangeas that spring from the green spaces. On Walnut Street shops were in the middle of a big sidewalk sale, offering an eclectic mix: books, odd pieces of landscape art, flowery shirts and dresses, costume jewelry. Passersby browsed and bought. It was a glorious, springlike day. Locals crowded into the bars and pubs where they could choose from 100 or more draft beers.

It won’t always be like this, I thought. The Pirates will shut down their season, the Flyers and Steelers (all in black and gold) will bring out the crowds. The snowbirds will head for Florida. Winter will bring the snow and the frigid temperatures. The town will button up, people will pile on layers. We’ve been to Pittsburgh in January. The air is frigid but crisp and clear, the snow crunches under your feet. The Shadyside folks probably will enjoy it.

Seasons fly by, life changes. Many of the younger people here, working, making friends, starting their lives, will get married, move to the suburbs, have families. We did see a few oldsters. I wondered about them. Maybe they spent their twenties and thirties here, then left to raise their kids. And now here they are, back in Shadyside.

August 2, 2021

“Some say if they flattened all of West Virginia it would be as big as Texas,” said the park ranger manning the visitors’ center at New River Gorge National Park, just north of Beckley, W.Va. That sounds about right.

I stared at the map of the Gorge environs on his desk. “It looks like all this area is wilderness,” I said. “Pretty much the whole state is forest,” he answered. He should know, he lives just down the road in Fayetteville.

We were driving to Pittsburgh to see our eldest daughter. The most direct route, really the only route, is straight up the spine of West Virginia. To avoid the scary construction chutes of I-85 we took I-26 through western North Carolina into the lonely southeastern corner of Tennessee, as rough and rocky as West Virginia. After passing Johnson City we merged onto I-81 into Virginia, then made a sharp left onto I-77 at Wytheville. The highway passes through two mountain tunnels to get you to Beckley. Then you’re on U.S. 19 for a short run to the Gorge.

It’s a spectacular, relatively new national park, authorized by President Carter in 1978. The gorge plunges 1,000 feet to the river. The single-span arch bridge supporting Route 19, completed in 1977, was the world’s highest until 2003. Visitors hike down (then back up) 180 steps to the observation platform, gawk at the view of the bridge and the river, from that height a tiny stream between the towering cliffs. In October the Fayette County Chamber of Commerce puts on “Bridge Day,” and opens the bridge to pedestrians, bungee jumpers, and parasail daredevils.

Years ago we visited the eastern sliver of West Virginia a half-dozen times for running events, then drove across the state in summer 2018 on our half-country road trip. This time we headed for Clarksburg, an old heavy-industry town of about 17,000 in the dead center of what’s called Mountaineer Country, the craggy, relentlessly forested northern half of the state. It’s the country the John Denver tune celebrates and the state advertises with its “Wild and Wonderful” license plates.

The state isn’t all stunning mountain vistas. Clarksburg, once home to glass works, foundries, machine shops, and coal production, was named a “National Small City of the Year” by the National League of Cities in 2011. On the heights along East Main Street we passed gorgeous old homes with wide porticos and soaring Ionic columns.

The boom has faded. Retail businesses have left for suburban malls. Downtown Clarksburg hints at the rest of the story of West Virginia, the story of rural and remote once-prosperous places: hollowed-out hulks of factories, boarded-up businesses, ramshackle houses and mobile homes. In late afternoon people sat on steps in front of overgrown yards and shambled along the dull city streets, recalling the sad statistics of poverty and unemployment and the curse of the worst opioid epidemic in the nation. In 2020, 1,045 West Virginians died of opioid overdoses, a 45 percent increase over 2019.

Clarksburg folks, though, are bearing up. The atmosphere was upbeat and boisterous at Parkette’s Family Restaurant, just off U.S. 50, up a steep hill (what else?) from the dark high-rises of downtown.

We studied the menu. Sandy ordered the chicken salad and soup. I wanted a sandwich and a side of green beans. The waitress scribbled something. Sandy got her salad. Another server stopped by and advised they were out of peas. Our waitress returned with the soup. “Sorry, we’re out of peas,” she said. “I asked for green beans,” I said. “Oh,” she answered. “Green beans can sound like peas,” I offered. She laughed. 

I asked my standard question at restaurants in new towns: “How long has this place been here?” She blinked. “A long time, 25 or 30 years, but someplace else before that. I don’t know, I’m not that old.” I looked down at the paper placemat, which announced Parkette’s had been in business more than 70 years.

The restaurant was busy with an everyday crowd, a mix of young and old, a few shaved heads, waist-length beards, and gray hair. It was midweek dinnertime at a no-frills place next to an auto dealership, a counter and a dozen booths and tables, that offered no-frills meals as a break from workday routine. I wondered if the folks sitting at Parkette’s has felt the impact of economic decline, the loss of businesses and jobs, livelihoods?

We left the next day. We passed through Bridgeport and Fairmont, just north of Clarksburg. The country then shifts, over miles, from mountains to rolling hills. Morgantown, near the Pennsylvania line, is home to WVU, the state university. We crossed deeper into what was once America’s heavy industry heartland.

Outside the Pennsylvania welcome center at Carmichael stands a somber marble monument to 37 men who died in the December 6, 1962 explosion in the Frosty Run shaft of the Rowena soft-coal mine that operated where the welcome center now stands. The victims’ names are engraved on its base. The men were 600 feet below the surface, the blast was felt two miles away. Their bodies were found four days later. The explosion occurred on the 55th anniversary of the 1907 mine explosion at Monangah, W.Va., near Fairmont, that killed 361 miners, the worst mine disaster in U.S. history.

Their descendants still gather at the memorials to remember. But the coal and heavy metals industries, for generations the economic heart and soul of this region, no longer exist there. The Frosty Run site now is surrounded by pastures, cornfields, and woods, pretty and green. Cities, towns, and families suffered, some still suffer. But West Virginia and Pennsylvania have moved on. We read the inscription, looked at the countryside, and headed north.