Category: default || By jt3y

Yesterday afternoon, I had to explain to a Picksberger what Renziehausen Park was. Is it like a conservation district? he asked.

No, I said. It's a big regional park in Our Fair City. It's got a bandshell, a fishing lake, softball and baseball fields, tennis courts, hiking and biking trails, the Heritage Center museum, and picnic groves. (I forgot to mention the Jacob Woll Pavilion, where the McKeesport Art Group holds its shows and where the Festival of Trees is held at Christmastime; I also forgot about the rose garden, maintained by the McKeesport Garden Club.)

It's kind of like a cut-down version of South Park (the park, not the TV show), I said.

Wow, he said. He didn't know anything like that existed.

I always enjoy bragging on Our Fair City, so it was nice to tell someone about one of its highlights.

Last night, while cleaning around the house, I heard a call come across the police scanner: Three people had just been wounded in a shooting in the Third Ward. Yikes.

Our Fair City has always fancied itself as a little version of Pittsburgh --- it was McKeesport politician and Daily News publisher W.D. Mansfield, after all, who helped block metropolitan government in the 1920s for fear that Our Fair City would lose its autonomy to Pittsburgh --- and has often duplicated things that were being done by its larger neighbor to the north. You have a symphony? We have a symphony. You have a housing authority? We have a housing authority.

McKeesport never went into Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, choosing to build its own water and sewerage treatment plants; until fairly recently, Carnegie Free Library of McKeesport patrons couldn't borrow books from Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and vice versa.

The merits of this feisty independence can be debated, of course. It was easy enough to make the books balance when 7,000 people worked at National Tube and thousands more worked for Firth-Sterling, Kelsey-Hayes, Peters Packing, G.C. Murphy Co. and all of the other companies that called Our Fair City home. If maintaining a separate sewer system was a little more expensive, well, it's only money. (And it kept lots of political operatives on the government payroll, too.)

In at least one way, Our Fair City is a lot like Picksberg. They have debt? We have debt. They have pockets of violent crime? We have pockets of violent crime. They have a population drain? We have a population drain.

Pittsburgh has some very nice neighborhoods, and some very bad ones. McKeesport has some very nice neighborhoods, and some very bad ones. And they're bad for the same reasons: Absentee landlords, too many social-service agencies concentrated in a small area, poverty and crime.

The problem is that Pittsburgh is a whole lot bigger than Our Fair City, so the decay is less evident. Someone who visited only Dahntahn Picksberg or Oakland or Shadyside wouldn't see the back side of East Liberty, for instance. This explains all of the glowing out-of-town press coverage that Pittsburgh has received recently; sure, if you only visited the Golden Triangle, you'd have no idea that people living out in the neighborhoods were frustrated and angry about abandoned buildings and lack of city services.

Whereas in McKeesport, you can't help but see the decline. I've become inured to it, I guess, but when I see it through someone else's eyes, I flinch. I stumbled onto a diary by a couple who rode their bikes from Washington, D.C., to the upper Midwest, passing through the Mon-Yough valley. If this doesn't make you cringe, you're not a McKeesporter:

McKeesport is a horribly dilapidated suburb of Pittsburgh --- when steel left and the malls were built in other towns, this place curled up and died. All it has now is a huge aging population who can't leave and a depressing low-income population.

I could get really defensive here --- gee, I'm sorry that people who have low incomes depress you, jerk! --- but unfortunately, I have to concede that the poor and the elderly represent two large demographics in the Mon-Yough valley.

It gets worse. Here's the next day's entry:

Well, I have to admit that the world did not come to an end. It's so amazing how much better everything is with just a night's sleep. But there is no way in McKeesport (that's my new swear word --- "Go to McKeesport, you jerk. What the McKeesport? Oh, McKeesport!") that I am biking anywhere today.

Uh, ouch.

Keep in mind that they entered Our Fair City via the worst possible route: After arriving in "little Boston," instead of going into McKeesport on Route 48, they came up the old P&LE tracks, through the scrap yard behind Dura-Bond in Port Vue, and then made a wrong turn that took them up the abandoned section of River Ridge Road in Liberty Borough. No place --- not Fox Chapel, not Sewickley Heights --- would look good after that detour.

But even if they had come up Walnut Street, what would they have noticed first? Not the marina or the Palisades. They'd see the abandoned boarded-up buildings at Fort Pitt Steel Casting, PB&S Chemical and Hubbard Mine.

They're not the only visitors whose negative opinions of the Mon-Yough valley I've read recently. Alert Reader Tim last week told me that Utne Reader had done a story recently about Eastland Mall. The story, reprinted from a magazine called Clamor, is frustrating in many ways, but it's hard to think anyone could come away with a positive impression of the area after seeing Eastland.

More on this subject tomorrow.