Category: default || By jt3y

Utne Reader, for the uninitiated, is the liberal analogue to Reader's Digest (an appropriate analogy, given RD's sometime penchant for right-wing pulpit pounding articles between "Laughter is the Best Medicine" and "Quotable Quotes"). It collects, digests and reprints articles from progressive, alternative and leftist magazines and newspapers about the environment, politics and culture. I buy Utne occasionally, but I get too darned many magazines --- from U.S. News and World Report to Cars & Parts --- so I've been trying to cut back to save money.

Consequently, I missed it when Utne excerpted an article about Eastland Mall from a magazine called Clamor.

I had never heard of Clamor; it turns out it's a bimonthly about politics and culture, published in Toledo. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in Oakland receives Clamor, so I went over on my lunch hour to check it out; naturally, the issue with the Eastland story (March-April 2004) was never received. And Clamor doesn't put their stories online.

Thus, I'm left to report on the Utne version of the story. I'm hoping the condensed version is accurate.

The article was written by Andy Cornell, who I can find next to nothing about through the normal database searches; I did find at least one other article on which he collaborated with a writer from Western Pennsylvania, so I'm assuming he might be a local guy.

Utne stories aren't available on the 'net to non-subscribers, so you'll have to take my word when I present these excerpts of Cornell's story. Here's his description of the Mon-Yough area:

This was coal country once. Working men and immigrant families, many having just stepped off the boat from Eastern Europe, flocked to southwestern Pennsylvania to blow the tops off of its wooded hills and scrape out the black gold inside. After that, it was steel country --- one of the most productive industrial areas in the United States for the first three-quarters of the 20th century. Now, in large part, this is retirement country. Temping country. SSI country, salesclerk country, flea market country.

Well, I find it hard to argue that the Mon Valley is not retirement and SSI country --- take a walk through Foodland on the morning after the Social Security checks come out and you'll see for yourself. As for the flea markets, I've long argued that the Mon Valley has gone right past the "market-based economy" and become a "flea-market based economy."

Anyway, here's what he has to say about Eastland:

Officially, the North Versailles mall is open for business, but visitors won't find much to buy. A Christian stationery store offers a variety of embossed birth and death announcements as well as some enameled plaques decorated with proverbs about walking on the beach with God. Further down the mall, it seems like the storefronts have been rented as warehouse rather than retail space.

True, this. Xerox stores a whole bunch of used duplicators and printers at Eastland. The only retail outlets that are open during the week --- Cornell obviously wasn't there for the flea market, or he would have written about it --- are the PennDOT driver's license center and Tony Macchiaroli's shoe repair shop. District Justice Barner's courtroom doesn't count as a "retail" business (though he doesn't lack for customers).

Then there's a passage about The Glitter Shoppe, which sells custom-engraved and custom-embroidered merchandise that was never picked up, or which has misspellings or other mistakes. Cornell has a bit of sport at the store's expense, before closing the article (at least the Utne version) with a standard jab at capitalism: "Like 'must-have' items that suddenly look like a whole lot of junk, malls minus their designer jeans and lusty-eyed teens come to be seen in a less flattering light. ... Suburban sparkle quickly dies when there's nothing left to buy."

I'm starting to see a pattern in national and regional coverage of the Mon-Yough area. It used to be the poster child for deindustrialization: William Serrin, in his book Homestead, writes how Chiodo's Tavern in the 1980s sometimes was populated by more sociologists and writers looking for "local color" than it had locals.

Lately, the Mon-Yough area has become a poster child for urban decline. OK, Detroit still has us beat by a country mile, but Detroit is too scary for freelance writers. We Mon-Youghers are too nice, by and large, to be scary. (Even if we're "depressing low-income" people.) And we're close to New York and Washington, unlike Detroit, so when they need some reliably run-down areas to gawk out, we're convenient.

We need to stop giving them stuff to gawk at by clearing out some of the decline. Now, unlike some people, I don't think we should erase evidence of our heritage. The marketing gurus running around trying to "brand Pittsburgh" keep saying that we should "downplay" steel and coal because it's outdated, and we "don't make steel here any more." Bull. People know Pittsburgh for its steel industry (Pittsburgh "Steelers" anyone?). What does Los Angeles make? Movies. What about Michigan? Cars. Texas? Oil. Pittsburgh? Steel. A hell of lot less than we used to, but we still make it. We shouldn't be ashamed.

Yes, robotics and computers and biotech are all important, too, but bring someone from out of town and show them Edgar Thomson Works at night. Then show them the outside of a robotics lab. Which one will they find more interesting?

But abandoned buildings are not our heritage. Nor are structures, like Eastland, which are long past their prime, and weren't that good to begin with. It's time to save the ones that are worth saving, and ditch the rest. Crummy roads aren't our heritage, either, though it seems like it at times.

Who can appreciate the attractiveness of the McKees Point Marina when they have to drive over the rust-stained Mansfield Bridge to get there? Who wants to attend one of the summer "lunches on the lawn" in Our Fair City when they have to walk past the crumbling Lysle Boulevard parking garage to get there?

We need some leaders with some vision for the future, instead of merely fond, misty memories of the past. The late mayor of Our Fair City, Joe Bendel, had vision; I'm not sure if the current mayor has it, but he seems to be trying.

Unfortunately, once you get outside of McKeesport, the opportunities for a leader to unite the area seem mighty slim. The boroughs and townships that ring the city are too small, frankly, to be able to take a leadership role. Our county council rep is former West Mifflin councilman Jay Jabbour, a decent fellow whose only real claim to fame, unfortunately, seems to have been his long-running feud with former state representative Richard Olasz. Our clout in the U.S. Congress evaporated when Joe Gaydos retired. State Rep. Sean Logan seems to be a firecracker, but he's more focused on statewide issues than the Mon Valley; plus, his district also includes New Kensington, Lower Burrell and Tarentum, which have problems of their own.

I don't expect factories to suddenly want to move back to the Mon Valley --- not when they can build and operate in China so much cheaper. I don't want malls and franchised restaurants and stores on every corner. I don't want to hang onto every shred of the past and wax nostalgic about Cox's and Balsamo's and the Memorial; dwelling on what's lost doesn't allow us to move forward.

But I do want someone in the Mon Valley to stick his or her neck out and say we should move forward, and offer some suggestions for doing so. In 20 years, I'd like to see people writing about a Mon Valley rebirth.

Or even not writing about the Mon Valley at all --- that would mean there was nothing remarkable about it: Just a stable group of communities, and a nice place to live, and after all, the media doesn't write or film nice, stable things, now, do they?

By the way, with all of its faults, I happen to think it's a nice place to live right now. I just wish we could convince outsiders. Is that too much to ask?

...

OK, three days of this serious thumbsucking is too much for Tube City Almanac to take. Tomorrow: Mindless goofiness, or at least I hope so, with another scheduled installment of Things I Found On the Internet While I Was Looking For Other Things.