Tube City Almanac

August 13, 2007

Dispatch From The Third-World

Category: default || By jt3y

"Hmm, that stage looks familiar," I thought last week as I read Justin Hopper's profile of Clairton singer Chuck Corby in Pittsburgh City Paper.

Sure enough, it's the Valley Hotel, which I wrote about in July with help from John Barna.

My enjoyment of an otherwise fine story was somewhat marred by the opening paragraph:

Under the harsh stage lights, Chuck Corby's face is strained, reddened as he crouches and begs over the end of a musical phrase: "Honey, let me stay." It's a plea he's been making for over 40 years, and yet tonight, in the confines of Clairton's small, worn Valley Hotel -- a dusty roadhouse between disused Mon Valley mills -- his "Honey, Let Me Stay" means something new. It's as though Corby, the definitive music-world veteran, is begging for one more shot at salvation: one more roadhouse gig, one more aging audience, one more dismissive woman to sing for.


A "small," "worn," "dusty roadhouse." Well, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, and I'll admit the Valley Hotel ain't the Sands in Las Vegas.

On the other hand, it's also not in Clairton. It's in Jefferson Hills. And the two nearest "Mon Valley mills" are U.S. Steel's Clairton Works and Irvin Works, both of which are operating, thank you very much; they're not "disused."

(U.S. Steel, by the way, just reported a nice $2.52 per share profit for the second quarter, which is pretty good for a bunch of "disused" mills.)

Am I nitpicking? Yes. But I get tired of the bottomless well of clichŽs that feature writers draw from when they file a report from the Mon-Yough area, and I get especially tired when the clichŽs are wrong.

I was also a little bit peeved by Professor Mike Madison's description of the Mon Valley last month as "Third-World Pittsburgh." (I won't elaborate on the ugly stereotypes that description conjured up of "squalor and filth and poverty.")

I'll be the first to admit there are a lot of problems here. We lack good jobs for people without higher degrees, we have too many buildings owned by absentee landlords, and we haven't attracted enough private investment. Our kids move away and don't stick around to help build up the community. All of those problems wind up feeding on each other.

But we do have running water, working sewers, electricity and telephones, and as the experience in Duquesne makes clear, people even want --- demand --- education.

The residents and writers of "First-World Pittsburgh" might want to spend some time here occasionally instead of just driving through with their doors locked and their windows rolled up.

Maybe they'd learn there's more to us than "dust" and "disused" mills.






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