Don't Tread on My City

One of the problems I have is that once I decide I like something, I tend toward blind loyalty.  Great example is that I saw Star Wars Episode I five times in the theater.  Five times.  And I own two copies of it on DVD, one for upstairs on the regular TV and one Blu-Ray copy as part of the set.  I can tell myself all day long that it has some redeeming qualities in the pod race and light saber duel between Obi-Wan, Qui Gon and Darth Maul that make it worthwhile, but let's face it, that movie just plain sucks.  Yet it's a Star Wars film, so I jumped all in.  And some non-Star Wars fan better not ever say to me that it sucks or I'll go all Dark Side on them.

So it is in other areas of my life, and as a result one of the stresses we experienced when my husband came home for a visit occurred when I felt he was criticizing it.  Since moving to Pittsburgh was wholly my choice, I take it personally, like it's really a criticism of me.  Truthfully, sub-consciously it might be, but that's another situation altogether.  Maintaining a relationship under the difficult circumstances my husband finds himself is complex.  Therefore, I should be more forgiving of his sharp complaints about no right turn on red, but in the moment, it just upset me way beyond reason.  But, truth be told, I know this is not a perfect place.  No place is.  You put a bunch of humans together, and you will get mixed results.  You will have poverty, crime and tragedy.  You will have prejudice and haves v. have-nots.   Pittsburgh is not immune to any of that, but it also has lots of less weighty issues that just make it a quirky, imperfect place.  And, as such, just to prove to myself that I can keep an objective viewpoint, I'm going to tell you about some of them.

Pittsburgh is known as the City of Bridges.  And it is.  An official count done by a University of Pittsburgh professor tallied 446, three more than another famous city with lots of water, Venice.  And they come in all shapes and sizes.  We lack just one kind of bridge:  a suspension bridge.  But that means the city has to maintain all those bridges.  That's expensive.  Therefore, you'll be driving along and look up as you pass one of those many, many bridges and see netting wrapped around it.  My daughter and I were here visiting when the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis.  Naturally that event raised a lot of local concern, so the news channels did a lot of coverage about the condition of local bridges over the next several days. That's when I learned that the protective netting we were seeing was to keep debris from the aging structures from falling on the cars below.  I saw that news story in 2007.  I drove under one of the bridges they talked about last week, protective netting and all still in place.

Greenfield Ave Bridge
http://www.frontiernet.net/~rochballparks2/towns/pgh_bridges2.htm

Then there are the infamous potholes.  Maybe not as dangerous as aging bridges, but, ask some of the locals and they might beg to differ.  Pot holes are big news here right now.  Even in my area, which seems to be well funded and well maintained, pot holes are a big issue.  We've got to understand why that is after the rough winter we all experienced, but the controversy is over how many, how big and how long it takes to fix them, which leads to another issue that I found is prevalent here:  it all depends on where you live as to how well and how quickly you are served.  The Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran an article just yesterday illustrating pot hole complaints by political district.  I am pretty sure it'll add fuel to an already smoldering fire.  Of all the issues the new mayor thought he would be wrestling with in the early days of his administration, this probably wasn't one, but it is.  And, to his credit, he is working on it.  In the meantime, we bump along and have to pay attention not only to the cars on the road around us, but the very road we drive on so we don't blow a tire or risk falling down to the center of the earth.

Of course, that's even harder if you're lost.  And getting lost here is like a vocation, even for those of us who have lived here much longer than I have.  I was warned when I was making plans on moving here that GPS is unreliable.  I can tell you now that never a truer statement has been made.  Downtown, the buildings block it.  Outside of downtown, the hills sometimes do.  And then, not all that long ago, I learned that some of the many winding stairs the city sports are actually considered roadways and have names assigned to them, so some of those times my Garmin was telling me to turn on a road I swore up and down wasn't there, that was the reason why.  I can take some comfort that I'm not alone in my frustration with finding things.  I used to see a t-shirt for sale in one of my favorite little shops that had a parody of a local roadway sign that showed a labyrinth of confusing arrows snaking around in a tangle.  Given the constant frustration I had initially to find just about any where, I thought it was perfect, but they never had my size.  It is a big point of pride that I have at long last found preferred routes to the areas of the city I frequent, but if you take me out of my comfort zone even a little, and I get anxious again because getting lost is a way of life here.

http://www.communitywalk.com

I could go on.  But you get the point.  No city is an utopia.  But, I've always maintained that if a place is worth it, then it's worth fighting for.  Those of us who live in it and love it are duty bound to try and help fix those deficiencies.  And it's a bigger challenge here, granted, because everything costs, and money is part of the issue.  Pittsburgh's true population is 306,211 according to Wikipedia.  That number does not include me actually.  I am one of the combined statistical population of over 2.5 million that live in the surrounding area.  But I spend much of my spare time in it.  I just don't help pay for it much, other than the taxes I pay to the county. Therefore, I've been struck since moving here that this grand old city that so many of us rely on is funding itself really on a shoestring.  For all of that, it's been named in various publications as one of the nations' most livable cities.  And I agree.  So for all of the things that might be wrong with it, there's a whole lot more that is right about it.  And I can stand to wait an extra half minute or so to make a right turn to be able to call this my home.