Hey G-20, meet the real Pittsburgh
The world leaders in the Group of 20 who are meeting in Pittsburgh will spend most of their time in a sterile convention center, like those in any mid-sized city in America. But if they had a chance to roam the streets, they'd get a better feel for the real Pittsburgh, a city that looks and feels a lot like our Baltimore.
Brian O'Neill, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist and an old friend, could be their guide. He just wrote "The Paris of Appalachia," a collection of essays featuring folks like LaMonte Pruitt, a former railroad brakeman battling debts; the women of Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church, who meet regularly to make pierogies; and the Condelucis, who created a family enclave on one of the city's hills. And the rabid fans of a very good football team and a lousy baseball team.
Sound familiar?
O"Neill has a columnist's gift for fitting in. He grew up outside New York City, and when I met him at a newspaper in Virginia, he still had a thick Long Island accent. Yet when he worked the night shift and had to call sheriffs across southwestern Virginia, he spoke with a perfect twang. He's been in Pittsburgh for more than 20 years now, and his affection for the city shows through in his words.
Comments
this doesn't relate to the post so much, i admit...but
as a 60's radical I felt sad that seeing the demonstrations around the G-20 and then googling to find out what they were about? ---I could find no press statements- nothing that explained the rationale of the protestors.
Fox News asked the same question and you can well expect they would not report it if they knew it...but- they said how peaceful were the teabaggers on the mall compared to these masked anarchists.
If you looked at the mall republican protestors then were all white- most old.
To me- I want to know what the youth are doing- and so- I will go, and I urge everybody else to go to the radical books tent at the book festival- attend Ralph Nader and Bill Ayers discussions- the rest is pretty much fluff (except for Laura Lippman!!!).
I mean, we all love Harry Potter and cook books and coffee table books- but- we PRIMARILY need books that will help us change the world.
Books like Darwins's or Marx's.
Posted by: david eberhardt | September 25, 2009 5:03 PM
Pittsburgh's G-20 story: Take an expressway from town and disappear into desolate 'hoods and encounter the civilization of menace. Pittsburgh, a dual city! The glass wonder of PPG Place and/or the G-20 Summit is a faded memory. Here in the 'hood lives lie abandoned as far as the eye can see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEukcWW5dM0
That is: For the most part, African-American Pittsburgh seems to be invisible, not only to the public relations hucksters who tout Pittsburgh's successes, but we are equally invisible to the protesters.
Certainly, black Pittsburgh is as proud as anybody in that the black President we worked so hard to elect has selected Pittsburgh as the host of the G-20 Summit. We even enjoy the re-invention of Pittsburgh from a dirty, smoky steel-churning history to the bright, clean, green financial success that the business leaders and politicians boast about so loudly. Nobody is more proud of the Super Bowl winning African-American coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mike Tomlin. But none of that feel-good stuff erases the pain of the stubbornly high unemployment among African American young adults and the staggering dropout rate for young black males from the public school system.
Posted by: Rap Man | September 29, 2009 9:17 AM
Maybe if young blacks weren't busy whining about the world keeping them down, the unemployment wouldn't be so staggering. And no doubt the white people are forcing blacks to drop out.
Posted by: Hailey | October 14, 2009 3:32 PM