Love Thy N.I.M.B.Y.

Recently our neighborhood awoke to the sounds of machinery tearing into the church parking lot, which is up the street and behind us. I figured the lot was being re-surfaced. Then I got a note from my neighbor about the construction, and I stopped over to talk with her.

She said she asked the contractor who was working on the parking lot if he was fixing the problem or making it worse. “He was nice as could be, and said they would fix the problem of the water runoff from the existing parking lot… And now, they’re making a new parking lot on the property they bought next door,” she said.

I talked with neighbors who’ve been in the neighborhood for decades. “We get the water bad, but it runs off of our property down onto the others' yards,” they told me. Another neighbor complained that the church folks let their kids run in his yard.

* * *

I never expected it to happen, but apparently I’ve become one of those characters who have annoyed me. I’ve become a NIMBY.

NIMBY stands for “not in my back yard,” and refers to outspoken residents who come out to council meetings when they are confronted with a development they dislike. As a freelance journalist, NIMBYs have been my bread and butter. I’ve quoted them extensively. But I never saw myself becoming one of “them.” Still, I realized I was a NIMBY through my overreaction to the church’s actions.

I was raised in the Presbyterian Church, where my father was an Elder. I grew up attending First Presbyterian Church in downtown Pittsburgh and became a member there. We kids who grew up there referred to the place fondly as “First Church.” It was our church—a place where we worshipped, and met for youth groups, musical theatrical productions, and even sleepovers.

I no longer regularly attend church. If I make it to Easter service and Christmas service, I expect my wife to be happy. But that’s not how I grew up. From the moment of my birth, I had the Bible quoted around me.

Growing up in our family of twelve kids, we had Devotions after dinner on weekdays. We would read from a book of illustrated Bible stories for kids, or from the King James Bible, reciting verses so they still echo in my head at the thought:

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly

Nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful

For his delight is in the law of the Lord

I mention this to establish my religious pedigree, and also to explain that it pained me to be griping about the actions of a church. I wasn’t raised to talk dirt on churches, and I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten to this point of resenting my neighbor. It was an unsettling feeling.

* * *

After making fruitless calls about the project and learning little about the borough’s involvement in it, I spoke with the contractor, who told me his company wasn’t responsible and that I should talk to the church. So I called the church, and reached the minister. I asked him if they were building a new parking lot in the back yard of the property they bought next door, and he said they were.

“Did you think your neighbors would appreciate that parking lot, or didn’t you care?” I asked as evenly as I could. He didn't respond.

“Would you like it if someone put in a parking lot next to your house?” I asked. "Or wouldn't you mind?"

“No, I don’t think I’d mind,” the reverend said. “O.K.?”

“O.K.” I said.

I felt exhausted by the anger that was raging inside me. I was worn out. I felt powerless—like no matter what I did, it was all a done deal.

I thought of what the minister said, and again I wondered if I was making a suburban mall out of a few parking spaces. Was I overreacting, I wondered. It dawned on me that we are all at the mercy of our neighbors. How tenuous are our loyalties, if the addition of something as fleeting as a parking lot can set neighbor against neighbor? Since I've passed into NIMBYhood, things feel more uncertain.

As I get older, I sometimes find myself doing things I never thought I’d do. I can remember feeling superior to some of the NIMBYs I encountered many years ago, thinking that they ought to just buy all of the property around, if they wanted to dictate what other property owners would do with their acreage. Since the construction equipment recently jarred me from my naïve state, I feel differently. But I know, here in Pittsburgh, I can count on things changing, and NIMBYs complaining.

A Death In The Family

3/8/06

I realize now that we were lucky that he made it through the night. It was a blessing that we had a little more time before we had to say goodbye.

Our dog, Max, had a fatal heart problem that put tremendous stress on his heart, and the vet who saw him at the 24-hour clinic gave him hours to a day to live. We’d taken him to the vet Monday evening, after he’d been panting excessively after a walk with Anne and his back legs gave out on him while he was trying to stand up.

“I would recommend that you put him down tonight,” the vet said.

Anne and I were in shock, and we broke down weeping in front of the vet. We agreed that we’d take Max home that night and stay with him. She was not ready to accept the inevitable, that our boy likely would have to be put to sleep. It was dawning on me that was the case, and I was heartbroken.

After the vet left us sobbing in the room, I walked out into the hallway, about ready to burst into a forbidden room where they were keeping our dog. “Where’s our pup?” I said angrily. “Why are they keeping him from us?”

Then we heard his piercing bark, like he knew we were out there trying to get to him. Somehow, it felt slightly reassuring, but not really.

I had thought of this possible inevitability many times before. You see, after falling for my wife Anne several years ago, I then fell for her dog Max. I fell so completely for him that occasionally when I would think of the probability that he would die before us, I’d feel sick inside at the thought of not having him as one of the family.

Everybody’s favorite pet is the best pet in the world, but I am not exaggerating a hair when I say that Max was the best dog ever born. He was a gentle 75 pounds of love, very mannerly and respectful of the cats, conscientious to a fault. Many times when I walked him in the neighborhood, someone would stop us and say, “That’s a pretty dog.”

“I just married into the family,” I’d tell them. “He’s my wife’s boy.”

Anne and Max found each other in 1999, when she was modeling in a fashion show benefit for Animal Rescue League. Some of the models were walking down the runway with a dog or cat, and Anne saw Max, and asked to walk with him.

“He took off down the runway and I was in heels and almost fell,” she told me laughingly many times. Of course he’d stolen her heart on that runway, and she came back the next day and adopted him.

In the end, his heart had become grossly enlarged and fluid filled the sack around it, making it impossible for his heart and the rest of his system to function properly. He might’ve had the condition very shortly, the vet told us. “If you’d x-rayed him a month ago, you might’ve found nothing,” she said.

It all happened so fast. Maybe not, but it seemed that way.

Now I wonder why I didn’t recognize the signs that he was declining—how he sometimes was reluctant to go up the stairs, or why he slept so late or kept sleeping after Anne and I had left the room, or how he’d pant excessively sometimes after a walk. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and there’s no way to say that if we’d known and been gingerly with him, he might’ve lasted much longer.

It would happen that we would have to put him down on the kind of day on which he would’ve loved to romp on a walk with us—one of those clear, cool sunny days just right for a pup with his kind of coat. We called him a Snow Dog, because when it was snowy out, he’d run out into the snow and bury his face in it and roll around in it, like he was born for the snow.

I wrote a story about walking him in the snow that was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and I actually met a neighbor because of it this past summer. One sunny day as I was working in one of our front yard flowerbeds, a woman who was new to the neighborhood walked up to me and said she’d read the story I wrote about walking Max.

“I liked the story, it had a nice feel to it,” she said, introducing herself. I thanked her, and she noticed Max in the front yard with me. “This must be Max,” she said, petting him a bit. A few days later, we saw her while we were on a walk, and I realized she lived about ten doors down.

I was raised in a dog-loving family, though my dad was the dog-loving king.

“He never met a dog he didn’t like,” my mom said many times. I feel much the same love for pups as my dad did. And I cried much harder after losing Max than I did after my dad died.

Franklin said beer is proof that God loves us. True, but pets are living, breathing, loving playmates that remind us of the simpler good things in life, like a sunny day, playtime at the park, a belly rub and a snack. They also remind us of our mortality, and of how important it is to enjoy that sunny day on a walk with a friend.

Super Steelers, Super City

Moments after the Super Bowl ended on Sunday, the explosions began. The snapping of firecrackers and booms of M-80s and larger fireworks echoed across Blackridge. The sounds of people honking car horns and screaming with joy from their car windows emanated from Graham Boulevard into our neighborhood. I didn’t hear a single gunshot, though it is not a rare thing in this part of town.

I went out front and lit off some firecrackers—they were left over from July 4^th a few years back, and I felt like I had to do something to celebrate. We’d spent a quiet Super Bowl with my wife’s parents at our house, so there wasn’t the usual hooting and hollering that you would get from a group of younger, more inebriated fans. More of a quiet celebration, but still all good, though different from the houses filled with family and friends that I remember from the Steelers’ four previous Super Bowl victories.

After lighting off a pack of firecrackers, I went back into the house and said goodbye to everybody. I had to do some legwork for a story.

As I drove down Penn Avenue into the heart of Wilkinsburg, the road was packed with cars whose drivers honked horns, whooped and hollered, waving Terrible Towels out of their windows as they passed. In the 300 block of Penn, a group of about 15 adolescents and teenagers edged into both sides of the street, hopping up and down and waving towels and hollering with joy to cars as they moved slowly past. Some of the kids, most of whom were black, wore shorts, while others wore Steelers jerseys. Few seemed to be wearing heavy coats, despite the chill and snow flurries. Many of the drivers happily honked back at the kids, while others hooted and flashed victory signs.

Traffic was moving slower than usual, partly because there was a lot more traffic than typical for a Sunday night. But all of the drivers seemed calm and not at all rushed. Down by the McDonalds on Penn, where several years ago Ron Taylor killed people in a racist rampage against whites, a brother with a wild hairdo sauntered down the sidewalk. He was wearing Steelers gear and every so often he would stop and place his hands on his chest, as if he would take a bow, while gazing at drivers passing by. When he got their attention, he’d raise his arms up in a “touchdown” pose, then wait to receive cheers and honks from those passing by. I saw him do this a few times, and he always got the desired response.

Every single person I saw driving by wore a pie-eating, blissful smile. Police officers in cars traveling down Penn Avenue grinned, amused by the scene.

From Wilkinsburg I headed over to Ardmore Boulevard to check out Forest Hills. As on Penn Avenue, Ardmore Boulevard was filled with cars carrying exuberant fans yelling out of their car windows and furiously waving towels to others passing by. Across the street from DeFazio’s Hair Salon a group of white kids, decked out in Steelers regalia and mostly appropriately dressed for the cold weather, cheered to passing cars, waving fists of victory and Terrible Towels. Drivers shouted back with joy and beeped their horns in frenzied staccatos.

Over in South Side and Oakland, mobs of young people flowed into the streets, some of which were closed off in anticipation of the celebration. Some of the expected idiocy of college students overturning cars and burning couches did happen, but not so much as might have occurred. Pittsburghers were pretty well behaved overall, as were our Steelers Nation comrades from outside the City of Steel who came here to celebrate with us.

Pittsburgh literally jumped for joy, long before the parade downtown yesterday that drew 250,000 fans.

The outpouring of love that the team received at yesterday’s celebration moved Steelers great Joey Porter, who wore a huge grin.

“I got chills up my back, looking at the sea of Black and Gold,” Porter said.

His teammates were just as ebullient.

“We brought one home for the thumb!” Big Ben told the crowd.

Coach Bill Cowher, who is legendary for the grimace he wears on the sidelines during games, smiled like a birthday boy.

“I was here in the Seventies when they talked about how great it was,” Cowher said to the adoring fans. “Now I can say, how great it is!”

The City of Champions had again reaffirmed its moniker and much of the Steelers Nation was here to celebrate. I realized that our town was hosting many people from out of town when I did a story on roadside vendors of Steelers regalia. I ran into a few former Pittsburghers while working on that story and other stories in the past few weeks. I also met compatriots of the Steelers Nation, such as George Woods, a truck driver and former police officer from Bloomingdale, Ohio.

He stopped by a Wilkinsburg vendor stand on Monday morning after the game, to pick up a Super Bowl T-shirt for his wife, Debbie.

Woods, 53, said he was raised a Steelers fan because his dad was from West Virginia and had always been a Steelers fan.

“Our whole block in my neighborhood is full of Steelers fans,” he said. “I stayed up for the game, though I had to get up at 3 a.m. for work. My only sad moments were when Bettis said, ‘The Bus stops here.’”

I mentioned how South Side had gotten a little crazy, which I know from experience (I lived there for a time) is liable to happen sometimes along East Carson Street.

“I would’ve liked to have been there,” Woods said with a faraway look in his eyes.

After a long drought, the Pittsburgh Steelers had again won the Super Bowl. In doing so, they reminded the world of our city’s inimitable work ethic, and of the tenacity with which Pittsburghers pursue their goals. The Super Bowl victory belongs to the team, but in a way, it belongs to all of us who consider ourselves a part of the Steelers Nation and share its ethic. We are the champions—black or white, middle-class or poor—all of us.

This story first appeared in Barnestormin.

The agreeably social ritual of walking a dog in winter

The wind whipped the snow at my dog Max and me as we walked down a street in our neighborhood the other night. Max was in his glory, dusted with a half-inch of snow.

A stranger walked up to us, reaching to pet the dog.

"I know somebody who doesn't mind the cold," she said through a tightly wrapped scarf while she patted Max on the head. "Yes, you like the snow, don't you?" she cooed.

She had been walking home from her bus stop when she stopped to greet us. She didn't seem to mind the cold, either.

There's stillness and inevitability to any good snowfall that can deeply affect a person. The harsh conditions can close a person up, or they can put a person in an expansive mood.

As Max and I headed up the hill, the tree branches were topped with an inch of snow, giving a quiet appearance. The snow blowing in my face reminded me of earlier in the day, when I was in rush-hour traffic, taking an hour to travel three miles. In the midst of the gridlock, it occurred to me that nature was doing her thing, without regard for how it inconvenienced us. It almost seemed that she was not particularly pleased with our constant rushing about.

"Slow down," nature says to us in the wintertime.

Men shoveling their walks said "Hi" to Max and me as we passed. Max walked up to one older man as the man was finishing his driveway.

"He wants to say 'Hi,' " I said to the man. Max smiled charmingly at him.

"Hello, pup," the man said as he reached to pet Max. "You're all wet."

People know Max, and they know me by extension. He's easy to pick out, with the black, white and gray coat of an Australian cattle dog that he shows off, and his size and curly tail, which make him appear to be part Akita. My wife adopted him from the pound before I came along, and he has brought me some respectability in my neighborhood. Max is OK with people in the neighborhood, and so I'm OK, too.

But it's not just Max's impression on these folks that make them more sociable -- it's the season.

The combination of the snow, the cold, and Max has become an icebreaker with some of my neighbors.

Even in the cold and steady snow of a late winter storm, some of my lesser-known neighbors found time to chat a bit.

As the dog and I strolled at the neighborhood park on a Saturday afternoon, shrieks of laughter echoed up the valley from the nearby golf course.

Parents stood barehanded and grinning as they watched their young children sled shrieking down a hill. I thought about how when I was growing up, we would toboggan on the Highland Country Club golf course. It reminded me that some things are timeless.

The untrammeled snow in the park crunched satisfyingly under my boots. In the bright sunlight, the shadows from the bare trees in the woods that ring the park had a sharpened, charcoal-sketch look. The path through the woods was still packed with snow, though it is well traveled. Patches of moss poked through a few bare spots.

Nature is serene, knowing her time is always right. People are not always so tolerant.

A while back, during one of the first snowstorms of this winter, I was riding an elevator in a Downtown office building with a well-dressed businessman. Seeing the snow on my coat, he mentioned that it was coming down pretty hard.

"I like the snow -- it kind of makes everything slow down," I said.

"I hate it," the businessman said with a grimace as he got off at his floor.

In the wintertime, snow squalls shake us and hiss, "Easy there." Hailstorms say: "Watch your step."

Snow is physical, tangible, natural change. It reminds us of the season and promises that spring is coming. The layer of snow covering everything acts like a muffler, insulating and muting at the same time.

And when nature is dressed in her winter white, we sometimes approach her, and each other, a bit more respectfully.

This story was originally published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Talking Past Tense

I recently saw an advertisement in the paper for the sale of the Original Hot Dog Shop. The ad specified that the name of the venerable institution—which years ago we college students called the “Dirty O”—was not for sale, just the business.

I shuddered at the thought. Given the trend in entrepreneurs naming establishments in Pittsburgh after things they once were, we might one day be eating at a Strip District restaurant called the Original Hot Dog Shop Sushi House. Or Pittsburgh might one day be graced with a Dirty O Strip Club.

Why not? Stranger things have happened.

When I was a kid growing up in Bellevue, we’d head across the bridge to West View Park, in West View. One of my buddies had an older sister who worked at the park, so we had an unlimited supply of tickets. We’d ride the rides all day, and we particularly enjoyed throwing up our arms as the roller coaster went around Horseshoe Bend.

Now, kids in North Hills have only an outdoor mall known as West View Park Shopping Center, which is located on the land that once was the park, to compare to what was a sweet amusement park. The shopping center’s greatest attraction now is its Giant Eagle.

This line of thinking was spurred when I read about Paint & Body, a new art and performance space opening up down the hill from my neighborhood, in downtown Wilkinsburg. The new venue is named after the former Earl Scheib Auto Body that the Penn Avenue building once housed. But I must admit that I find this trend of naming places after what they once were to be postmodern and boring.

Before you start calling me a player-hater, let me say that I know one of the curators of Paint & Body. I went to college with Laurie Mancuso, and she’s cool and I’m sure her place will be great. Also, I’ve written about redevelopment efforts in Wilkinsburg and other parts of Pittsburgh, and I support such efforts. But this trend of naming new businesses after things that once were has got to stop. Though it may be reassuring to some natives, such names just confuse the transplants to Pittsburgh.

A while back I was interviewing with an editor of a local publication. During the course of our conversation, she mentioned how when she first came to Pittsburgh, she didn’t understand the meaning of the name of one of the local redevelopments.

“I thought that Southside Works was a promotional statement about the neighborhood. I didn’t know it was a mill site,” she said.

I was incredulous. But not more so than when I heard that the former G.C. Murphy building in Bellevue was to be renamed the “517521” building. That’s the new name because the place has the addresses of 517 and 521 Lincoln Avenue, don’t you know?

I’m tempted to say that this trend started when the Mattress Factory art museum opened in a building that once housed a mattress factory in the North Side. I personally like the Mattress Factory, and I’ve written about it in the past. Still, I find that naming places after what they once were, regardless of their current use, is a bit disingenuous. Such naming practices are almost a way of trading on the reputation of what once was, without having earned the right to do so.

The artistes hanging out at the Mattress Factory may never have set foot inside a real factory, but still, how can you cast a pall on the brilliance of the installations? College boys hanging out in the Church Brew Works might never have attended a mass, but hey, they like the beer. After a while, the names begin to lose meaning.

I expect that soon we will have the Cookie Factory Condos in the old Nabisco plant in East Liberty. And who knows, if we’re lucky, Oakland may some day have the Schenley High School Business Development Center.

Given this trend, folks in the image gap committee might want to consider a new slogan: “Pittsburgh: It was here.”

There’s an old joke among those who aren’t Pittsburgh natives. If you ask for directions to somewhere in Pittsburgh, the joke goes, a Pittsburgher will give you directions using landmarks of places that no longer exist. For a while now, people in Pittsburgh have been naming their businesses after places or things that no longer exist. I just wish they’d be a little more original.

This story originally was published in Barnestormin.

Welcome, Pittsburgh ex-pats

Give me your homeowners tired of high costs, your newly equity-rich west coasters yearning to breath freer in western Pennsylvania… We’ve certainly got lost of reasonably priced property around here.

Maybe Pittsburgh should be billing itself as the place for expatriates to retire early. Certainly some of them are considering the prospect.

The other day I was reminded of this when I received an email from a reader in California that had stumbled on Gist Blackridge while looking for information on Blackridge, the community in which I live. The reader has been thinking of moving back to Pittsburgh, where he grew up. After all the years he’s been gone, Pittsburgh still feels like home, he wrote.

The reader said he’d visited Pittsburgh recently on a scouting trip and liked the Blackridge area, but he wanted my take on it.

“Does the Parkway serve as any sort of north-south line of demarcation or psychological barrier? And just how often do you hear the sound of gunfire wafting up the hill from downtown Wilkinsburg,” he asked, referring to a story that I wrote about living in the Wilkinsburg section of Blackridge.

I responded that Blackridge is a small community of about 600 homes, covering parts of Wilkinsburg, Churchill and Penn Hills. I walk the dog three blocks down the street to a 10-acre park that includes some woods, Blackridge Civic Association community center, a ball-field and a playground. On the other side of the park is Churchill Country Club.

I've heard gunfire in the summer, mostly. A mile or so down the hill is the Wilkinsburg hood, but even down there, many beautiful houses and commercial buildings are being rehabbed. I know some young professionals who live down there, and I know other people that are taking an active part in Wilkinsburg's revitalization. Wilkinsburg used to be one of the premier suburbs in Pittsburgh. It's coming back, slowly.

Is it dangerous here? Not for the average person who isn't dealing drugs and getting into gunplay. The Parkway doesn’t serve as any sort of demarcation or psychological barrier. I walk my dog along Greensburg Pike, over the Parkway and further into Forest Hills from time to time. Sometimes I'm walking him in the morning, while folks are backed up in rush hour on the Parkway. As I walk across the bridge over them I think how nice it is to be a freelance writer, and not have to sit in traffic to go five miles in thirty minutes.

The reader responded that my observations matched his impression of the area. I wrote back that I also like Blackridge because of its proximity to Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, Oakland and downtown. The Parkway and the Turnpike are close, too.

What makes Blackridge more interesting is that the neighborhood has a diverse group of people: singles, married couples, folks with kids, a majority white but a fair amount of blacks, and a substantial number of gay and lesbian couples. There are a lot of friendly dog-walkers, too, I added.

Part of what makes this community so quiet and comfortable is the trees. There are many large oaks and maples, as well as many mature ornamental and fruit trees (some of which may have come from the Black farm, for which Blackridge was named) that give this place an almost park-like feel. The trees are the structure that many gardeners here use to landscape their yards. The roots of those trees are firmly dug in.

The roots of former Pittsburghers still lay dormant in this region. We should encourage those roots and bring back those former residents, to bloom again where they originally were planted.

Homecoming

I noticed all of the yellow ribbons many months back, but it didn’t occur to me to ask anyone about them as I walked my dog down the tree-lined street in my neighborhood. The ribbons were on trees in front yards in about a dozen homes on this particular street—far out of the ordinary for my neighborhood. Then one day this past summer I was walking the pup and a couple of the neighbors on that street were talking, and the one lady had her dogs running around freely so that they almost accosted my dog.

The lady reined them in with shouts and leashes. As we passed by, I asked her why so many of the trees on this street had yellow ribbons wrapped around them.

“They’re for my son. He’s in Iraq. He’s a marine in Anbar province. He’s a jarhead,” she said.

I said I hope he is safe and comes home healthy.

She looked away for a moment, and took a drag from her cigarette.

“If I live that long,” she said ruefully.

I’ve often thought of that conversation as I’ve walked the pup past that lady’s house. I’ve wondered whether her son ever made it back, and if he was OK.

Several weeks ago, a Marine flag and a U.S. flag replaced the large ribbon around the tree in the lady’s front yard. The ribbons remained on the other trees in the neighborhood. I wondered if the flags meant that the young Marine had made it home safely. The other day, I found out.

As I was walking Max past the lady’s house, her dogs escaped through her front door and they both set on Max, with the male getting very aggressive and almost biting him. She ran out after them, and the little baby pup of the two came out and comically chased my 75-pound pup and me down the street. As we were walking away, I called out to lady: ”Is your son back? Is he O.K?”

She got a big smile on her face. “He’s back and he’s fine,” she said.

I believe the ribbons are still on the neighbors’ trees. It could be some time before they are removed.