Just One More Thing ...

I feel like Lieutenant Columbo.  Just one more thing:

I'm on Twitter @profmadison.  Most of the content there will be tweets of posts at my law-and-technology blog, madisonian.net, which continues even as Pittsblog expires.  But Pittsburgh notes and other things may sneak in from time to time.

To paraphrase the words of the classic country song, how can you miss me if I won't go away?

Pittsblog: Eight Years is Enough

Pittsblog followers -- and a few loyalists are still out there, I believe -- have noticed the steady decline over the last many months in the frequency of posting here.  There are lots of explanations and no excuses.  The reality is that I have simply gotten too busy to give the blog regular attention and too interested and engaged in things going on both outside of Pittsburgh and in my little corners of Pittsburgh to spend energy writing anything more about the place.  This will be the last Pittsblog post.  I promise.

Earlier this Fall, I started a short series called "Fresh Eyes on Pittsburgh," and I promised five posts.  I managed to produce three of them, and you can find them here (on the economy), here (on Pittsburgh society and community), and here (on culture, particularly sports).  I had hoped to write about Pittsburgh politics, and about Pittsburgh's environment (natural resources, I mean), but looking back and looking forward, I just don't have the time or the energy.  For the omitted posts, I throw myself on the proverbial mercy of the blogosphere.  I have long planned to wrap this whole thing up by the new year.  I started Pittsblog way back on December 31, 2003, and I'll end it just shy of the blog's eighth birthday.

I stopped blogging here once before. That turned out to be a false start, as it were.  Then, it turned out that there was more that I wanted to say.  Now, that's not the case.  (Plus, the blogosphere as a whole is steadily being absorbed into the Twitterverse.  How many of the old-time, once-novel Pittsburgh blogs are still around?  Tube City may be the last.)  The blog will stay up, at least as long as Google will have me.  My final word, for what it's worth, will end up in print.  The Pittsblog series known once and for the foreseesable future as "The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization" is being adapted into a chapter in a forthcoming edited collection on the renewal of American's cities.

Eight years of blogging are too much to wrap up in a single post.  The most important thing to say is thanks.  Thanks to all of you who read, who continued to read, who commented, who disagreed and criticized and told me that I was and am wrong, very wrong (yes - I mean that), and most of all who reached out in one way or another.  Perhaps the most important benefits of my blogging here have been the gifts of friendship that I received from blogging colleagues; media colleagues; law and business colleagues; arts, tech, and culture colleagues; higher education colleagues; and non-colleague colleagues -- individual souls, often named, sometimes anonymous and pseudonymous -- who took time to engage at Pittsblog in the construction of the continuing project that is Pittsburgh.  Many of the people who began as my Pittsblog readers and correspondents have become my Pittsburgh friends. 

True gifts, I have learned, are given again.  They stay in motion.  Pittsblog will close, and it closes now.  But the point is not farewell, let alone a Pittsburgh-ish "Bye now."

The point is this:

Hello.

Adios to Aldo Coffee

Coffee aficionados in Pittsburgh already know this:  Aldo Coffee in Mt. Lebanon has closed.  New ownership will carry on the practice of high quality coffee in the same venue.

Aldo's valedictory blog post is here.  The store opened in 2004, and at the time it was in the vanguard of a lot of things in Pittsburgh:  High quality coffee as an alternative to Starbucks.  Explicit concern not just for the quality of the beans and the flavor in the cup, but for fair treatment of the people who grow and sell the beans.  Aldo was an early adopter of broad-based social media strategies to support a small business.  Today, outstanding coffee houses are flourishing all over Pittsburgh.  Marketing via social media is the rule, not the exception.

Along the way, Aldo provoked.  It made a lot of friends.  It also alienated a few people.  The real cost of a cup of coffee at Aldo reflected the real costs of making coffee.  Was that honesty, or pretense? 

Above all, and in the face of a lot of locals who thought (and perhaps still think) that Pittsburgh is fine just the way it is, Aldo unsettled the status quo.  In this Pittsblog post, I linked to some Aldo comments about the future of localism and small business. Pittsburghers take enormous pride in their neighborhoods and in their small towns.  They still buy an awful lot of coffee at 7-11 and Sheetz and Dunkin' Donuts, and when they go upscale, they are often spotted at Starbucks. 

Thanks, Rich and Melanie, for giving us the love of your labors over the years.

They named the dog, "Aldo."

Pittsburgh's Decline v. The Decline of Steel

Chris B. appears to be running out of patience with the conventional history of modern Pittsburgh, which blames the losses of jobs and wealth in steel towns such as Braddock squarely on the shoulders of the decline of the steel industry.  As the data shows, and as Chris repeats over and over, the decline of places like Braddock is a complex tale.  It got started long before steel started to slide, and it has all kinds of causes, some steel-related, some not.

Relevant posts:

The Blame Game (Nov. 22 2011)

Braddock mythos redux (Oct. 18 2009)

Speaking of real estate - Braddock (Dec. 1 2008)

"The Cruel Lesson of Penn State"

This post is off-topic for Pittsblog.  I am posting it -- a link to a piece at Slate about the sources and costs of childhood sexual abuse, written in the wake of the disclosures coming out of the Penn State football program -- because it is brilliant, moving, humbling, chilling, and in my opinion absolutely essential reading.   The author is my friend, and I am moved beyond words by his courage.

Read "The Cruel Lesson of Penn State:  How what happened in State College forced me to confront my own abuse."

Innovation Practice Institute at Pop City

In connection with Global Entrepreneurship Week, now underway, Pop City has a nice feature on Pitt Law's Innovation Practice Institute, where I am the Faculty Director.  Under the leadership of our Executive Director, Justine Kasznica, who is the focus of the piece, the IPI has really blossomed over the last ten months.

The Pop City story has links to current IPI events in Pittsburgh.  The IPI's home page is here.  Justine and I have big plans for additional IPI programming, including new courses for law students and a research program to complement the teaching and community engagement.

Fresh Eyes on Pittsburgh, Part 3

Here is the next, overdue, installment on my brief “Fresh Eyes on Pittsburgh” series. Read the first installment for the background and the premise.

Today's topic: arts and sports in Pittsburgh.

Well, sports. There's quite a bit going on in Pittsburgh's arts world - music, visual art, dance and theater and other performing arts, craft, writing and publishing -- but sports knit Pittsburgh together in public ways that the arts world, at least today, just can't. As to arts, there are the big public institutions: the Cultural District, the Carnegie Museums, the big performance stages Downtown and elsewhere. There is Pittsburgh's still-in-rediscovery arts history: jazz and blues, Teenie Harris, August Wilson, Andy Warhol, Hollywood legends like Gene Kelly and Shirley Jones, more recent they-come-and-then-they-go performance spaces (the Oakland Beehive, Club Laga), and undoubtedly other things that don't come immediately to my mind as I sit here typing. And there is Pittsburgh's emerging and increasingly robust contemporary avant-garde: hip hop stars Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller, Girl Talk, the gallery "scene" in Lawrenceville and whatever you call the cool stuff that's happening in East Liberty in and around the Waffle Shop and the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater. Pittsburgh is no New York and never will be, but there is a growing amount to be proud of and to be challenged by in Pittsburgh, and that's a great thing.

But I digress.

Sports are the undisputed kings of Pittsburgh's cultural life. And when I say "sports," today I mean "football," and when I say "football," for almost all intents and purposes, I mean the Steelers. High school football rules Friday night social life in Western Pennsylvania to a degree that's matched only in Texas and parts of Ohio, I am told, and college teams in the region elicit passions of their own. I'm looking at you, Pitt and Duquesne, as well as programs like RMU, CMU, and smaller regional programs like Cal U., W&J, Slippery Rock, and IUP, among others. Moreover, Penn State and its alumni are massive presences in Pittsburgh, which is something that surprised me when I moved to Pittsburgh more than a decade ago. But today the PSU presence here makes sense -- Penn State counts several hundred thousand living alumni -- making it all the more disappointing that Pitt and Penn State haven't played each other in football in many, many years. I'll venture only one other comment here about Penn State: I have never encountered any other university anywhere where the identities of so many alumni and students are so directly bound up with the image and influence of one person -- Joe Paterno -- and the school's football program.

That observation regarding Penn State might be scaled up and over and applied to Pittsburgh's relationship with the Steelers:

The Steelers are Pittsburgh; Pittsburgh is the Steelers.  More than a handful of people in Pittsburgh are not Steelers fans, or don't care about football at all, or don't pay attention to when and where the games are played. But it is impossible to live in Pittsburgh and not have a sense of the role that the team and its history occupy both in community culture and in defining the world-wide Pittsburgh "diaspora" of ex-pats and those who fancy themselves Pittsburghers just because they have that kind of imagination. Stuck in Reykavik on a Sunday afternoon? They have a Steelers bar for you. The place is called Bjarni Fel. Walk in wearing your Steelers jersey, and you'll be greeted like a hero. When I first moved to town, a colleague who had recently joined the Pitt faculty -- a woman, and an athlete but not a football fan -- told me that she had quickly decided to pick up a bit of Steelers trivia solely because she wanted to be able to keep up at parties. The line that she mastered, in 1998, was this: "How about that Immaculate Reception?"

I grew up rooting for the 49ers and the Raiders, and nothing like Steelers culture exists on the West Coast, or just about anywhere else, I am told, with the possible exception of Green Bay. And by "Steelers culture," and by the phrase "Steelers are Pittsburgh; Pittsburgh is the Steelers," I mean the sense that in Pittsburgh, the Steelers aren't just a team, and their fate isn't just a series of wins and losses, the Super Bowl or bust. If they play well and play honorably -- that second part is key -- then Pittsburghers internalize their success. There's a spring in their steps on Monday morning if Tomlin's crew does well, as if they -- the fans -- have done something swell. If a player or the team lets us down, on the field or (worse) off of it, then the hurt cuts deeply. A philandering quarterback or drug abusing wide receiver betrays the entire regional family, not just his teammates. The ownership family, the Rooneys, are lionized as patrons of Pittburgh; the family history -- the source of the money that helped the Chief (Art Rooney) acquire the team -- is well-known but rarely mentioned. It's a skeleton in our own closets.  This isn't "12th Man" stuff; this is positively tribal, and medieval, or even ancient.  Most modern sports franchises "represent" their cities in the sense that they are mercenaries, hired to do battle with rival cities in metaphorical substitutes for real wars fought between Greek city states.  Pittsburgh's  battles are still metaphorical, and our mercenaries are still mercenaries, but the city-state idea is pretty vivid here.  The players are us; we are the players.  The players get their cash from the team, but their spiritual and some financial subsidies from the whole place.

What I like most about the Steelers, though, is that the team reciprocates. The current ownership, the coaches, and the players all "get" the fact that they are accountable to the fans in a way that directly reflects the region's sense of itself. The Steelers are not simply supposed to win, and to win a lot, and to win more Super Bowls than any other NFL franchise. They are supposed to win honorably, and when they lose, if they play dishonorably, then they deserve to lose. After the Steelers lost to the Baltimore Ravens a week ago on the final Ravens drive of the game, I listened to a lot of fans, and read a lot of commentary, that concluded that the Steelers simply didn't deserve to win. That was said in sadness, not in anger. On that day, on that field, the other team was simply better. Pittsburghers like to think that they respect the superiority of those who vanquish us, when that superiority is justly earned.  It is almost tangibly Homeric, not in the "epic" sense, but in the "narrative of morality and virtue" sense.

I suspect that this cultural meaning of the Steelers, more than the brilliant 1970s history of the team or the anachronistic name of the franchise, accounts for its stunning popularity among women. I don't have the statistic handy, but I believe that it is common knowledge that the Steelers count more women among their fan base than almost all other NFL teams -- and that the team maintains this edge in an era when female NFL fandom is on the rise. I like to think that women "get" the culture of civic and communal virtue that surrounds of the Steelers precisely and explicitly in a way that men, stereotypically, only "get" implicitly. What happens on the Steelers field and what happens off the Steelers field are virtually equivalent.

That's my theory, anyway. [I wrote a little more about the Steelers, here.]

It turns out, if you're a newcomer to Pittsburgh, that there are other professional sports in town. The Penguins, in the National Hockey League, have had a remarkable run of success in the last 20 years (well, two runs, really, one called "Mario" and the second called "Sid") and Pens fans are as passionate as they come in ice hockey. In some quarters, Pens fans may be more fanatic about the team and the sport, as a team and sport, than many Steelers fans are about the Steelers. I am not a hockey fan, although I have cheered when watching Game 7 of a certain Stanley Cup final. My status aside, though, ice hockey simply doesn't have the resonance across the entire region that football does.

There is baseball. The Pittsburgh Pirates play in a stadium that is as lovely and inexpensive to attend as any in Major League Baseball. The whole world knows that the team has not had a winning record in close to 20 years, a record of futility for high-level sports that is unmatched on the planet. That's a shame, because underneath Pittsburgh's hard-edged football and ice hockey helmets is the soul of a baseball town: a place filled with community and family and children following in their parents' sporting footsteps, a town with a blue-collar and working class ethos (despite the visible presence of a long-standing and supremely wealthy upper-class crust) that is perfectly suited to a game that here and there recalls its blue-collar, working class origins.

And that note leads me, finally, to the sport that I care most about, which is the other football, soccer. Soccer, like baseball, was once a blue-collar, working class sport, and in many countries around the world, and in some communities in the US, it remains the sport of the people, rather than the sport of kings. Soccer in Pittsburgh moves along quietly, below the radar. Youth soccer here is booming, as it is booming everywhere. There is a semi-pro team in town, the Pittsburgh Riverhounds, that refuses to go away despite modest attendance and modest performance success, but that has been doing the right thing for a decade -- working and teaching in the community -- and may yet re-emerge as a publicly successful sports franchise. The most interesting thing about soccer in Pittsburgh is just how long the sport has been played here. Organized soccer in Pittsburgh goes back roughly as far (about 100 years) as organized American football. The men who worked in the coal mines in Beadling back then -- Italians -- founded an athletic club that is still, today, one of the top youth soccer clubs in the United States.

In the end, I think that's the thing that Fresh Eyes see in Pittsburgh.  Underneath the contemporary performance and community connections are decades of history, waiting to be excavated.

Enough for today. Next in the series: Politics and government. The last post in the series will look at the environment. And then I'll be done.