Who Are Those Guys?

Some time ago, I asked whether Pittsburgh possessed a collection of living human curiosities -- pockets of weirdness -- to rival Baltimore (sorry; “Bawlmer”). The response here was underwhelming, but the Post Gazette sort of picked up my gauntlet the other day. It published a list of Pittsburgh “characters.” Do they rival Baltimore for sheer quirkiness and distinctiveness, not to say outright weirdness? Probably not. But they’re our characters nonetheless.

I’ll get to the details in a moment. But first, a preliminary thought: The PG’s presentation of the list carries a strong whiff of “all Pittsburghers obviously know these people, and loves them,” which carries an implicit “if you don’t know who these people are, then you’re not a Pittsburgher.” Here’s the line from the story: “Truly iconic Pittsburghers are known by everyone, from the city to the suburbs.”

The PG is trying to sell newspapers and page views, and most of its audience skews old – even older than me – which means that the PG may be punching exactly at its weight. But as a Pittsburgh immigrant, I read an echo of Border Guard Bob’s cousin. Border Guard Bob, many will recall, made a brief and inglorious (inglourious?) appearance in Pittsburgh years ago, locking up Allegheny County’s high school grads and college students to ensure that they wouldn’t take their talent to other places. BGB was supposed to be the plug in the alleged brain drain. His cousin faces outward; as geographers and demographers know, in-ward looking cities like Pittsburgh post sentries to block incursions from strangers. They communicate the message: Keep out; if you aren’t already one of us, you aren’t welcome here. Can you identify all of the people on the PG’s list? If not, you may not belong. Certainly that’s not the PG’s game plan. But there’s this “with us or agin’ us” echo.

I'm posting this from the San Francisco Bay Area, my home turf, where cultural "insider" and "outsider" are marked in their own but very distinct ways. In the Bay Area, the way to say "insider" is to know what's new and hip - not what's been around forever. San Franciscans can get as self-righteous as Pittsburghers, but San Francisco's current "characters" are, on the whole, children. Ask someone here to identify Herb Caen, or better - Miles Archer. If you know the answers, then you're past your prime. Clueless. Not part of the contemporary community.

Pittsburgh is the reverse: If you're too far ahead of the curve, then you're out of step with authentic Pittsburgh. Every city struggles with this problem in its own way.

Pittsburgh newcomers should steel themselves against the list below, but they can take heart: Pittsburgh – city and suburbs – is far less of a single cultural piece than traditionalists may think. I don't want to turn Pittsburgh into San Francisco, but a little out-with-the-old and in-with-the-new would lend the city some needed perspective.

Here are the details - the people included in the PG story. My reaction to the list is akin to Butch and Sundance’s reaction to the anonymous posse trailing them through the Rocky Mountain West: Who are those guys? My amateur knowledge of Pittsburgh's history and culture clearly has its limits. Who do you know?

• Vic Cianca: No idea. He passed away the other day and apparently was a traffic officer who entertained in the middle of the intersection.
• Sophie Masloff: Former Council President, Mayor, and now elderstateswoman of the Democratic Party machine.
• Ricki Wertz: Who?
• Lynn Cullen: TV talk show host maybe? Never seen her.
• Bob Prince: No idea.
• Chilly Bob Cardille: Ditto.
• Joe Hardy: 84 Lumber founder, spouse to younger women.
• Joe DeNardo: Weather guy? Not sure here; I rarely watch local TV news, but I think that I’ve heard his name.
• Dan Rooney: Ambassador to Ireland. Patriarch of one of the most beloved sports franchises in America.
• Michelle Madoff: I’ve never heard this name before.
• Cyril Wecht: I certainly know about this guy, and he is certainly a character. The title “Allegheny County Coroner” doesn’t begin to do him justice.
• Paul Shannon: Who?
• Bruno Sammartino: I’m in the dark.
• John Fetterman: Making noise as the Mayor of Braddock.
• Phat Man Dee: Heard of him her, yes. (Corrected per Bram's comment; obviously, I haven't heard much.)
• John McIntire: Heard of him, too, but have never heard? read? him.
• Andy Warhol: Changed art. Maybe ended it.
• Tom Sokolowski: Warhol Museum director and a real character. Absolutely know him.
• Chuck Tanner: Need to be a baseball geek from a certain era to get this one, but I was reading the sports pages carefully and watching the sport on TV back in the 70s. Former Pirates manager.
• Mario Lemieux: Not a character, but a hero to hockey fans.
• Judge Jeffrey Manning: Nope.
• DJ Scott Paulsen. I assume that he’s on the radio. Stations still use DJs? I thought that they relied on comedy teams and “hosts.” The music comes from satellites.
• David Newell: Watched him and the Neighborhood gang in first-run.
• Sally Wiggin: Also a local TV person. In 12 years here, I have probably seen 12 minutes of her.
• Drummer Spider Rondinelli: A musician, I’m guessing, but I don’t know more.
• Paul O’Neill: Tried to bring sense to the Treasury. A titan at Alcoa and part of Pittsburgh’s Old Guard.
• Beano Cook: An unfortunate nickname (I assume that this is his nickname?). He has something to do with sports.
• Richard Mellon Scaife: Owns the Trib. Scion of the right wing, or its bête-noire, depending on your perspective. Major divorce battle still pending, AFAIK.
• Donnie Iris: Say it with me - “Dawnie.” Love is like a rock. Got this one.
• Bingo O’Malley: No idea.
• August Wilson: Love his work and loved it before I moved here and learned about his life in Pittsburgh.
• Billy Hillgrove: Sure, I listen to the guy on Sundays while watching the Steelers on TV. He’s an imposing and amusing presence in person. If he dialed back his schedule a bit, he might be a bit sharper. “Check that.”
• Steve Pellegrino: No clue.
• Teenie Harris: Yep. The history of Pittsburgh on film.
• Mike Lange: He shoots, he scores. The voice of the Penguins.
• Patrice King Brown: TV person. I don’t know why I know this.
• Ken Rice: Another TV person. He’s also my neighbor. Why are so many TV people on the list?
• Franco Harris: I’ve actually met Franco. I believe that I was watching the live TV broadcast of the Steelers/Raiders game in which he made “The Immaculate Reception.” At the time, I would have been cheering for the Raiders.
• The sports fan trio of Maurice “Mossie” Murphy , “Tiger” Paul Auslander, and Lawrence “Deuce” Skurcenski: I am at a total loss. What sport? More than one? Are these guys fans? Players? Something else?
  
  Finally:

Fred Rogers. An obvious choice, though surprisingly, not everyone liked his work. There is a line of thinking that goes, if everyone is special, then no one is special. I don’t quite buy it.

Myron Cope: Well, of course. More than anyone else on the list in my view Cope epitomized “classic,” inside-the-Parkways Pittsburgh. Knowing the source, meaning, and proper application of “Yoi” (Double Yoi, and the save-for-tremendous-occasions Triple Yoi) really marks a certain generation of Pittsburgh residents, if not Pittsburghers themselves. Do you (or did you) “get” Myron? If so, traditionalists would say that you get to keep your card as a member of the Diaspora. I went to a screening of a Pittsburgh film at the Carnegie Science Center IMAX theater years ago, and after many minutes of beautiful sweeping views of the region the film ended with an uncredited but unmistakable voice that said, in the simplest Pittsburgh-ese, “Bye, Now.”

My list, a start:

I’ll add these folks, a completely incomplete and idiosyncratic list of Pittsburgh characters. Some are here because I think that they're fabulous people; some are here because their personal and/or professional distinction is just too compelling; some are here because they are – or were -- or are in the process of becoming -- “characters.” What they have in common is (and in some cases was) a willingness to challenge the status quo, to see the world on their own terms and not just ours. Do you recognize them? Then you might be a Pittsburgher. Or not.

Randy Pausch. The Last Lecture touched a lot of people, but the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU is his gift to Pittsburgh.

Herb Simon and Allen Newell: Ever wonder who that computer science building at CMU is named for? These guys. Legends.

Bob Brandom and John Norton. And all those folks in Philosophy and Philosophy of Science at Pitt. Absolutely the cream of the crop, and characters to boot.

John Murray. A lifetime of distinction and leadership, and a pretty fair teacher and scholar as well. If you ever have a chance to hear him deliver an address, go.

Eve Picker. Eve helped to reshape the Downtown residential real estate market over the last, say, decade, and her social entrepreneurship is pushing the city to rethink itself. Tireless advocate for cycling. (Why aren't there more women on this list?)

Carl Kurlander. My Tale of Two Cities filmmaker and tireless civic booster. Being from Pittsburgh isn’t enough. You have to come back.

Ralph Bangs and Larry Davis at Pitt’s School of Social Work. Shedding light on Pittsburgh’s under-studied and under-addressed problems at the intersection of race and poverty. (Notice a lot of Pitt people on the list? That’s no accident. People in the region have little idea what a phenomenal university Pitt has become over the last 15-20 years. )

Agnus Berenato. I get inspired just seeing her collect her luggage at the Pittsburgh airport. Playing hoops for her must be amazing.

Bill Strickland, at the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild.

Dennis Roddy. When he is on his game, he is the best writer at the Post-Gazette, and whether he’s on his game or not, he is a newspaperman’s newspaperman (and I use that gendered term on purpose; back in the day, they were newspapermen even if they were women). The Post-Gazette employs a bunch of talented characters (not as many as it used to, of course), but Roddy is tops.

Chad Hermann. This is inside baseball, I know (or inside ice hockey), but Chad is a wicked sharp writer (and a more acute critic than anyone writing above the Morning File hed, right, left, or center) who has essentially forced himself upon the Pittsburgh media scene – with enormous success, judging from what I understand to be his readership. I don’t always agree with him, and we even once settled our differences in the pages of the Post-Gazette. But if TV is a hot medium, then Chad is hotter.

PittGirl, now known as Virginia (Ginny) Montanez, at That’s Church. The tragedy in Haiti brought out her best.

Not From Here

What does it mean to be from Pittsburgh?

I know that the folks at the Post-Gazette mean well, but when a piece of this blog shows up in the paper I cringe almost as often as I smile. Today was a "cringe" day.

A snippet of this post about Mt. Lebanon made it into Greg Victor's "Cutting Edge" file this (Sunday) morning. The snippet is weirdly out of context, since the point of the original post was not really to make Mt. Lebanon look like any ordinary suburb, but to argue that no one does Lebo (or any community) any favors by turning a blind eye to its problems.

I didn't cringe at that part, though; I'll tell anyone who asks that I know a lot more than your average newspaper reader about the stresses and challenges of those few who still practice daily journalism. The occasional mis-quote and out-of-context anecdote are par for the course. No one should lose sleep over those, on either end of the writing/reading relationship.

I cringed at the characterization of Mt. Lebanon as my "hometown." Not that Mt. Lebanon is a bad place to be from; lots of souls are happy to call it their place of birth. But as most people who have been reading Pittsblog for a while know all too well, I wasn't born in Mt. Lebanon. Not raised there. Not born or raised in Pittsburgh, even. Never set foot here until 1998. I'm "from" California, Menlo Park to be precise. (Demographically, that town is a little bit like Mt. Lebanon, though it has a substantially larger non-white population these days.) Menlo Park is now part of the Silicon Valley. It wasn't part of the Silicon Valley when I was growing up there, because the Silicon Valley wasn't the Silicon Valley then; it was still the Santa Clara Valley, and a lot of large landowners back then grew prunes rather than D-RAM.

I spend a lot of time writing about Pittsburgh (and about Mt. Lebanon, though less about the latter these days) because the place fascinates me -- as a native Californian. California has little history and cares not a whit for the history that it has.  Californians have an almost bizarre, unhealthy belief not only that things can be changed for the better but that things will change for the better -- somehow. (This explains the rampant joking about the state's simultaneous constitutional and budget crises.) When Californians move to Pittsburgh, as I did 12 years ago, it often takes a while to realize that Pittsburgh is just really old, that it has a lot of history, and that Pittsburgh takes its history really seriously. Change comes slowly, and at a price. All of those things are important. Before moving here I had lived in Boston, and Connecticut, and Washington, DC, and each of those places often scores well on two out of those three standards, but none of them necessarily goes three for three. Pittsburgh is not unique, but it's unusual.

In Pittsburgh, lots of things can be made better here, but a Californian "let's just fix it!" attitude is almost always the wrong first step toward progress.

Of course, history is all relative. On a high school trip to England many years ago, my buddies and I received a stern warning from a castle guard who objected to our scrambling over part of a ruin: You Americans! You have no history! We laughed. We were from the land of the Golden Gate Bridge.

So my interest in Pittsburgh arose initially from the fact that this place seemed so completely foreign to me. Maybe I now seem to know some things that only natives are expected to know.  If so, it's because I've done a lot of reading over the years. I still think that I haven't figured it out. On the blog and elsewhere I still sometimes trip over ancient understandings that I haven't uncovered.

The reference to Mt. Lebanon as my "hometown" is no doubt a quick and forgivable assumption in a context where there isn't time to check a fact or the staff resources to do so. The Post-Gazette isn't The New Yorker, which is famous for its fact-checking (though even TNY gets tripped up once in a while). But the error is something subtly telling nonetheless, not about the paper but about the region's expectations: Pittsburgh is the antithesis of California when it comes to population mobility. California is filled with so many who migrated from elsewhere that some people on the West Coast are surprised to learn that people were really born in California. In one of my old offices in Palo Alto, I was part of a very small, informal club of strange people who had been raised locally. (I'm even a second generation Californian, and my kids are third generation!) If I'm reading an old factoid correctly, Pittsburgh is the largest city in the country with such a high proportion of "born here" residents. In Pittsburgh, in other words, the default expectation is that this is your hometown; in California, the default expectation is that it is not your home state.

Of course, as I understand the data, these days more people are leaving California than are moving in, and Pittsburgh is guardedly optimistic that in the recession, people are leaving economically blighted regions for places that appear to be more stable - like Pittsburgh. What does any of that mean for Pittsburghers' view of history? Perhaps nothing. But stay tuned.

Enough With Mt. Lebanon

My suburb, Mt. Lebanon, is Pittsburgh's Lake Wobegon, a place where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average. The skies above Mt. Lebanon are always clear and blue; everyone is extremely pleasant. Neighbors never gossip about each other or send harrassing or annoying emails. The Fire Department retrieves cats from trees. There is enough money in local government coffers to pay for most anything that the residents of the town would like to have. No one ever goes hungry, or gets hurt.

Mt. Lebanon, in other words, is the antithesis of Pittsburgh itself, which is a place so absorbed with its own deficiencies as a community, at least when Pittsburghers are talking among themselves, that I once characterized it as an Oreo cookie: soft and chewy on the inside, tough and crunchy on the outside.

That Mt. Lebanon, the Mt. Lebanon of pleasantness and kindness, is also fictional. It bears very little resemblance to the actual Mt. Lebanon, which is full of caring people and mean people, under-assessed homes, barren public bank accounts, the shouts of joyful children, and the hurt, and anger, and horror of violent crime.

Not that anyone else in the Pittsburgh region cares. Really, why would most of Pittsburgh want to read more about Mt. Lebanon?

I post all of this not to put down Mt. Lebanon (which is a nice place to live, despite its many flaws), but instead to point out that rumors of Mt. Lebanon's thriving -- like rumors of Pittsburgh's renaissance, which is a much more interesting topic -- are grossly exaggerated. So when you read me quoted in a Pop City story about a new "positive" blog in Mt. Lebanon, referring to Mt. Lebanon as "Pittsburgh's Brooklyn," don't take any of that only at face value. Mt. Lebanon is the Brooklyn of Pittsburgh in the sense that like Brooklynites, Mt. Lebanonites (or Mt. Lebanese, or Mt. Lebonians, or whatever) are given to an extraordinary amount of public navelgazing. I also said "I'd be willing to bet that Mt. Lebanon is Pittsburgh's Brooklyn," but the hedge got omitted, which turns a statement of opinion into a statement of apparent fact! Is Mt. Lebanon really Pittsburgh's Brooklyn, even in this narrow sense? How could I know for sure?

I do know this. Unlike Brooklyn, Mt. Lebanon is not the hippest, most happening place in the region. Far from it. Of course, it may soon be as expensive to live in Mt. Lebanon as it now is to live in Brooklyn.

And unlike Brooklyn, Mt. Lebanon has a very, very difficult time accepting critical self-scrutiny. Community blogging is a great thing, and I'm all for more of it. As the mainstream media sinks slowly in both West and East, for better or worse amateur journalism is what we will need and will get. But long before the new "positive" blog was published last month there already were other civil, community-oriented but critically minded blogs in Mt. Lebanon -- I founded one, and it's still going strong, thanks to Joe Polk and Tom Moertel!

Pittsburgh has some of these, too, and some constructive critics in the mainstream (and alternative) media. I won't call them out by name. You and they know who they are. It is a great thing to celebrate the positive about the region. I do that here, too, from time to time. But the bad and harmful and dangerous and needs-to-be-improved can't and shouldn't be ignored.

Pittsburgh's Next Decade: The Suburbs

[Second in series of occasional posts; read the first one here.]

This is how I began this series:

So long to Pittsburgh's last decade. What will the next one bring? Long-range forecasts are easier in some ways than short range ones; my list of predictions for Pittsburgh's 2010 includes only one sure thing. My view of the next decade is on surer footing. These things take longer to come into focus - and most of them have been emerging for some time already.

But I've been traveling a lot, a working some more, not paying close attention to local events and news, and when that combination hits then the blog suffers. Momentum is a difficult thing to recapture. Fortunately for me, occasionally little local issues just rise up and slap me in the face.

Long-time observers and occasional readers of this blog will remember the simmering passions over the distribution of tax burdens between City of Pittsburgh residents and commuters who live in the suburbs. Suburbanites (suburbanauts?) cruise into the City each day in large numbers, soak up the benefits of a broad range of public services, then retreat beyond the City's boundaries, free of City taxes. It is often argued that much of the financial crisis that afflicts the City could be solved by rebalancing this tax burden (a commuter tax, in other words), and even if that wouldn't save the City, then the rebalancing is in order as a matter of simple fairness.

Let's assume that there is a lot of sense in this suggestion. The future-of-Pittsburgh question is whether the economics are likely to pay off. Is the money going to be there? My strong sense is that over the next decade, some of Pittsburgh's suburbs, and their residents, are going to be doing pretty well, others not so well, and still others - well, to call them "suburbs" might turn into an insult to that term. A commuter tax is going to fall unevenly on the suburbs themselves, and it's difficult to tell whether, as a group, the suburbs are going to fair well enough to provide a strong source of City income.

The North Hills suburbs are likely to be big winners over the next decade, in terms of population, income - and jobs. To the extent that people continue to commute down the I-279 corridor into Pittsburgh, that's good news for commuter tax proponents (and bad news for everyone who has to endure the horror that is McKnight Road). To the extent that the Cranberry and its neighbors continue to attract jobs, including jobs that used to live in or might have been destined for Pittsburgh or Allegheny County, then commuter tax proponents are likely to be disappointed. This, of course, shows one of the weaknesses of the commuter tax concept. If jobs are mobile -- and pace Chris Briem's work that shows that in Pittsburgh's case, many of them have not been -- then a differential tax burden may influence how they move.

South Hills suburbs, by contrast, are creaking, and over the next ten years they likely will continue to do so. Population growth has slowed. Income growth will follow. No one in the South Hills is building employment clusters comparable to what we've seen in recent years up north, though new investment around the Pittsburgh International Airport suggests some reason for optimism - especially if the airport itself somehow manages to build more traffic. PIA as the hub of South Hills community economics is indicated by shifts in South Hills retail: Century III and South Hills Village malls are both struggling; retail in Robinson and North Fayette is expanding.

The doubtful future of the South Hills was brought home to me (again) recently as a little financial scandal erupted in my home township, Mt. Lebanon. I've written before that Mt. Lebanon is the canary in Pittsburgh's financial coal mine. If the suburb that most of Pittsburgh both envies and loves to hate can't get its financial house in order, given its professional planning and city management apparatus and the wise elders who have dominated the town for decades, then the rest of the region has little chance for stability. And Mt. Lebanon's financial house is collapsing all around us, while public officials are scrambling for cover.

Last year the township's School Board voted to proceed with construction of a brand new high school building (tear down most of the old, build up the brand new) at a nominal cost of roughly $110 to $115 million (I say "nominal" because the real cost is likely to be much more). That's a lot of money in anyone's book, and I and others in town argued that the the time wasn't (and isn't) right for such a huge capital investment. Fix what needs to be fixed, we said, and wait until the financial weather clears for the rest. But the Board disagreed, relying in part on the promise that 15% of the project's cost would be reimbursed by the Commonwealth. That wasn't a special deal; reimbursement for school projects is a standing obligation of the Commonwealth.

Last week, local residents were informed that the reimbursement rate would be roughly 8% - meaning that the local share of the project, the amount that has to be financed by local debt and school taxes - has now jumped by a couple orders of magnitude. Couple that with other state-mandated increases in school spending over the next several years, and Mt. Lebanon -- once the showpiece of public education in Western PA -- is looking at tax increases over the next few years on the order of 40% - 50%. (For local blog posts describing this fiasco, take a look here and here.) I refer to this as a little scandal because School District officials publicly relied on the 15% number in selling the project to the taxpayers, successfully sold the project in the public's mind, and now they have backtracked to the 8% number. One school director has tried to explain what looks like a bait-and-switch in terms that make the sale of collateralized debt obligations look simple and sensible. She argues that the high reimbursement rate is fair because it applies to the nominal cost of the project; the new, low reimbursement rate is also fair because it applies to what the district and its taxpayers will actually pay to finance the project. Since the latter figure is what comes out of my pocket, I think that it's fair for me and my fellow critics to be outraged: The town was told that it would have to pay one thing (based on a high reimbursement) and now is being told that it will have to pay much, more more (based on a low reimbursement).

Besides the fact that I still hold out hope that the Post-Gazette will send its crack investigative reporters to Mt. Lebanon (I'm advised that this is unlikely; too many PG staff live here!), and besides the fact that other South Hills suburbs have built or renovated schools of comparable scope at significantly less cost (Baldwin, Upper St. Clair), the real lesson here is a broader one: Pittsburgh's older, southern suburbs are not aging well. The pool of resources is relatively fixed; fights are erupting over their distribution. The center of Pittsburgh's suburban gravity is shifting north, where the resource pool is growing. Among other things, that means that South Hills suburbanites are likely to fight a commuter tax even more intensely than their North Hills neighbors will - because the South Hills pie is shrinking while the North Hills pie is growing.

That leaves points west and east. I see much of suburban Pittsburgh through my South Hills lens, so I have less to offer here. Points west (down the Ohio River - Aliquippa, Beaver, and so forth) and points east (and south) up the Mon River (especially up the Mon River) are not looking healthy today, and there is little reason to expect that they will do more than continue to limp along for the next decade. [Sharp-eyed readers will note that PIA and Robinson are really west of downtown Pittsburgh, not south. I think that lots of Pittsburghers, region-wide, think of PIA and so forth as "south" even while they drive the Parkway West to get there.] Things may get worse. The battle for Braddock is under way right now; we will see what happens there. Will there be anyone in Braddock, ten years from now? The older generation that ties that town to its past will be almost completely gone by then; the newer generation that is trying to reimagine the place (I'll call them "Socio-Industrial Entrepreneurs") will have to fish or cut bait, because their money will either come in or dry up. In truth every town up that way and beyond will become a battleground of one sort or another over the next decade or two, if it hasn't already. Homestead is an exception that partially proves the rule; via the Waterfront development, Homestead effectively resolved its own battle by voluntarily annexing itself, economically speaking, to Squirrel Hill. I wonder whether the region will have the stomach and the energy to fight the same fight over and over again, town by town. Close the hospital? Close the high school? Close the grocery store? It may. It may not. There are a lot of City of Pittsburgh neighborhoods that need that stomach and energy, too.

Points due east, out the Parkway to Monroeville and beyond, look somewhat more promising to me, with a future that is not as comparatively bright as the future of the North Hills, nor as comparatively bleak as the South Hills. I've been watching the progress of Vocollect's proposed expansion in Penn Hills, as a signal of the future of the eastern economy. Gradually, that project is moving forward, but it has been a struggle at every step.

Of course, few people think of down-river and up-river communities when they think of a commuter tax. The coming battles over saving those towns are significant to their residents and to the broader identity of the Pittsburgh region, but in economic terms, they are cost-sinks. The question there is how many resources is Pittsburgh willing to sink into them. The commuter tax question raises the income question, that is, the benefit question: How can the suburbs help Pittsburgh, not how can Pittsburgh help the suburbs? The mental model of a commuter tax is white-collar professionals driving in from Wexford, Upper St. Clair, Churchill, and Murrysville. Those communities and their neighbors are worth watching especially closely.

The Cookie Crumbles

Over and over, Eat 'n Park sues companies that sell smiley face cookies, claiming infringement of Eat 'n Park's registered smiley cookie trademark. Over and over, the Post-Gazette, oddly, runs a big story about these lawsuits. (Here's another story. And another.) And over and over, the defendant's cookies lack the Eat 'n Park cookie's distinctive nose. Every year in my Trademark Law class, I show my law students pictures of the trademarked cookie and the allegedly infringing, noseless cookies, and the students always say that no one, even a child, would be confused.

I wasn't going to post a note about this latest lawsuit, but then today I saw the cover of the January 2010 issue of FamilyCircle magazine, which is ablaze with noseless smiley face cookies and which offers, on page 132, a detailed recipe for how to bake them. The FamilyCircle cookies look suspiciously like the cookies that Eat 'n Park just sued. Is another lawsuit in the offing?

A breathless Pittsburgh awaits the answer.

Pittsburgh's Little Disappointments

Late this afternoon, at John McGinnis & Co., a great food store on Route 88 in Bethel Park:

Me (approaches deli counter in an empty store).

Counterman: Can I help you?

Me: I'd like to buy some salami and pepperoni.

Counterman: Sorry. We closed the deli at 5:45.

Me (checking my watch, and noting that nothing has been moved from the deli case): My watch says that it's 5:40.

Counterman (holding up his clock, which shows the time to be 5:45 on the nose): Sorry. The deli's closed.

I guess the store is doing so well that they don't need the business. The counterman wasn't rude. He was just indifferent. I'll buy my sliced meats somewhere else from now on. When I can, I like to help out local businesses that are looking to help me.

Pittsburgh's Next Decade: A Beginning

[First in an occasional series of prospective posts.]

So long to Pittsburgh's last decade. What will the next one bring? Long-range forecasts are easier in some ways than short range ones; my list of predictions for Pittsburgh's 2010 includes only one sure thing. My view of the next decade is on surer footing. These things take longer to come into focus - and most of them have been emerging for some time already.

Today: Pittsburgh's leadership.

In my view this is probably the most important thing that will happen in the region over the next ten years: The Pittsburgh-born and bred older white male leadership of the region will pass from the scene (though not necessarily this world), to be replaced by a younger corps of leaders that is more diverse in every way: age, geographical origin (within the US and beyond it), gender, professional background, color. In business, the not-for-profit community, higher education, and medicine, this shift is already underway; it will accelerate in the next 10 years. Pittsburgh's political space is a tougher nut, but it, too, is slowly evolving.

Years ago, at Pittsblog I made a fictional address to the annual meeting of the Allegheny Conference, and the Post-Gazette was kind enough to reprint it, accompanied by some brilliant art. That photo, alas, is not available with the online version: it was a murderer's row of the while male titans of Pittsburgh industry long past. The not-so-subtle message -- conveyed better by the image than by my piece -- was that not much had changed.

Even today, not much has changed. Most of the captains of Pittsburgh industry, and of most other things in the region, are still older white men. Is there a generation of younger white men waiting to take their place? Sure, in a sense; there are always white men waiting to step up and be handed the reins of power. Look across the leadership landscape, however, and you see a generation of competitors for those roles -- the CEOs, the presidents, the executive directors -- who don't fit the standard model, who wouldn't have been eligible to belong to the Duquesne Club, back in the old days, and who don't necessarily feel comfortable there even now. (An aside: Is there another city in America where so much cultural power is concentrated in a single building? I have wondered for many years what would happen to Pittsburgh if the Duquesne Club were forced, by circumstance, to close.)

Competition is the key; over the next decade, no one, white male or otherwise, should expect to rise to the top because of where he or she went to high school, or because he or she grew up in the City of Pittsburgh and the other person didn't, or because he or she has the connections and resources to appear in the Post-Gazette's Monday "SEEN" report. Again, the political space is a tougher nut here, and in all areas the Old Guard likely won't go without a fight. But in time it will go, if only because there will be too many talented non-standard alternatives; even Pittsburgh's famous obtuseness about change will yield, if grudgingly at times, to the need to find the best talent, not just the usual talent.

Pittsburgh's 2010: My Crystal Ball

‘Tis the season for predictions. Here are mine for Pittsburgh for 2010. These aren’t hopes or wishes; they’re what I think we will see in the region over the next 12 months.

1. Sports: Pirates observers (few people today hold themselves out as fans any longer) will endure yet another losing season in 2010, but the team will fall short of 100 losses. This is hardly a prediction, of course; it’s all but a guarantee. The Pirates are well on their way to becoming this generation’s Washington Senators. (The team has a couple of options: Make a deal with the devil, and lure Tab Hunter out of retirement. Or execute a move similar to one made famous at the trial of Al Capone: Take the entire major league roster, coaches, managers, and all, and ship them to the Pirates’ Class AA affiliate, the Altoona Curve. Bring the entire Curve roster and staff to Pittsburgh. Put them in Pirates uniforms. A AA-grade franchise deserves AA-grade players. Play ball!)

2. Arts: 2010 will be a breakout year for Pittsburgh’s emerging “young creatives,” especially the visual artists and musicians who have been quietly taking over the North Side and some northeastern neighborhoods for much of the last decade. Look for at least one Pittsburgh-based performer to take the national stage. The arts communities in Lawrenceville, Garfield, and the North Side will overtake the institutions of the Cultural District as the faces of Pittsburgh’s arts culture.

3. Business: The number of tech spinoffs from Pitt, CMU, and UPMC will increase. Pittsburgh will emerge as an East Coast hub for Google, which will hire more staff and occupy more space in East Liberty/ Larimer than it currently forecasts. At least one long-time “name” Pittsburgh company will go out of business in 2010. Pittsburgh’s unemployment rate will trail the national unemployment rate for an additional 12 months.

4. Education: Pitt and CMU will continue their two decades-long journey to the upper echelons of the international higher education community. The dollar value of sponsored research at both Pitt and CMU will continue to increase; their respective endowments will begin slow recoveries. The tuition tax debate of 2009 will enable the emergence (or in some cases, re-emergence) of Pittsburgh’s “second tier” of colleges and universities as leading voices on the future of region’s economy and culture: Duquesne, Robert Morris, Chatham, Carlow, Point Park. Negotiations over nonprofit contributions to the city’s finances, in the wake of the tuition tax détente will reach another crisis point in 2010 before a deal is reached.

5. Politics: The Ravenstahl administration will experience a serious corruption scandal in 2010. Much of the city will yawn, and the Republican and progressive Democratic Party constituencies that have been trying to unseat the Democratic machine for years will gaze at their navels, still too disorganized to capitalize on their good fortune. Harrisburg will not bail out the city.

6. Demographics: The Pittsburgh media will search for good news in Pittsburgh’s modest but growing Latino and Indian and South Asian communities. More often than not, they will miss the story. New grocery stores are interesting and colorful and fun for shopping; new professionals migrating to Pittsburgh have a greater bearing on the region’s prosperity. 2010 will be Pittsburgh’s year of the woman (women?) in leadership, across politics, business, and the nonprofit sector.

7. Law and Order: The U.S. Justice Department will announce a major antitrust investigation aimed at a Pittsburgh institution. The homicide rate in Pittsburgh will increase in 2010.

8. Community: The opening of the Consol Energy Center will anchor a revitalization of the Uptown neighborhood, but the Rivers Casino will continue to struggle to meet its revenue projections. Demand for housing will raise housing prices sufficiently that Pittsburgh loses its status as the nation’s most livable city. This will be a good thing.

9. Media: A Pittsburgh-based newspaper will cease daily print publication in 2010. Blogs and other social media won’t fill the gap.

We will see how things turn out. Check back a year from now.