The Pittsblog PR Blitz

For years, Pittsblog has been on the receiving end of a steady stream of press releases, requests that I "cover" various events, invitations to partner with this service or that service, and offers of freebies. Look around the blog and check the archives; I'm pretty consistent about ignoring this sort of thing.

But over the last few months, the pace has increased. Anyone want to venture a theory as to why? In part, I've made it somehow onto a list or two, and lists beget lists. Beyond that, I'm at a loss.

For example, here's an email that I received today. Certain information has been redacted.

Hello Michael,

My name is [name] and I’m writing to you on behalf of AT&T. While I know mobile phone carriers/service does not typically fall within Pittsblog’s coverage area, but given a few of your past posts I thought you might be interested in hearing more about AT&T’s operations in the Pittsburgh area. In addition, it’s clear your readers are tech-savvy and like getting Pittsburgh-specific information that affects the way they communicate while they’re around town.

If you’re up for it, we’d love to provide you with some pretty unique,
behind-the-scenes insight into the AT&T wireless network in Pittsburgh. The company has been continuously updating and expanding its coverage network in the city and Larry Evans, Vice President and General Manager for AT&T Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, would welcome the chance to chat with you about wireless networks and what really goes into ensuring that mobile device users in Pittsburgh have coverage when and where they need it. We’d take you inside the network infrastructure and use that as a backdrop for the discussion. Photography will be allowed, with a few security restrictions.

Is this meeting something you might be interested in? If so, are you free on April 9th by chance? We’d like to coordinate the meeting at a time during the day that is convenient for you. Let us know what might work.

Thank you,
[name]
Fleishman-Hillard for AT&T Corporate Communications
www.attrealvoices.com

Weird.

Not a Pittsburgh Jeremiad

The NYT published a little essay that distinguished good old jeremiads from their more radical and less common counsins, manifestos. That reminded me that just about three years ago, I posted what I think is a real manifesto -- a manifesto, not a jeremiad, because it doesn't rely on rust-colored glasses and isn't grounded in nostalgia for a distant, better past. The "Manifesto for a New Pittsburgh" is still lying there, waiting for more Pittsburghers and Diasporans to seize its day. Eventually I'll find time to post an update, but glancing at the seven points of the manifesto prompts me to think that Pittsburgh has made some progress on those fronts over the last three years.

Get Creepy at Pittsburgh's Fairmont

Pittsburgh gets a real luxury hotel tomorrow, as the Fairmont Pittsburgh opens downtown.

I was fairly creeped out to learn that "high-priced deluxe rooms" at the hotel will come equipped with binoculars and telescopes, "so guests can zoom in on some of the rich architectural detail at the tops of some of Downtown's landmark buildings," or so said the Post-Gazette.

Are my creeps are unjustified? Is the new Fairmont merely joining the ranks of other high-class hostels that enable peeping by their guests? Or is this a sly nod to the fact that Jimmy Stewart's hometown is Indiana, Penn.?

Student-Led Innovation

Google Fiber or no Google Fiber, Pittsburgh has at hand a nearly incomparable resource for its own economic development: students. What that resource needs is infrastructure, investment, and incubation.

Today, from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, comes an invitation to cultivate those things:

"Students have contributed (pdf) some of the most important advances in information and communications technologies—including data compression, interactive computer graphics, Ethernet, Berkeley Unix, the spreadsheet, public key cryptography, speech recognition, Mosaic, and Google.

Today, with the right kind of support, students can play the role of innovators again—by leading the way in the development of broadband applications. In the same way that Mosaic and Google drove demand for today’s Internet, new applications could drive demand for a gigabit/second Internet and 4G wireless. Indeed, a key component of the Federal Communications Commission’s recently released National Broadband Plan is the development of new broadband applications.

Now is the time to launch an initiative that would cultivate, with student involvement, such a wave of innovation. Although it’s impossible to predict what the next generation of applications will be, universities, companies, and students could work together under such an initiative, which would serve as a sort of “Petri dish” where new ideas could incubate and grow. This initiative could be led by the private sector, encourage multi-campus and even global collaboration, build on investments already made in high-speed research networks such as Internet2 and National LambdaRail, and take advantage of a growing number of grants from the Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP).

The initiative could have a number of elements, including:

• Campus-based incubators for the development of broadband applications, with access to high-speed networks, cutting-edge peripherals, software development kits, and cloud computing services.
• Relevant courses that encourage multidisciplinary teams of students to design and develop broadband applications.
• Competitions that recognize compelling applications developed by students. Some existing competitions that could serve as models include Google’s Android Developer Challenge, Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, and the FCC-Knight Foundation’s “Apps for Inclusion” competition.

Let us know what you think of this idea. You can send us e-mail at broadband@ostp.gov."

The Future of Pittsburgh Political Journalism?

Is the Mayor stonewalling Councilmember Natalia Rudiak and her investigation into how city services were delivered during February snowstorms? That is what I infer from this PG report.

I don't pay a lot of close attention to Pittsburgh politics, so my take - based on the lack of general outrage over this little spat - is that this is pretty much business as usual.

Meanwhile, much of Pittsburgh is in a major flutter over what Big Ben's latest bonehead move means to the high-toned image of the Steelers. As always, I enjoyed Gene Collier's take on that situation.

Which leads me to the point of this little post:

What if Collier were sent over to cover Luke Ravenstahl and Pittsburgh City Council?

New Book: Ordering the City

In discussions of the life of the city (of any city), "planning" and "neighborhood-based development" conversations take place over in this corner. "Policing" conversations generally take place over in that other, unrelated corner.

Bringing those conversations into a single dialogue is, I take it, one of the important contributions of a new book titled "Ordering the City," by Notre Dame law professor Nicole Garnett.

I haven't read the book, but I picked up a reference to it on a law professor blog that I read, and that hosted a "virtual book club" about it earlier this week. My takeaway is that the author hasn't set herself up to run a consulting practice selling big themes to cities trying to rebuild themselves, but that she has done an excellent job of capturing the fact that any given city and its problems are full of complexities and nuance.

Here's a blurb about the book, from the publisher's site:

This timely and important book highlights the multiple, often overlooked, and frequently misunderstood connections between land use and development policies and policing practices. In order to do so, the book draws upon multiple literatures—especially law, history, economics, sociology, and psychology—as well as concrete case studies to better explore how these policy arenas, generally treated as completely unrelated, intersect and conflict.

Nicole Stelle Garnett identifies different types of urban “disorder,” some that may be precursors to serious crime and social deviancy, others that may be benign or even contribute positively to urban vitality. The book’s unique approach—to analyze city policies through the lens of order and disorder—provides a clearer understanding, generally, of how cities work (and why they sometimes do not), and specifically, of what disorder is and how it affects city life.

Here are links to posts with thoughtful comments about the book:

• Comment one


• Comment two


• Comment three


• Comment four


• Comment five


• Comment six


• Comment seven (Professor Garnett chimes in)


• Comment eight

CNN Misses the Boat

CNN.com covers the cupcake boom and misses the Cupcake Class entirely. High-priced cupcakes aren't just food. They're Veblen goods.

The Virtues of Small Business

From the March/April 2010 Washington Monthly, a powerful account of the job-suppressing costs of corporate consolidation -- that is, the economic virtues of small business:

It is now widely accepted among scholars that small businesses are responsible for most of the net job creation in the United States. It is also widely agreed that small businesses tend to be more inventive, producing more patents per employee, for example, than do larger firms. Less well established is what role concentration plays in suppressing new business formation and the expansion of existing businesses, along with the jobs and innovation that go with such growth. Evidence is growing, however, that the radical, wide-ranging consolidation of recent years has reduced job creation at both big and small firms simultaneously. At one extreme, ever more dominant Goliaths increasingly lack any real incentive to create new jobs; after all, many can increase their earnings merely by using their power to charge customers more or pay suppliers less. At the other extreme, the people who run our small enterprises enjoy fewer opportunities than in the past to grow their businesses. The Goliaths of today are so big and so adept at protecting their turf that they leave few niches open to exploit.

The Laws of Blogging, Re-Explained

This story by the Post-Gazette about "cheap shots by anonymous bloggers" offers some entertaining anecdotes and quotes from solid expert sources, but it leaves the layperson wondering what, exactly to take away. When it comes to blogging and commenting, what are the rules of the legal road? The following quick-and-dirty guide applies to blogs, bloggers, and those who comment at blogs; to message boards and chat rooms; and to social networking sites that allow commenting, such as Facebook.

A disclaimer: This is not legal advice; I am not your lawyer (or anyone's lawyer!).

There are two, related legal areas: rules relating to anonymity, and rules relating to the responsibilities of the site or blog owner, author, and/or host. Let's take the second question first, even though it isn't the focus of the PG article.

The basic rule is that someone who provides or uses what's called an "interactive computer service" is not legally liable for content posted by another provider or user of that interactive computer service. The rule is found in section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 . The idea is that if you host a site, and someone else comes on to that site and says something defamatory, then you aren't legally responsible for what that other person said. That rule requires a little bit of explanation, because its meaning isn't obvious, and because there are some exceptions.

First, what is an "interactive computer service"? Congress wrote the law in 1995 and 1996, before blogs and social networking became popular; Congress was looking at message boards and things like Compuserve and the old AOL. So courts have taken the idea that Congress was looking at -- online services run by one person or enterprise so that other people could chime in there -- and extended it to today's media. Blogs are "interactive computer services," most of the time, and companies that host blogs, like Google, are also "interactive computer services," most of the time. ISPs are "interactive computer services." Both the Facebook company and individual Facebook profiles are likely to be treated by courts as "interactive computer services."

Second, what kinds of things are the site owner, or host, or author off the hook for? The owner/host/author is not considered to be the "publisher" or "speaker" of content that is provided by someone else. The language of "publishing" and "speaking" is a clue that the law is mostly concerned here with defamatory statements and invasions of privacy and related things. In the offline world, say the world of newspapers, if the newspaper publishes a defamatory letter to the editor, then the newspaper is legally liable for the defamation, because (among other things), the newspaper "published" the letter - even though the letter was written by someone else. In the online world, section 230 means that the online equivalent of the newspaper - say, the blog - is *not* liable for the content of a defamatory comment, because the law says that the blog did not "publish" the comment. (As in many areas, the law is using conversational terms in a non-conversational way.)

There is an important limitation here: If the site owner (host/author, etc.) does anything to the comment or information "provided" by others -- anything that means that the host/author etc. is not merely "passively" receiving the information on the site -- then there is a risk that a defamation plaintiff would claim that the immunity from liability provided by section 230 no longer applies. Simply screening comments before posting them is usually not enough to defeat the application of section 230, but any kind of editing or editorial scrutiny might cross the line. In other words, section 230 creates a kind of perverse incentive for blog owners and hosts to ignore the content of what commenters and other posters say. The more active the host, the more risk the host buys.

Third, what are the important exceptions? The fact that Section 230 doesn't apply to "active" blog owners and hosts, who are still potentially liable for defamatory statements by other users or commenters, is one important exception. The other big exception is that Section 230 provides no immunity if the plaintiff in the lawsuit is complaining about a violation of intellectual property rights. In other words, a blog owner or message board (or, say, peer-to-peer service) has no immunity under section 230 if users or commenters are infringing copyrights, patents, or trademarks. That doesn't mean that blog owners, etc. are automatically liable; regular copyright, patent, and trademark law applies. It just means that the special rule of section 230 does not apply.

Note, then, that there is another kind of perversity at work: Victims of defamation and invasions of privacy - which are almost always individuals - have fewer rights against blog owners and message board operators than owners of copyrights, patents, and trademarks - which are almost always corporate interests. And enterprises that want to innovate in technologies that enable consumers to be productive and creative with content floating around in our culture - say, modern updates of things like the Sony Betamax - don't have the kinds of legal protection for their efforts that the promoters of, say, Facebook do.

Hmmm. The PG story mentions a little bit of the history of section 230, and quotes my law professor friend Dan Solove, a privacy law specialist, for the proposition that the statute has gone too far and should be cut back. Dan says that a service provider that has reason to know that a statement is defamatory should be liable for the defamation. There is a formal logic to that argument; the problem is that the "reason to know" concept is incredibly difficult to work with in practice. I have other law professor friends, telecommunications law specialists, who believe that section 230 has done a good job at fulfilling its purpose: encouraging lots of speech on the Internet, without the chilling effect of over-zealous plaintiffs' lawyers.

Now to the second question: anonymity. Anyone who runs a message board, chat room, or blog deals with anonymous and pseudonymous commenters and posters who sometimes test the boundaries of good taste - and who sometimes leap far beyond it. Not all claims and cries of "defamation!" are flung by thin-skinned folks who can't take sharp criticism or parody; there are real victims out there (including Ken Zeran, who was the the unfortunate victim of some genuine abuse in the leading case interpreting section 230).

Because of Section 230, most of the time those victims cannot sue the site owner or host - even though the site owner or host usually has more resources to compensate the victim, is easier to find than the source of the defamation, and in many cases is in a better position than anyone else to keep the defamation from appearing in the first place. The real defendant has to be the person who posted the comment. But because the allegedly defamatory comment or post was made anonymously or pseudonymously, the plaintiff has relatively few ways to find out who that defendant is. The best way, often, is to ask the site owner or host or author, and in lots of cases that information -- the commenter's name, if the site owner knows it, or the commenter's IP address -- will be supplied voluntarily. But for a variety of good reasons, the site owner may not be willing to turn over the information voluntarily. So the plaintiff files a lawsuit, names the "real" defendant by a John Doe pseudonym, and then tries to use a subpoena -- legal process -- to require the site owner or host, which may be a non-defendant third party, to turn over whatever information the owner or host has regarding the poster's identity. Often, that's just an IP address, and even with the IP address in hand, the plaintiff may still have a lot of work to do to connect an IP address to an actual human being, including further subpoenas and consulting with forensic IT experts.

This skirmishing takes place *before* the plaintiff has proved that the comment or statement was defamatory. So, site owners and hosts that resist the subpoenas have gone to court to "quash" them, arguing that the First Amendment protects the right to speak anonymously, and unmasking the identities of anonymous speakers before the defamatory character of their speech has been proved would pose an unwarranted threat of "chilling" legally protected speech. These are pretty standard arguments with a lot of support in precedent, so courts have developed a variety of "balancing" tests. These vary a bit from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Generally, a plaintiff can defeat the First Amendment argument and enforce the subpoena if the plaintiff can show that the relevant anonymous defendant can be specifically tied to specific statements that are highly likely to turn out to be defamatory.

Of course, if you're a blogger or message board operator or host of a site that permits comments and contributions, there are a lot of things that you can do to minimize the risk that any of this will rise up to bite you. You can try to enforce a "no anonymous commenting" policy, which is highly imperfect but which sends a message to most people that certain standards of civility apply. You can permit anonymity but screen comments for bad behavior, either before they are posted or after they are posted, or both. (As I noted above, this brings certain risks in terms of liability, but it may also decrease the likelihood that a dispute will come up, or that a dispute will escalate.) You can ensure that your own contributions set a tone that doesn't cross the line in the first place, so that you don't invite tit-for-tat responses. You can do these things in a variety of combinations.

But there are no guarantees. Know your rights, on all sides of the playground.

Googleburgh

Google is moving into expanded space in Bakery Square. Now Pittsburgh is among the many cities across the country that are competing for a slice of the Google Fiber project.

Read that site's description of the benefits that Google Fiber would bring to Pittsburgh:

• Enhanced education, job training and workforce preparedness for the 21^st century
• State-of-the-art delivery of health services to a much wider population base
• The network infrastructure to support the new innovations for which Pittsburgh is famous, in research, technology, development, education, health, business, the arts, and many other areas
• Far better Internet access for all, potentially at reduced cost
• An increasingly attractive place for businesses to locate, expand, and stay
• An opportunity to continue to stand out as the "Eds and Meds" hub that continues to reinvent itself (as highlighted during the recent G-20 Summit hosted by President Obama).
• A chance to showcase and extend our regional strengths in computer science, information technology, and robotics; life sciences, energy and the environment, and materials.
• New jobs, both creating the new infrastructure and working with the new applications it enables.

Pretty great, right? There's hardly a piece of Pittsburgh that wouldn't be made better by Google, given that it's solvent and aggressively future-oriented and Pittsburgh is neither. The city is outsourcing its visioning, and there's nothing wrong with that. So why stop with fiber? How about:

• The Googleplex of the Alleghenies, formerly known as Pittsburgh International Airport. Use Google's network management technologies to get Pittsburghers where they need to go, when they need to go there, without public subsidies.
• Pothole management, street repair, and snow removal: Infrastructure is infrastructure. While we're at it, how about a Google service that minimizes the likelihood that drivers will slow down needlessly when they approach tunnels?

That's just a start. (Chime in with other, better ideas.) The problem is that we don't have Al Franken. Duluth, also in the running for Google Fiber, has Al Franken. (Some people might say: That's no problem at all.) As Chris asked in the comments to the last post, who is Pittsburgh's Al Franken?

Pittsburgh Tech Falling Behind?

Pittsburgh may be grabbing some quick headlines with the push to snag Google-based broadband IT, but Pittsburghers know that the surest way to the region's heart is through its stomach, not its ISPs.

And on that score, Pittsburgh's leading edge - its Cupcake Class - may be falling behind the tech curve.

Montreal's Clever Cupcakes is offering cupcakes with edible QR Codes that work - the codes point to the Montreal Science Center. Check them out at left.

An earlier version of the Clever Cupcake QR code pointed to the company's website.

Why didn't Pittsburgh think of that? The ball is in the Burgh's cupcake court.

Photo attribution:http://www.flickr.com/photos/clevercupcakes/ / CC BY 2.0

(H/T BoingBoing and kuriositas)

Pittsburgh Business Here and There

Let's start with the Buy Local movement, to which this morning's PG devotes many inches: Spend $50 at 3 local businesses, goes one saying, and you'll help to save your neighborhood. Or, Buy Fresh, Buy Local -- agricultural products.

The problem is -- buying local isn't enough, and sometimes it's the wrong thing to do.

Because in the same edition of the PG (today's!) there is another great story about a local business that is thriving -- online. Rollier's Hardware is an icon of the local Mt. Lebanon economy, a still-successful example of a vanishing breed: the local hardware store. It is a fabulous store (though not quite as fabulous as a store that I visited last summer, McGuckin, in Boulder!), yet it has enthusiastically and successfully made the leap to hyperspace. Rollier's is behaving like Willie Sutton. Sutton robbed banks, he is alleged to have said, because that's where the money was. But Rollier's is on the right side of the law. Even the greatest local businesses need to do what they can do to survive, and that sometimes means taking business out of local communities elsewhere. It's not show friends, it's show business. No local business can survive - nor should it - without a good value proposition.

The myth here, in other words, is that local businesses deserve local support just because they're local. And that's just not true. Out here in the South Hills, I am surrounded by local businesses that I love to support with my money. But I don't support them just because they're local; I support them because I get a great return on my dollar - that combination of price, quality, convenience, ambiance, and service that makes it worth my while to buy at one store rather than another. Rollier's is one. There's a little pharmacy on Mt. Lebanon Boulevard, Asti's, that's a second. Empire Music on Washington Road is a third. Mt. Lebanon has a lot of coffee shops and a lot of restaurants. Aldo Coffee, on Washington Road, has the best coffee, in my opinion, and the friendliest environment, but every shop has its partisans. Many of the restaurants in Mt. Lebanon are good; none are really great. There's one restaurant out here, though, that stands out for its sheer exuberance: Cocina Mendoza, which is also on Mt. Lebanon Boulevard (and, as a result, is actually in Castle Shannon, not Mt. Lebanon). The food is pretty good, too. And the margaritas.

There are plenty of local shops whose disappearance would not be mourned. I won't name them (well, I gave an example here), but they are the complacent ones: They haven't improved their products in years, or even changed them. Their prices are uncompetitive. And worst, they are indifferent to their customers. I'm willing to pay above-market prices if I get something else in return, but a store that exhibits indifference to my patronage is a store that deserves to disappear. Give that space to someone who wants my business. You want to stay in my community and make it better? Don't plead with me to spend my money. Give me a reason to spend my money. There is no charm or value in a neighborhod filled with local - but crappy - stores.

Is that selfish on my part? Unsympathetic to the plight of local merchants? Perhaps. But only an idiot opens a store and simply expects people to shop or eat there. It's a lesson that I learned 25 years ago, as I was finishing school and working as a lawyer representing a lot of small company clients. There is no money in retail, and most new restaurants fail. Want to make a little money? Be the exceptional restaurant that survives? Work for your customers. I'll call it local capitalism. Or better, a Sell Local movement. If the economy is going to grow, locally, nationally, and internationally, then businesses need to compete.

Speaking of selling locally, yesterday's PG followed Chris with a story about the struggling Delta flight from Pittsburgh to Paris. It seems that not enough people are following Chris and Eve and heading to the Continent for fun and profit. Empty planes to Paris will put the Allegheny Conference on the hook to pony up the subsidy that it promised Delta if the planes were empty.

And you know what? Forget Paris. Paris is a fantastic city, but Pittsburgh's European romance is mostly based on another marketing myth - that Pittsburghers should want to play in the big kids' playground, which means Europe. Well, we'll always have Paris. Personally, I think that the Allegheny Conference should take a page out of the Rollier's playbook. Follow the money. I would much prefer that air service marketing efforts go toward something that I suspect has a bigger impact on both the Pittsburgh population at large and on local business -- but that relies on the assumption that Pittsburgh is a second (or third) tier city. How about flights to the West Coast? Pittsburgh is down to one nonstop flight per day to San Francisco, which is increasingly the number one West Coast gateway to Asia, and one nonstop per day to Los Angeles, home of the film industry that is on the cusp of making Pittsburgh a genuine film production home-away-from-home. Right now, if my experience is a guide, those flights aren't always full. Why work on increasing those numbers - butts in seats, and planes in the air? The West Coast, Asia: That's where the money is.

The End and Future of History in the Strip

Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority has given the thumbs' up to the possibility of later agreeing with the idea of a new development plan for the Strip District, specifically the stretch of the Strip that runs closest to the Allegheny River, from the Strip up to Lawrenceville.

Predictably, even the idea of discussing the possibility of change to the area brings out the custodians of Pittsburgh's rich industrial and working class history. In this instance, the custodians are the occupants and other friends of the produce terminal building on Smallman Street. In the yet-to-be-approved-let-alone-finally-planned-development, the terminal might disappear, or it might be modified. The current tenants likely would be relocated.

According to the PG the other day, these folks -- current tenants of the building, and in some cases very long-time tenants -- are not obstructionists. But they are nostalgic.

Without [the wholesalers in the Terminal] "Why call it the Strip anymore? Change it to something else. That's the way I feel about it."

["In the end, predominantly, the old ways lose out to the new. I think the Strip is probably the last bastion of what Pittsburgh used to be, at least a certain flavor of it."

So it isn't the building itself, which is sort of "iconic," if you turn your head in a certain direction and forget that it was, for most of its life, a warehouse adjacent to a now-displaced railyard, and a not particularly distinguished warehouse at that. Franklin Toker's recent book, Pittsburgh: A New Portrait, the current bible of Pittsburgh's history and architecture, says this about the terminal:

It was to coordinate trains and trucks that the mammoth Pennsylvania Railroad Fruit Auction & Sales Building was erected in 1926. The building covers five blocks in length, but it is relieved by touches of Art Deco on the caps of its miniature buttresses. Rail traffic to Pittsburgh had just about ceased in 1983, but the City of Pittsburgh had the structure renovated that year to ensure a base for the local produce trade. The far end of the structure, diagonally opposite St. Stanislaus, houses the galleries and workshops of the Society for Contemporary Craft, which introduced a note of cultural diversity in the Strip.

No word in the PG yet regarding the impact that potential relocation of the Society for Contemporary Craft would have on the authentic character of the Strip.

In other words, I'm not pro-development or anti-development here. We'll see whether any development really makes it to the table, and that will likely take years. Rather, the little episode is emblematic of Pittsburgh's choice of relevant history.

As just about everyone knows, Pittsburgh is proud and possessive of a specific period of its history - the period that people actually lived and remember, the history of the last 50 years (their own history) and the history of the 50 years before that (their parents' history). It's the history of life being reasonably prosperous and stable (if brutal from an air- and water-quality standpoint). By the beginning of the 20th century, Pittsburgh had pretty much arrived as a city. Its neighborhoods mostly had the character that they have today. What Pittsburghers like to remember and preserve is that feeling of being more or less secure, and in many cases of being on top of the world. Even the first Renaissance, which changed a lot of things, especially Downtown, was premised on Pittsburgh wanting to maintain its pride of (first and then-present) place.

The history that Pittsburgh remembers is not, on the whole, a history of growth, expansion, vision, and change. But that's part of Pittsburgh's history, too - the history of Pittsburgh in the 19th century, when things were changing rapidly and dramatically all over the city, and when Pittsburgh had a plausible claim to being the source of boundless vision. Several years ago, the country celebrated the 200th anniversary of the expedition of Lewis & Clark, which as we all know launched in St. Louis, underneath the Gateway Arch. (Well, the Gateway Arch was actually built a few years later.) But Pittsburgh was justly proud to point out that the expedition's boat was built and launched here, and Lewis sailed from Pittsburgh to pick up Clark, on their way to St. Louis.

Suppose, in other words, that Pittsburgh's sense of history were suffused with the adventuring spirit of Lewis & Clark at the beginning of the 1800s as well as the community spirit of the Poles who built St. Stanislaus at that century's end.

What would Pittsburgh think of the future of the Strip then? What about the Society for Contemporary Craft, as well as J.E. Corcoran and Superior Produce and La Prima Espresso?

And while the western end of the Strip seems not to be part of the redevelopment discussion, what about the future of the Seagate Technology Building, which is part of the Strip and should be part of the future of that neighborhood? The building houses state of the art clean room and lab space - and as I understand it, currently sits empty.

History is often about you. But it isn't always about you.

Spring Means Gardening

I saw a note recently about a resource for urban gardeners in Pittsburgh called Grow Pittsburgh, which is offering courses in growing vegetables in an urban setting, among other things. Here's a link to GP and their programs.

Grow Pittsburgh is a private non-profit organization. There are also some terrific if underpublicized public resources for Pittsburgh and Allegheny County gardeners, supported through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Penn State University.

I posted a note about a bunch of these things -- the Cooperative Extension Office in Pittsburgh, and the Allegheny County Master Gardeners Program -- last summer. Here's a link to that post. For many years, the Master Gardeners have presented a series of inexpensive lectures -- $15 per! -- titled "Backyard Gardening." Here's a link to the Backyard Gardening series for the Spring 2010 season. The Master Gardeners offer a variety of other bargain-priced educational services to the public, including a free Gardening Hotline (when that tomato emergency just can't wait!) and an outreach program that provides speakers for community groups and garden clubs. All of those services are highlighted here.

[Full disclosure: I am married to a Master Gardener!]

So Long 'Sliberty

Chris's digital media filter beat my analog media filter, so he posted first about today's NYT relatively upbeat story about commercial redevelopment in East Liberty. For real estate developers and the companies than afford their space, the neighborhood is on a modestly upward trajectory.

I liked the story, but as someone who has heard and read the history of Pittsburgh but not lived it, I didn't come away feeling all rosy about the result. Virtually all of the good news about contemporary East Liberty, at least the good news reported in Times, conveys the impression that the area is being transformed into a generic upscale suburb, with the big box stores, higher end retailers, and chic restaurants preferred everywhere by real estate developers and middle-aged cupcake-eating hipsters. (Not only am I not going to let the hipster meme go, I'm going to link it to the Cupcake Class!) I may be the most unlikely person in the world to make this point, but: What happened to the "Pittsburgh" in East Liberty as a Pittsburgh neighborhood?

A couple of weeks ago, I went to dinner at Jimmy Tsang's Chinese restaurant, on Centre Avenue. I was part of a group hosting a speaker on campus, and apparently the speaker - a Pittsburgh native who no longer lives here - remembered the restaurant from his youth. I am told that Jimmy Tsang's was once a great place to go. Our dinner was just a notch above a disaster. The food was adequate. The service was a 0 on a 1 (low) to 5 (high) scale. And the restaurant was nearly empty.

Maybe the lesson of my Jimmy Tsang's dinner is that the "Pittsburgh" in this "Pittsburgh" neighborhood is gone for good. As Chris points out, East Liberty's population loss has been staggering.

The Arts in Pittsburgh: A Review

Let's suppose that I wanted to assemble a comprehensve post on the arts "scene" in Pittsburgh, featuring links to and very brief descriptions of the leading arts organizations and related infrastructural resources in the region, including arts initiatives, policy proposals, funding sources, and service providers. Let's suppose that I didn't want to highlight the work of individual artists, but I want to be inclusive as to the arts represented: music, visual arts (film and video, photography, painting, sculpture), craft, dance, literature, conceptual art, fine art, popular art, public art. And things that I'm missing, but that you won't.

But I don't have the time or personal knowledge to build out this post on my own. I need to crowdsource it. Are you willing to help?

I might start off with an obvious traditional source such as the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, then add a link to somethign newer, such as the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. Courtesy of BrianTH in the comments to the Hipster post, there is the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative.

I would include the Warhol Museum (in fact, all of the Carnegie Museums), the Mattress Factory, and the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild. The Pittsburgh Filmmakers. The Society for Contemporary Craft. Just to help kick things off with some of the better known groups.

Some enterprising soul might point me to a rendering of the locations of these different institutions, coded by type of art(s) represented by each institution, against a map of the region. A really enterprising soul might generate a map like that, if it doesn't exist.

If this works, I may repeat the process for other communities in Pittsburgh.

Let's do it. Please add suggestions in the comments.