Styx and Steel, Part Deux

Styx is in town tomorrow night, just in time for the start of the Steelers' campaign for another Super Bowl victory.

The Trib covers the cultural linkage between the band and the region.

Apparently, reporters have given up even the teensiest bit of surf-based research.  Because Pittsblog has been there, done that.  Three years ago.

Ironically, if I were writing that "Styx" post today, I'd back off the claim that there is some deep cultural narrative that links Pittsburgh and the modern Steelers to Styx or bands like them, which ruled the airwaves 35 years ago.  There are too many other great musical traditions in Pittsburgh -- jazz, as we are repeatedly reminded in the post-WDUQ era, being at the top of the list -- for the power ballad to stand as Pittsburgh key musical signifier.  WDVE, for all of its durability, is just a radio station playing rude comedy in the mornings and old music the rest of the day.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.  I listen to DVE myself.

No, I think that Styx thrives in Pittsburgh for the same reason that Def Leppard thrives in Pittsburgh or AC/DC thrives in Pittsburgh.  (For the record:  I'm a big fan of Def Leppard and AC/DC.)  There's a large community of people in town who just love really loud, vapid music.  A lot of genres of popular music are best listened to when they're loud.  ("Loud" might just define all of rock 'n' roll.)  But a lot of rock music, even when it's just loud, has an edge.  The lyrics aren't just placeholders for people who expect words (Joe Satriani (rock) and Al DiMeola (jazz/fusion) are fabulous guitarist, but neither is a pop superstar); the lyrics are trying to tell a story, or convey a message.  Styx has no lyrical edge.  Styx is just loud.

No one needs to go too deep with any of that stuff.  You have Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young and even Billy Joel at one end of the spectrum; you can pick your own favorites for the other end.   But it isn't right to put Styx on that spectrum at all.  The point of Styx, and pop/rock bands of that era (say, Queen, another great band from that era that is occasionally heard on PA systems in NFL stadiums), is to crank the music up to 11 and stomp and scream, preferably surrounded by other people doing the same thing, in some semblance of rhythm.  Playing "Renegade" at a Steelers game is the closest thing Pittsburgh has to flash mobs.  Aussies do flash mobs to Kylie Minogue; the Belgians do them to Julie Andrews; Chicagoans do them to Black Eyed Peas.  Steelers Nation does them to Styx.

Does any of that have a larger cultural meaning?  Does it resonate with Pittsburgh's alleged working class ethos?  Does dancing to Kylie Minogue tell us anything about Australians?

I hope not.

Party on, Wayne.  Party on, Garth.

{Corrected on 9/1:  Originally, I placed the Julie Andrews flash mob in the Netherlands.  I've changed that, to Belgium.  Sorry to all offended Belgians.  And offended Dutch.)

Pittsburgh's Industrial Commons

Susan Hockfield, president of MIT, makes the case in today's New York Times that rebuilding the manufacturing sector in the United States is one key and perhaps the key to restoring the country's economic health.  We need to get back to the business of making stuff.

Somewhere, Harold Miller is smiling; he's been making that case for and about Pittsburgh for a long time, and I've been (occasionally) disagreeing with him.  Today, I'll grant that Harold and Susan Hockfield are right at least about the idea that restoring American manufacturing would be a good thing, whether or not it really holds the promise of large-scale economic recovery.

So?

The first thing to note, and both people I mention above are explicit about this, is that 21st century manufacturing is not much like 20th century manufacturing.  Contemporary manufacturing is high-tech and high-end, and precisely for that reason it requires an investment in an entirely new industrial infrastructure -- supply chains, innovation chains, labor markets -- that has largely (but not entirely) disappeared from the United States.  America is going to have to import the ability to do this.  Another New York Times story, from last Sunday's paper, makes that case in vivid terms.  It is somewhat paradoxical that reinvigorating domestic manufacturing will require significant willingness to partner with international firms.

If Pittsburgh wants to get moving on this project, in short, Pittsburgh will not be able to grow its own way out its economic doldrums.

A couple of years ago, I put up a couple of posts about what I called the "entrepreneurship commons."  The posts are here, and then here.  I distinguished

between processes and institutions that offer (metaphorically) "retail" economic development services, on the one hand, and infrastructures that support (metaphorically) "wholesale" economic development. I wrote that policymakers should focus on "public and private resources to create infrastructures and environments to which resources (time, talent, money, innovation) can be contributed, in which they can be shared and mixed together, and from which they can be combined to produce new stuff -- knowledge, products, services, enterprises, industries. A university is a kind of commons. The internet is a kind of commons. A library is a kind of commons.

That description consciously echoed the work of Ben Chinitz, the Pittsburgh economist who Chris and I both like to cite.  Back in the early 1960s, Chinitz argued that New York City's relative economic vitality was grounded in the multitude of modestly-sized firms that constituted that city's garment industry (its largest commercial sector, at the time); Pittsburgh's anticipated stagnation at the time was based on the concentration of the steel industry in a small number of dominant firms.  Chinitz's insight has largely stood the test of time; his work is cited admiringly by Ed Glaeser, among others.  Glaeser is a Harvard scholar who writes about the revival of cities. 

Reading the NYTimes articles above, I discovered that right around the time I was blogging about "the entrepreneurship commons," a pair of Harvard Business School professors, Gary Pisano and Willy Shih, were describing the decline of American manufacturing as the loss of the country's "industrial commons."  Read their article here (it's not too long).  The "industrial commons" and the "entrepreneurship commons" are not the same thing, but they have some essential attributes in (dare I say it?) common:  an emphasis on knowledge, skills, training, and equipment that constitutes an infrastructure to support an entire industry, even an entire economy.  A diverse and largely unpredictable economy of firms can thrive atop a robust infrastructure

Pisano and Shih wrote:

Centuries ago, “the commons” referred to the land where animals belonging to people in the community would graze. As the name implies, the commons did not belong to any one farmer. All were better off for having access to it. Industries also have commons. A foundation for innovation and competitiveness, a commons can include R&D know-how, advanced process development and engineering skills, and manufacturing competencies related to a specific technology.


Such resources may be embedded in a large number of companies and universities. Software knowledge and skills, for instance, are vital to an extremely wide range of industries (machine tools, medical devices, earth-moving equipment, automobiles, aircraft, computers, consumer electronics, defense). Similarly, capabilities related to thin-film deposition processes are crucial to sophisticated optics; to such electronic products as semiconductors and disk drives; and to industrial tools, packaging, solar panels, and advanced displays. The knowledge, skills, and equipment related to the development and production of advanced materials are a commons for such diverse industries as aerospace, automobiles, medical devices, and consumer products. Biotechnology is a commons not just for drugs but also for agriculture and the emerging alternative-fuels industry.

Their article gives a number of contemporary examples and offers a series of policy recommendations relative to the contemporary American economy.  I don't necessarily agree or disagree with the specifics of all of those, but in the aggregate the recommendations strike me as sound, and as recommendations that scale down (to the regional level -- say, to Pittsburgh) as well as up (to the national level).  In the aggregate, they argue that public policy and corporate strategy should drive investment toward new and innovative technological capabilities -- to the (re)construction of the industrial commons, or infrastructure -- and not just to specific products, quarterly returns, and distinctive brands.

Pittsburgh, are you listening?

Burritos!

Today's PG story about the big Burrito restaurant group (PG story here) is a business story masquerading as a food story.  Don't get me wrong; I've eaten at Casbah many times, and Kaya, and Soba, and Eleven, and multiple Mad Mexes, and I like all of the food a lot.  Casbah is my favorite of the bunch.

But the food is neither the point nor the reason to celebrate BB's success.  You can find better food in Pittsburgh.  More innovative food.  More challenging food.

What I like about the bB experience, particularly at Casbah, is the attention to detail that's rare at a mid-range restaurant.  (Casbah isn't cheap, but it isn't at the highest end of the scale, either.)  I love the service.  At every single meal I've eaten at Casbah -- lunches and dinners over the years, that's well over 20 at this point, including groups both small (3 and 4 people) and large (I've had dinners at Casbah with 15 and 25 people) -- I've been attended by a service staff that was attentive, responsive, accurate, and knowledgeable, without being obtrusive, oppressive, or overly familiar.  I've eaten at a lot of Pittsburgh restaurants, even restaurants pricier than Casbah, where the wait staff projected an I-just-don't-care-that-much attitude.  The Casbah staff are there to make sure that I have a great dining experience.

That's a tribute to the service staff themselves, but it's also a tribute to the management of the restaurant, and to the management of the organization as a whole.  It's hiring the right people, training, supporting, and compensating them properly, and then letting them do their jobs.  (If someone remembers an older Pittsblog post about tipping practices, note that I'm a habitual 20-25% tipper at bB restaurants.)  I assume that nothing is actually perfect at Casbah or other bB outpost, and I imagine that if this post gets around I will read or hear anecdotes about mistaken orders or rude service or abusive managers.  But based on my own experience, I have to assume that these would be the exceptions, not the rule.

The bigger story here isn't the dining experience.  The bigger story is a story of a new, post-Steel Pittsburgh:  individual entrepreneurs willing to innovate in territory incognita, investors willing to partner with them along the way, a dining public that gradually but perceptibly came to embrace their vision, persistence and resilience in the face of occasional failure, and -- as China Millman's PG piece makes clear, owners who "get" the idea of paying it forward.  big Burrito's success has meant success for big Burrito staff, and many of those are now bB alumni, owning and/or working in other new restaurants around town.  A great deal of attention is paid to the nail-biting adventures of high tech entrepreneurs coming out of CMU:  will their company succeed?  Will there be funding?  Customers?  Profits?  Employment growth?  Spinoffs?  How can Pittsburgh grow and nurture an innovation economy and recover its former commercial glory?

Maybe it turns out to be the food after all.  But not cupcakes.  Fake Mexican burritos. 

Quake!

If the ground rocks and rolls but no one and nothing gets hurt, then it was a minor thrill ride, like the Jack Rabbit.  An earthquake in Pittsburgh is like snow falling in San Francisco:  Your adrenalin goes up in a big hurry, and when it's over, a few seconds later, you make sure that you have all of your things and wits about you. 

This was a quake.  When the ground moved in San Francisco in 1989, I was standing in the left field bleachers of Candlestick Park, waiting for a World Series game to start.  Everyone in the ball park that night watched the concrete lip of the upper deck undulate like the hips of a slow-motion hula dancer.  When the rolling stopped, a stadium full of people let out a monstrous cheer.  That was a major thrill ride, we're still here, and that was so cool!

Then the people in the stands turned on their portable TVs and tuned in to images broadcast from the Goodyear blimp.  Bridge sections collapsed.  Neighborhoods on fire.  SF police drove onto the field and told everyone to go home.  The lights in the stadium, and then the lights everywhere, went out.

When I moved to Pittsburgh, ten years later, a local real estate agent drove me around the city for a morning.  When she learned that I was moving in from the San Francisco area, she pointed out that all of the stone and brick buildings in Pittsburgh would hold up well in a (hypothetical) earthquake.  I think that the idea was that I should be comforted by all of these strong buildings after living through lots of ground-shaking on the West Coast.

Stone and brick and clay are, unfortunately, among the most brittle of building materials and among the least safe in an earthquake-prone zone.  Chris is surely right that a real seismic event in Western PA would damage the region's water infrastructure, probably critically, but in the developed areas of the region, infrastructure of all sorts likely would fail -- especially older bridges and tunnels, rail beds, all kinds of sizable buildings built on uncompacted fill, and scores of older houses, apartment buildings, and small businesses. 

Pittsburgh would be in Barney.  Rubble.  Trouble.

Bees!

There is a neat story in this morning's PG about Burgh Bees and beekeeping in Pittsburgh.  Gardeners, too, love bees, and Pittsburgh's urban gardeners are smiling today.

Some notes:

Burgh Bees (website here) works in cooperation with the Penn State Cooperative Extension in Allegheny County.  (Website here.)

The story mentions the recent little brou-ha-ha about bringing hives to Beechview but doesn't otherwise talk about the landscape of local land use regulations that might bear on your ability to keep bees in your back yard.  A sidebar says that local laws vary.  Not helpful.

And I've been told by folks who know bees that it's best to avoid locating hives within a short distance of a source of water -- such as a backyard swimming pool.  True?

Rust Belt Chic Goes Mainstream, or Hip and Hipsters in Lawrenceville

Rich Florida still has a soft spot in his heart for Pittsburgh, after all these years:  He put Lawrenceville on his USA Today list of up-and-coming urban neighborhods across the country.

Not long ago, I stirred up an entertaining little blogospheric firestorm with this post that argued that Lawrenceville  - like the rest of Pittsburgh -- isn't hip (which is neither here nor there with respect to Florida's point).

But what does Lawrenceville have that the rest of Pittsburgh doesn't have?

I suspect that Lawrenceville is pulling together Pittsburgh's old and new in a particularly positive way.

On the one hand, Lawrenceville isn't changing at all.  There are broad swaths of Butler Street and adjacent blocks that look, to me at least, very much like they have looked for decades.

On the second hand, Lawrenceville has changed quite a lot, at the hands of urban and semi-urban adventurers.  There are lots of younger people - professionals, artists, professional artists, others - buying up inexpensive houses and in many cases, renovating them.  Starting businesses.  Restaurants.  Galleries.  Other things.  Two years ago, when a European news crew came to Pittsburgh to film a segment about the renaissance of the city, the reporter and producer had heard a bit about places in Pittsburgh that featured sidewalk cafes, much as you might find in grand cities of the Continent.  Did the crew zero in on Downtown?  No.  They shot in Lawrenceville.

On the third hand, there has been some massive capital investment in Lawrenceville; not all of the important changes in the neighborhood are associated with restaurants, the arts, and residential renos.  The new Children's Hospital, which is a striking building no matter how you slice it, anchors, symbolizes, and signals the proposition that Lawrenceville is not tied to some fixed idea of Pittsburgh authenticity.  Nor is that investment tied principally to global homogenizing retailers.  At both large and small scales, Lawrenceville is mostly local.

On the fourth hand, this development has been a long time in the making, and local government support played a role.  Way back in 2004, near the dawn of Pittsblog, I posted a quick note about the 16:62 Design Zone.  The Lawrenceville Corporation had something to do with that.  The New York Times took note of the neighborhood's emergence back in 2007. "Lawrenceville-Pgh.com," a URL that politely evoked the neighborhood's history as an independent town, has been shortened to lvpgh.com, which signals nothing, except perhaps that insiders "get" the shorthand and outsiders should brush up on their inside-knowledge quotient.

Go-to urban and semi-urban destinations risk tipping into preciousness, either because they attract visitors and money and get tacky and sterile, or because their custodians get self-absorbed and protective of what they think is special.  Sometimes both.  Elsewhere online you can find a feature story in which I am made out to argue that Mt. Lebanon, of all places, is Pittsburgh's Brooklyn.  I didn't argue that; it isn't true.  But Lebo has Brookyn's sometime sense of overdone self-awareness.  Lawrenceville has to walk a fine line to maintain whatever it's got, and whatever it's getting, and to keep from developing a related snobbery.

Tell Us What You Really Think (Ouch!)

Somehow this passed under my radar screen.  I was in China in July, and Pirates mania was on the lips of everyone on my tour.  But from a national media outlet, roughly a week ago, came this:

Pirates Acquire Lee, Ludwick To Bolster 2nd-Half Collapse

PITTSBURGH—In order to deepen some holes in their lineup and increase their chances of a second-half collapse, the Pittsburgh Pirates acquired first baseman Derrek Lee and outfielder Ryan Ludwick Sunday. “They’re both experienced losers who we’re hoping will come in here and help us surge right to the bottom of the NL Central,” Pirates general manager Neal Huntington said in a statement, adding that after six consecutive losses, the team is now poised to make a last-place run.

Food for Thought (Not Cupcakes)

This has nothing specifically to do with Pittsburgh, but I assume that Pittsburgh is far from immune to the conditions diagnosed below.

From TomDispatch.com:

Nickel and Dimed (2011 Version)
On Turning Poverty into an American Crime
By Barbara Ehrenreich

.... The big question, 10 years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. The short answer is that things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.

Post-Meltdown Poverty

When you read about the hardships I found people enduring while I was researching my book -- the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans -- you should bear in mind that those occurred in the best of times. The economy was growing, and jobs, if poorly paid, were at least plentiful.

In 2000, I had been able to walk into a number of jobs pretty much off the street. Less than a decade later, many of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff competition for those that remained. It would have been impossible to repeat my Nickel and Dimed “experiment,” had I had been so inclined, because I would probably never have found a job.

.... So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America’s working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list -- a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.

Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.

Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can’t afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they’re down.

Frosted

Must. Stop. Blogging. About. Cupcakes.

Yes, I noticed that Dozen has a buyer.  The Cupcake Class in Pittsburgh has a pulse. 

Sorry.  I can't help myself. 

I love the fact that the new owner currently runs a day camp for dogs in ... Castle Shannon.  It's not exactly a hipster destination, Castle Shannon, but it is a perfectly decent, perfectly Pittsburgh kind of place.  The kind of place where the Cannoli Class feels right at home.  Where cupcakes come from the Shop 'n Save, or the Giant Eagle, the local bakery next door, or from your own oven.

Castle Shannon is also known, among other things, as Dennis Miller's home town.

Winded

It's time to get just a bit caught up on goings-on around the region.  No cupcakes.  I promise.

Raja, Republican candidate for Allegheny County Executive, released a "jobs plan."  Here's the whole thing.  The news coverage tended to focus on the political bickering that followed.  I don't do much politics on this blog, and I don't intend to get in the middle of the Raja/Fitzgerald race.  But the politics aside, Raja's "plan" is no plan at all.  It's re-hashed, warmed-over, re-statements of a kitchen sink-ful of ideas and platitudes that have been kicked around Oakland, Downtown, the Strip, Lawrenceville, the South Side, and in some cases, Pittsblog, for years.  Raja is as polished as political new-bees come, and he has connections and money that will assure him and all of us a high-gloss, professional campaign.  But Raja is a complete newcomer to the policy space.  I know Raja; years ago he invited me to join his new "Business Mentoring Roundtable" in Mt. Lebanon, which is occasionally touted by his campaign as evidence of Raja's experience in leading multi-stakeholder economic revitalization efforts.  I didn't do much for the Roundtable.  I was mostly a listener.  I listened to some very smart and successful people critique business plans.  And then nothing happened.  The prospective businesses were flops in waiting, for the most part, and those that weren't were looking for free advice and low-cost money, not for status as green shoots in a snobbish, overpriced suburb.  The BMR in Lebo did zero to move Mt. Lebanon forward.  That's not a criticism of Raja as such; the fact that little happened in Lebo coming out of the BMR has much more to do with the fact that Raja was offering a simple solution, a linear solution, a one-dimensional solution, if you will, to a complex, non-linear problem.  

Any candidate for County Executive who wants to move the conversation about economic development forward should be reading Jim Russell's blog and Chris Briem's blog.  Because Chris or Jim make good use of actual data.

The UPMC/Highmark feud (battle? divorce?) is just too big to ignore.  The region's biggest medical services provider plans not to renew its contract with the region's biggest private health care insurer.  Which leads local politicians to scramble to find ways to coerce UPMC into behaving better.  Which fails to get at the root of the problem:  physician compensation and insurance reimbursement policies and practices that cause health care costs to escalate across the board -- and which make the health care services industry financially attractive enough that UPMC is trying to lock Highmark out, while Highmark is trying desperately to get in.  This op-ed from a couple of weeks ago, which takes a shot at Highmark's insurance practices relative to physicians, is on the right track -- but only sort of.  Third-party insurance company incentives (productivity and profits) and physician incentives (higher compensation based on additional procedures) are misaligned with patient interests (quality of care in multi-disciplianary team-based settings).  Pittsburgh shouldn't be screaming at UPMC and Highmark to behave like well-mannered monopolists.  Pittsburgh should be enabling real competition -- supporting self-insured groups, and matching them with physicians and physician groups who are willing to work on salary.  Costs?  Down.  Access?  Up.  It's not as simple as it sounds, but it's a starting point for a more innovative and more productive end result.

In this morning's news, I read that the Pittsburgh Public Schools plan to close several schools, while at the same time demand for commercial real estate in Downtown Pittsburgh is booming.  It's hard to see clearer evidence of the city/suburb divide in the region; whatever wealth is being created Downtown certainly isn't being shared broadly bwith the City of Pittsburgh and its residents.  If the County Executive candidates want to deal with a real economic challenge, there's one to sink their teeth into.

And for anyone looking for a little more reflection and a little less grit, read up with Nicholas Lemann's New Yorker review of several recent books on the urban condition.  Whither cities?  Herein -- Florida, Glaeser, and others.