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.