Sprung

Some interesting things in the Pittsburgh region as it appears spring is here. First, three people shot last night in a Hill neighborhood. I am still not sure where this neighborhood is, but I am always bothered by shootings. Pittsburgh seems, like many other cities, to have a racial problem.

I was talking to a friend in Seattle this week and I was remarking how Pittsburgh often reminds me of Seattle when I first moved their, pre-grunge, Amazon, Microsoft. Housing was cheap, the city was a weird mix of Boeing workers and office drones and a bunch of young artists who found the area inspiring. One of the things my friend and I both noted from that time was the self imposed segregation. The blacks lived in the Central District of Seattle. A hillside near downtown, with elegant older homes and property values held down by drugs and crime.

Within a few years Amazon.com would flourish and base their corporate offices nearby and the yuppies rich from stock would begin buying some of the homes in the Central District, upending poor families, who happily took the cash and ran to other rundown neighborhoods. The white people wrote the history of the time as coming in to save this neighborhood and maybe, in some ways, they were right. Most just rebuilt the older homes, some tore them down and build McMansions and tried to bring their upwardly mobile lifestyle to the ghetto.

My wife and I bought our first home near that very ghetto, for 45 thousand dollars. A couple of years later, having sold the small house, we bought another, in another ghetto, for about 70 thousand. At the time that was a lot of money, especially for us, and the 70 thousand dollar home needed a lot of repair, most of which friends and I did to save cash. We sold that house after police mistakenly showed up one day with guns drawn, looking for a home that had an alarm going off. That and the almost nightly sound of gunfire kept us on edge, and we had a beautiful baby boy to raise.

We hightailed it to an almost all white suburb and put down roots. I never felt comfortable surrounded by boring white people all proud that they had escaped the jungles of Seattle, where their Volvos and potted plants could now be safe from all crime. It took me a decade, but I got myself and my children out of there and we ran off.

It took us a couple of years to find Pittsburgh, but here we are. It is a beautiful city, trying to rebuild itself and its reputation as that of a polluted old industrial city. There are universities and old buildings being rebuilt and wonderful museums and out door stadiums for teams that play well. I have met some creative and interesting people and I keep looking around and thinking how much this place reminds me of Seattle. This area seems on the verge of something big, if only the economy would offer just a little bright light.

Then there are the gunshots and racism. If you go to a place like Craigslist and look at Rants and Raves (do this in any major city and you might be shocked at the out and out racism and anger) you will find some serious backward thinking and overt hatred. The "N" word is tossed around like a hot potato. It seems about 2-3 decades behind the times I usually live in, but people post these things to share their innermost beliefs on a board where no one knows their identity. Then the gunshots. One of the other things that Pittsburgh shares with the Seattle I knew two decades ago is the separation of races. The blacks live over there, the whites out in the suburbs and everyone else can find their own place somewhere else.

Much like the homes my wife and I purchased long ago, the kids and I have settled in a sketchy ghetto type area. We did this for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that I was ripped off big time by a business partner and I did not have the money to spend on a house in the Whites Only area. The other reason was we could buy this place for cash and have a home that we owned, that we did not have to pay monthly for the right to call it our home.

So the sun is out, the birds are nesting outside my bedroom window, some people got shot, the neighbors who party till 4AM are back with passion and it is kind of nice to be living in a neighborhood with real people. Of course, my Volvo is in fear of its window being busted and we have yet to fill the planters with flowers, but we will get there.