Steel yourself: Pittsburgh’s more fun than it looks
Take time to visit the Warhol Museum and taste the Strip District’s wonderful food
“Yes, Pittsburgh,” I was forced to say after telling people where we were heading on a family road trip. Our fancy friends who think a vacation must involve Maine or Martha’s Vineyard, and who think the word summer is a verb, found our destination to be bizarre, as if we’d announced we had decided as a family to learn how to handle snakes and speak in tongues.
But Pittsburgh was an easy choice of destination. We didn’t want to cram ourselves into an overpriced and undersized New York City hotel room. We love the beach, but at the last-minute there weren’t rooms available. So we eyeballed Pittsburgh as a place with a beguiling combination of natural beauty and urban quirkiness.
It’s also a surprisingly pretty city, almost like it stole a move from Seattle or Portland. The most striking feature is the rugged topography, which has no obvious equivalent among big cities anywhere in the East. I’ve never seen it look anything but clean and fresh. Where are smokestacks belching stygian clouds of toxic fumes? Why is there no soot raining from the sky? I guess that image of Pittsburgh is off by a century or two. Now there’s a big Google presence, and at Carnegie-Mellon University they do amazing work with robots.
The steel town displays its proud industrial history in the old factories turned into retail strips, and in the bridges that seem to have so much steel in them they might outlast the Appalachians. It has 446 bridges, which I’m told is more than any city in the world.
Pittsburgh has all the amenities that the soft traveller — i.e., someone who goes into a dive bar and asks the bartender for the wine list — demands. You can go up and down the grittiness scale in a place like this. Like so many American big cities, Pittsburgh has decided that the coarse, raw, grizzled urban textures of the industrial era can pretty much double the expense of your salmon entrée.
Pittsburgh has a sneaky proximity to the big cities of the East, such as Toronto or Washington, D.C. But even when you find Pittsburgh on a map, it’s hard to describe where it is in relation to the rest of North America. It’s certainly not on the East Coast and it’s not part of the Midwest. Terms like Appalachia and Rust Belt are not likely to be embraced by the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce.
There was a time, of course, when its location was obvious, providential and economically significant. Pittsburgh sits on the rolling terrain below the western flank of the Allegheny Plateau. The city was founded on a point of land where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers converge to form the Ohio River.
We got a big suite at the Courtyard Pittsburgh Downtown on Penn Avenue, which puts you in walking distance of everything from the Point (where the rivers converge) to the Warhol Museum. There is no joy in an American road trip greater than getting a jumbo hotel room of a size unimaginable in, say, Maine and Martha’s Vineyard, where our fancy friends were probably suffering in shoebox rooms in precious B&Bs with sailboats clacking next door and seagulls cawing up a storm while we had a suite large enough for a game of Wiffle ball.
We did our usual vacation routine, which is eat our way through the city like a herd of goats. We remember our family trips via stomach memory. As in: “Remember that place with the great gelato?” “Yeah. Rome.”
Our favourite place in Pittsburgh is the Strip District, which has a profusion of small grocery stores of distinct ethnic identity. Thus at the Mexican place, Reyna Foods, you can load up on dried chili peppers stored in old-fashioned metal garbage cans. The Pennsylvania Macaroni Company is where you go for your pepperonis and weird styles of pasta. We went to the upscale Pittsburgh Public Market and got kidchego goat cheese from Wheel and Wedge for a mere $22 a pound. Then we hauled our bags of exotic and obscure foodstuffs back to the room, laid everything on a shiny countertop, and took photos of what we had achieved as consumers.
Our favourite meal was one of the least expensive: Chicken Latina, a Peruvian place that doesn’t look like much but serves an exquisite chicken quesadilla — crispy and buttery on the outside, stuffed with chicken, beans and cheese. What really makes it is the spicy, garlicky and everso-lightly creamy green sauce they serve with it. It’s not a successful vacation unless you come home with an obsession over some kind of sauce.
We did a pub-crawl on the South Side, and the college-age kids nosed around the vintage clothing shops. There’s a robust punk scene that makes for good people-watching, though I spent much of the time fretting that the kids would get inspired, disappear into a tattoo parlour and come out three days later completely unrecognizable.
Of course we went to the Warhol Museum, which captures the man’s astonishing evolution as a creative force — though, gosh, that’s a lot of museum for one fella. I kept thinking that even Michelangelo wouldn’t have got a seven-storey museum.
The secret of family travel is that if you are careful about tending to everyone’s needs, and are patient and resilient, and don’t expect too much, you don’t have to have Shangri-La as a destination. You’re with people you like, and you’re not on your laptop and you’re not in your cubicle and you’re not on some kind of deadline. The flowers are prettier. The food tastes better. The sunsets are more entrancing. You don’t need the outer world to be fabulous and entertaining. No weather can drown your happiness. You can go anywhere — and Pittsburgh is as good a place as anywhere else.