The quest to walk Pittsburgh’s 4,600 streets
Maybe it’s all our hills. Maybe it’s the 90 neighborhoods we’ve squeezed into less than 56 square miles. Whatever the reason, there’s something about Pittsburgh that compels many of its denizens to walk or run its streets until they can call every paved slice their own.
Alexis Rzewski, whom I tried to keep up with in 2002 when he designed a 30-mile course within the city that leaned heavily on the vertical, emailed last week to tip me to yet another habitual walker. A woman with the pen name Megan S. Spookypgh is chronicling her quest to walk all 4,600+ streets within the city limits.
Her quirky take on what she sees and photographs (with cameo appearances by her 3-year-old and 8-year-old sons) is chronicled on her website, “You Can’t Get There From Here.”
Meghan Snatchko agreed to meet me this past snowyturning-to-slushy Friday morning at a North Side coffee shop. We spent the next hour-plus walking the Mexican War Streets. It happened to be her 37th birthday.
Mrs. Snatchko lives in Hopewell, a couple of exits west of Pittsburgh International Airport, in Beaver County. Her family’s roots are in Chicago, though, and she’d like to do for this city what a book called “Streetwise Chicago” has done for the Windy one. That dictionary of Chicago street names includes short entries explaining the origin of each.
She began only Jan. 14 in Windgap, but she’s taken 25 walks totaling 70 miles and she’s already notified Google Maps of an error in Highland Park. That’s been corrected. The short alley south of Stanton Avenue that Google had been calling “Carnival Way” is now correctly labeled “Carmine Way’’ because of her.
Mrs. Snatchko loves alleys. There’s a level of honesty along them that you just don’t see on front porches, she believes, because people are less worried about being seen by the world.
We were walking up a sloping alley east of Buena Vista Street and hadn’t yet seen a street sign.
“This would be my fourth street without a name,” she said. “I found three in Brighton Heights. They were like alleys. And I found a street with a name in Garfield that was blocked off and just woods.”
When we got to the top of this alley at the intersection with Redknap Street, there was the little blue street sign: Ehlers Way. We kept walking the back streets and finding street names I’d never or rarely noted, despite being an inveterate walker myself and living within a mile of them since 1990: Atlanta Street, Fireman Way and Pryor Way.
That last one was a steep brick alley. It reminded Mrs. Snatchko of her walk in Beechview on Feb. 13 when a blizzard hit. As she aptly wrote then:
“Think about the steepest street you’ve ever seen and then imagine a neighborhood made up of that street. In Beechview, there are step sidewalks. [It’s] home to Canton Avenue, the steepest street in the United States” (and maybe the world).
“I walked up Canton and the roads were getting slippy. I was glad there were stairs because they had a railing.” But then she got to a stretch of Alverado Avenue without a sidewalk and tried to stick to the edge of grass in people’s yards — and wiped out in a driveway.
Urban exploration is not always pretty.
Having roughly the technological capability of a Cro-Magnon, I am astonished at the deft virtual tours Mrs. Snatchko gives of each neighborhood she visits. She’s just old enough to have lived her childhood old-school, learning to play before the internet grabbed kids by the eyeballs and never let go. But she’s young enough to have launched her first website when she was a 16year-old student at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart High in Moon. So there’s a winning combination of childhood wonder and millennial snark in her walking tales.
When she got home, she found she had walked her 699th street in Pittsburgh. So she has only about 3,965 to go. That is if the hand count she spent 10 hours making with a paper map is accurate.
She’s already touched base with Lisa Valentino, who doesn’t keep a street count but has walked 1,000 miles of the city since May 2015. Ms. Valentino has finished 20 of the 90 neighborhoods. Others are doing similar things.
I don’t know if people in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Cincinnati walk this way. Maybe they do. But I’ll bet my laminated map that none tells the story of a slippy street like a Pittsburgher.