A lonely day in the Strip
She pines for the hustle and bustle that she loathed before the pandemic
As I sat at a sidewalk table eating my mung bean pancake from Sam- Bok one recent weekday, I watched a sparse pedestrian parade pass by me on Penn Avenue in the Strip District. A couple would walk by, then one person some minutes later.
I thought about how happy this emptiness would have made me before the pandemic.
I am one of those shoppers who would step out into the margins of the roadbed on Penn Avenue, impatient behind the saunterers who fingered crafts, knickknacks and books, who stopped to lift the edge of a dress on a mannequin, to try on a fedora, to ponder the array of pastries.
I was the person holding a number at the cheese counter at Pennsylvania Macaroni Co. in mild distress that I was number 94 and they had just called 78.
I am a shopper who likes to get in, get what I need and get out. That is now pandemic thinking.
Strolling the Strip recently, I was gripped by a forlorn feeling. The Strip felt lonely. I became nostalgic for the elbow- to- elbow joy of leisurely looking, the un- self - conscious calls of one person to another, their droplets just inches from my own.
Inside several of the stores, I asked cashiers how business has been lately. Most said it is starting to return to some normalcy. The cashier at Penn Mac said the pace has never slowed during the pandemic. But it wasn’t very busy when I was there.
Maybe my experience that day in the Strip was something akin to a normal weekday. Even though it was a beautiful morning, weekdays are workdays, after all.
I couldn’t help seeing it through a new lens, though, tinted by the pandemic and by the momentum of redevelopment.
The Strip District is changing so quickly, and the isolation of the past six months has only intensified the fact. I used to visit the Strip two or three times a month. I have been to the Strip three times since March. The second time was in early August, when I visited a friend who lives in the Cork Factory. We walked on Railroad Street, where townhomes and apartments seem to have gone up overnight. In the recent past, there was little life and little traffic on Railroad Street.
The Edge Apartment complex and the townhomes across from them have transformed that street. The townhomes are pretty handsome. No comment on the Edge.
When I left, I was planning to walk on Smallman Street, but the construction deterred me, so I walked back to the Central North Side along Penn.
Smallman Street is soon to be “new.” It needed some improvement, but its aesthetic is soon to be gone.
My colleague Mark Belko wrote a marvelous piece a few weeks back on the concerns people have about too much reinvention, about the loss of the Strip’s gritty, post- industrial identity. Updating is inevitable, but the Strip has worn its aesthetic comfortably for
so long that it seemed to be part of its DNA — unchangeable.
During my walk on Penn Avenue the other day, I concentrated on what I was seeing, realizing that one day I would want to remember, try to remember, if I didn’t.
I did the same thing before PNC Park was built. I would walk on Federal Street each day to get to work in Downtown and memorize the orientation of the buildings I passed, knowing they would soon be gone. At one corner of Federal and General Robinson Street was a diner. I’m thinking it was Castellano’s. Then there was an exercise equipment place, a hair salon and a high- rise apartment building just before the Clemente Bridge.
Had I not committed those images to memory, I would have wondered, “What used to be there?” Over more than 30 years of walking Pittsburgh, I ask myself that question often.
We don’t document the places we lose unless they were iconic or grand or served an elevating purpose.
But I remember the little dry cleaner on General Robinson, where the woman who waited on me had her radio tuned to a gospel station. It was roughly where the ticket windows at PNC Park are now.
Updating is inevitable. But if Penn Avenue were to be improved through the Strip, I would hope it would only be to shore up rickety buildings behind the facades. No matter how homely many of them are, they define the Strip. When the sidewalks are teeming with shoppers and browsers, those facades speak. They are the facades of the masses. That’s all of us.
I once vowed, after spending too long one Christmas Eve morning gathering up last- minute goodies, that I would never go to the Strip just before Christmas. Now I look forward to the Christmas when it is safe to join my fellow Pittsburghers in the festive, jam- packed shops.
When I start feeling impatient, I hope to summon the images of that latesummer weekday — couple of people at sidewalk tables and a few on the sidewalks — as a sad memory.