The Gospel of Pittsburgh

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East Liberty, Friendship & Penn Ave Arts District, North Side, Oakland, Lawrenceville, Downtown & The Cultural District, Strip District, Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, South Side 

“Pittsburgh? Oh. Yeah.
“But, why?”

The question, from people from New York or Chicago or San Francisco, is especially hard for me for two reasons. One, as a freelance writer, your chances for just about any idea of “success” are greater in any of those hot spots. And, two, I love it here so much. I’ve often said that I don’t understand how there’s anyone who doesn’t live here. Yet it’s hard to explain why.

There’s a song from Tom Waits’s 1992 album Bone Machine, co-written and performed by Waits and Keith Richards, called “That Feel,” which ends with this wonderful couplet: “Well, you say that it’s gospel / but I know that it’s only church.” It describes the way we all feel about our true passions – not the kind of prescribed, antiseptic passion reared on Easter and Christmas, but the spiritual passion of the disciple.

When someone asks me why I live in Pittsburgh, and why I’ll never truly leave – a year here and there, sure, but I’ll be back – I’ve got an easy answer for ’em. I’m a freelance writer. And yet, what I do for a living is write. In New York City, I might write for bigger publications and have more recognizable bylines in my clips. But every day, I’d probably wait tables, walk dogs, or work the counter at a record shop.

I’d seek out eccentric New Yorkers to interview, only to have them fit me in between the radio and TV interviews they’ve already scheduled. I’d find out about the city’s interesting folk from their press releases and blogs, rather than from word of mouth or a barstool chat. At the end of each day I’d scratch out an hour or two to spend on the personal interests I had cast aside in order to concentrate on the celebrity lauding and table waiting that formed my career’s financial backbone. Here, I can pay my rent writing, and toss the money I make from my other interests – deejaying, for example – on whatever I want: Hats, jewelry, a billboard in Baltimore proclaiming “Go Steelers.”

But that’s only the “church” of Pittsburgh, the answer that the uninitiated can get in two minutes or one email. Everyone understands “cheap.” What’s more, there are plenty of cheap, culturally unexploited spots in this country and this world. The “gospel” of Pittsburgh takes some history, and some understanding – you can’t learn it, you’ve got to be filled with its spirit. But once you get it, as Waits and Richards say, “It always comes and finds you / it will always hear you cry.”

The gospel is in the Homestead strikers standing up to the Pinkertons, and it’s in Ben Roethlisberger grabbing Nick Harper’s foot. The gospel is a new art gallery opening in Braddock or Garfield, and it’s a long-unemployed steel worker laughing with a CMU professor at a bar. It’s the day of the dead display in a Squirrel Hill Mexican shop honoring Mayor O’Connor, and local rock ’n’ roll gods the Modey Lemon flying a Pittsburgh flag onstage in London. It’s Gus Greenlee running numbers and bootlegging liquor to finance The Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Crawford Grill, and it’s the Industrial Arts Co-Op’s sculptures going up surreptitiously in our parks and streets.

The gospel is that Pittsburgh, particularly since the steel industry crash and the Superbowl years, was for a while a city held together almost exclusively by hope; a shared sense that there was something better on the horizon. I’ve lived here 17 years now, and I feel a part of everything that happens.

Whenever someone fails or succeeds in Pittsburgh, it’s like we all fail or succeed. That’s why, when things go wrong, it’s such a betrayal – when a politician gives a break to some big-box shop while a local, whose head tells them to move but heart tells them to stay, struggles. That’s why, when things go right, it’s a joy – when Wiz Khalifa gets “Pittsburgh Sound” into Rolling Stone’s top picks.

This city is something of a tabula rasa – as I sometimes say to outsiders, it’s open season for freaks here. Try something. Try anything. If it fails, we’ll help you move on; if it succeeds, we’ll be the first to buy a round. And by “we,” I don’t mean some institution or government agency, but the rest of us who believe in the true gospel of Pittsburgh – the base layer of “hope” that holds everything here together, including you and me.

In the past year, Justin Hopper has written for Pop City about soccer-playing robots, Mr. Smalls, Appalachian Spring, Soundways 61, and a Florence-born artist named Fabrizio Gabrino. All his articles can be viewed in the archives.