Thoughts on a College Tour

If you have a child and she has somehow managed to scrape together enough of the right genes from the ragged chromosomes you bequeathed, she will eventually want to go to college. This need to attend an institution of higher learning is, of course, a desire you have inculcated in your offspring from her earliest days, so you have no one to blame but yourself when you embark on what most parents have come to know as “the college tour.” 

This is a trip typically made in the summer between junior and senior year that allows you to subject yourself to one post-secondary education sticker shock experience after another. While on this trip it finally hits you that you will have to sell a kidney and possibly one cornea to send your pride and joy off to an appropriate ivory tower for the next four years.

Molly, my oldest daughter, and I recently made the east coast version of “the tour” (there are endless variations) running an urban gauntlet that included Washington DC, Baltimore, Princeton, New York, Providence, New Haven and Boston. Combined, these metropolitan areas embrace more than 40 million people (everyone of whom we seemed to have bumped into). We hit ten schools in these cities in six days in 90+ temperatures, and got plenty numb of brain in the process.

Molly had never been to many of these cities and as we toured them I found myself examining – and incessantly commenting – on their urban assets and liabilities even more than usual. I have a habit of filleting the cities I visit or live in, usually in the form of a running internal monologue, unless some poor soul (like Molly) is with me.

Is Anyone Listening?

I check to see how clean they are. I examine their traffic patterns, sidewalks, curbs and transit systems. I yammer on about everything from sanitation to potholes to architecture, and make comments like, “You know if they put a center terrace down this boulevard, it’d be much more attractive.” Or “The signage in these subways is horrible. How do they expect people from outside the city to get around?” Or -- if I’m in a forgiving mood -- “They did a great job blending that building in with the surrounding architecture.” I relentlessly compare these places to Pittsburgh to see what we can learn from them, how our fair city outflanked them. My riveting insights led mostly to Molly tugging out one iPod earplug to ask, “Did you say something, Dad?”

We did we not make like tourists as we wove our way through these towns. We arrived by train (which always reveals a city’s  flabbiest underbelly) and traveled them like natives, on foot and via public transit.

There was a lot to be learned because like Pittsburgh, these cities shoulder many of the same challenges our hometown does. Unlike the sprawling metropolises of the south and southwest, they are old. No flat, clean and meteorologically benign expanses here, like Phoenix, Dallas or Las Vegas. Wicked winters pound them; they suffer from ossified infrastructures and orange barrel syndrome, problematic geography, and the fun and games of long and crippling political legacies. Some are booming, some are struggling. But all of them, like Pittsburgh, are working to survive, even flourish, in a global economy where change is blistering, and it’s innovate, or die.

The Boomeranger Perspective

Since returning to Pittsburgh several years ago from a decade living in Los Angeles, it’s been easy for me to see how slowly my native town has moved while the rest of the world gathered speed. As a group, the region’s citizenry appeared balkanized, small-minded, determined to fight all change without thought. We were, as a gambler friend of mine would have put it, playing with “scared money,” second guessing every bet we made on the future, afraid it would cost too much, that we might lose; a sure way to get drummed out of the game. We reacted, rather than thinking proactively and strategically. We whined and the world blasted ahead. Or so it seemed.

But then, not long ago, I found myself walking through Oakland, thinking of “the tour” and imagining myself a stranger to the city. I compared my stroll with other walks through Cambridge outside of Harvard, along the Charles near MIT and Boston University; hill climbs from downtown Providence up to Brown University, subway rides to NYU and Columbia, strolls through Princeton and Georgetown. And I realized that Pittsburgh stacked up pretty well.

The streets were clean. The new park, Schenley Plaza, between the Hillman and Carnegie libraries was serene; people strolled and biked and chatted beneath the gothic gaze of the Cathedral of Learning, the benign presence of Heinz Chapel, the historical weight of the Carnegie Museums. Craig Street buzzed, buildings were rising at CMU, and landscaping everywhere that not long ago was a mess, was inviting and creative. From one end of Oakland to Squirrel Hill, things hummed.

I’m not quite sure how this happened. Maybe the ground level conversations that have been going on for years among a younger generation, the efforts of the Heinz Endowments, the seeds of innovation that were planted decades ago by people who just refused to give up on the city were finally pushing through the fear and bull-headed resistance. All of those endless conversations were paying dividends at last. The successes of Pitt, CMU, UPMC, a thriving start-up here and there and the arrivals of high tech change agents like Seagate, Intel, Google, Rand and a revamped Westinghouse were adding up.

The progress we’ve made is something we can grin about, but not for long. Our college tour also revealed that every city, not just ours, is making progress. While we’ve advanced, and moved parsecs beyond the smoky, former incarnations of old Pittsburgh that visitors often expect to see, we have to guard against comparing ourselves with ourselves. When visitors ride in from the airport they may be relieved that we aren’t gritty anymore, but what they really want to know is how our poker game stacks up against Boston, DC, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, Seattle. That means no more playing with scared money. We have to make the winnings in Oakland, the Northside, Southside, and the Cultural District pay off. And we have to keep playing – not recklessly, but more boldly and creatively than ever because as another friend of mine once said, “If you’re coasting, you must be going down hill.”

We can’t afford even a day of that.

You may now put your iPod earpiece back in.

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Chip Walter's latest book, Thumbs, Toes and Tears – And Other Traits That Make Us Human, is available in local bookstores as well as at Amazon.com and other online retailers. He’s currently working on his next book about why we make the choices we make.

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Captions:

Schenley Plaza at the corner of Forbes and Bigelow

School year begins

View of Downtown Pittsburgh

Cathedral of Learning and Heinz Chapel

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All photographs copyright © Brian Cohen