Most of the posts in this almost-complete-ten-part-series on The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization, or How Did Pittsburgh Become the "It" City All of a Sudden, have had a good news/ bad news flavor. Pittsburgh has some undeniable economic and cultural momentum. It looks mah-vel-ous, to borrow Billy Crystal's brilliant Fernando Lamas parody, especially on a bright and warm blue day like today. I've been arguing that there is still a long road ahead. Lots of problems and challenges remain. Pittsburgh's progress comes at a price, and a lot of that price still has to be paid. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
As the end of the series approaches, I'm going to let out my inner optimist, so that I can finish with a bang, not a whimper.
Today's topic: Is Pittsburgh hip?
And the short answer is: It never was and it never will be, at least so long as anyone thinks that "hip" is defined by a New York or Los Angeles aesthetic. (Of course, those are two completely different things.) But -- good news ahead -- in the last few years Pittsburgh seems to have attracted and supported a younger, more progressive social, cultural, and political "scene" than anyone might have thought possible as recently as ten years ago. It's wrong to put too much emphasis on surface phenomena like the Whole Foods market in East Liberty, which gives a patina of cool to part of a single neighborhood. But below the surface, there is definitely something happening.
Ten years ago, the region was gripped with public fear of "brain drain," anxiety that the area's adolescents and recent college grads would leave Pittsburgh and take the brightest ideas and most passionate energy with them. That anxiety was almost entirely misplaced to begin with; young people in America are fated to move around. Leaving home and leaving their native region seems to be an American birthright. Pittsburgh is a more rooted (some would say, "European") city than many of its peers, but it never had any realistic hope that its experience over the long run would be different.
Pittsburgh's true anxiety was and to some extent, remains that no one from other parts of the country and the world wants to move here. More dynamic cities, places where "hip" really means something, are places where population churn is a fact of life: People go, people come. New ideas are constantly being imported as well as exported. The concept of the Pittsburgh "Diaspora," both natives and non-natives around the globe who are bonded psychically to Western Pennsylvania, has emerged to focus attention on the need to cultivate the economic value of Pittsburgh's international network. That link goes to Jim Russell's Globalburgh blog. Local Pittsburgh official-dom has recently joined this important bandwagon: the Pittsburgh Council for International Visitors was recently rebranded "Global Pittsburgh." Actual and would-be Pittsburghers can come home again, and even if they don't, their investment dollars can.
Read more at Pittsblog.
[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here]
