It’s the secret city that’s all around us in what remains of Pittsburgh’s past in its historic buildings, its brownfields, its rusting industrial hulks along the rivers, its bridges and its streetscapes.
Just today some workmen were digging a hole in the street in front of my house. They carefully removed the bricks in a 4′ x 16′ area and set the backhoe to work. And work it did, pounding and pounding, waking up the entire neighborhood. When the workmen were on a break, my wife and daughter and I went out to ask them what they had been pounding away at.
“Slag” we were told.
“Here?!?” I asked, reluctant to believe that slag would have been schlepped the 3.5 miles from the nearest now defunct furnace.
“Oh yeah. It’s everywhere in this town.” The backhoe operator ecxplained further, picking up a hunk of it from the rock pile.
Still more mysterious is what was under the slag.
Just 9″ below street level was the top of the slag which appeared to extend several feet further down and just to the left of the center of the picture you can make out the top section of a masonry wall encased in slag, a la Pompeii!
A Secret City literally right outside my door.
This work which I began during the Old and New Media Residency co-sponsored by software design, development, and strategy whizzes deeplocal and the book arts collective Encyclopedia Destructica, aims to rediscover or invent the stories that happened in the places that remain of Pittsburgh’s past. By giving people a means to open their eyes to the city of the past that lies silent, but still present all around us, I hope to connect us with the history of the city and the people who came before.
I’ve long thought that places with a history of human effort in work or worship or learning, acquire a patina of all that energy. If places could talk what stories would they tell?
With a little digging of my own, I’m going to channel those stories into re-being and share them with a new audience.
