3 posts tagged “braddock”
on current, with commentary
A nonlinear map of the echoes of loss still ringing through the greater Pittsburgh area, via images of Braddock and stories I've collected since I moved here in 2002.
I think when it is in your backyard, and humans cause it -- then it doesn't get the attention that it needs.
I took a few Boston friends on a brief walking tour of Braddock yesterday morning. The tension is still coming out of my body.
We parked down by the steelworks. Its the first and the last, you know - the first steelmill Carnegie ever built, the last to be operating on the eastern seaboard.
We were in separate cars. As I parked I looked at the US Steel watertower and thought, There was a man I knew, his dad worked for US Steel, and drank too much, and beat his family because of the stress of keeping his job through the 70s and 80s. And nobody in the family owned up to the injuries that he had caused after he quit drinking. They denied their wounds. I suppose they did that in gratitude that he stayed, that he stopped. I suppose they thought that was the loving response, to bury their wounds and resent him.
Lxxx's partner Pxxx said the mill smelled like the town in Poland that he's from, which was filled with steel mills. She couldn't believe the dump trucks filled with slag that drive by every 3 minutes.
Braddock feels like the 9th ward, New Orleans, except the place doesn't shriek. Its a long quiet moan. Lxxx shot over a hundred pictures of rotted out windows, faded sign details, a row of stakes in the side of a building that looks like crosses. We accidentally took a tour of the library - Carnegie's first-opened library in the US. It was supposed to be closed. We loitered on the porch. Eventually a volunteer came and asked if we wanted to see it.
The empty full-length swimming pool Carnegie built as a policy of appeasement, to keep his workers from making unions, lined with filing cabinets and boxes and desks. We'd never fix the pool, he said. The humidity would ruin the books.
There's also the 2-lane bowling alley our guide couldn't find the keys for.
The gorgeous music hall, pale blue seats flecked with faded gold paint on the armrests and scalloped back. I can imagine a candle-lit candlabra hoisted up above, hundreds of pale hands clapping too fast in the dark, wearing their sunday best.
The font on the organ's pull-knobs is beautiful, something out of the 20's I've never seen before. Three foot-shaped pedals, then all the floor pedals covered with bricks and the gaping hole in the wall behind -- vandals broke in, stole all the organ pipes to sell for recycling while the library was closed for repairs in the 80s.
Lxxx said the palette of the music hall is from the height of the 1950's.
Braddock is the fruit of so many poisonous cultural forces, its decay happened over a generation, a tooth rotted out of someone's head because of neglect. The freeway bypassing it keeps it cut off, isolated, off the mainstream cultural maps. I never see it in the Pittsburgh media, not even the five and dime drug-related crime.
When I went to shoot in the 9th ward last June, I discovered the cognitive erasure of that neighborhood in the map of the City of New Orleans. The 9th ward as an area wasn't labeled, and was spread over four discrete pages of the book in a way that made navigating the neighborhood intelligably impossible until I had gone and blown up those pages on a photocopier, cut them up, and made a new map.
Of course, what happened in New Orleans was primarily caused by a hurricane. You can't point a finger at a hurricane ... and so it pops up in the news every once in a while ... But Brad Pitt won't be coming to Braddock any time soon, because that poverty and loss was created by the loss of an industry, and the region denies it so it can live with it every day.
This is the culture of "hate what is ugly and painful, and ignore it so we don't have to think about the complicated forces that made it". Even if what is ugly and painful is simply the untreated wound of place. The steel industry was built with the bodies of men, it ate the bodies of the men who made the steel that built the world. Now it is gone, and the houses that housed those bodies rot.
Our tour guide told us they are going to premiere the play, Out of This Furnace at the Braddock Music Hall sometime later this year. This makes me happy.
