I love Pittsburgh. I only spend a few weeks a year here over the holidays, but I carry it with me everywhere I go. Of course, my feelings for the Burgh are biased by the nostalgia that lingers from my youth, so it's hard to separate truth from fiction--what the city really offers from what it represents in my mind. In my mind, it's the place of my childhood--where I played wiffle ball in the front yard using a bush, a tree, and a lamppost as the three bases, where I frolicked in the leaves with my brother, where I went sledding until some lawn-obsessed neighbor demanded that we leave. It's where I played on three soccer teams at a time, where I ate countless home cooked meals prepared by my mom, and where my dad picked me up at the bus stop after school.
Of course, to other people, Pittsburgh is none of those things, although some may ring familiar. Over Christmas, my uncle mentioned a title that caught his eye in the book store: Pittsburgh: The Paris of Appalachia. We joked around a bit about what that actually means and my cousin suggested that maybe it referred to the City's fashion sensibility. I laughed with images of Steelers' jackets flashing through my mind. (Of course, with no clothing tax, Pittsburgh isn't such a bad place to be fashionable.) According to the author, that title is actually borrowed from some hipster's jab at the city. The fact that the author uses it is pretty awesome...like when Dagny mockingly names her brilliant rail the "John Galt Line" in Atlas Shrugged.
In any case, I don't see Pittsburgh as the Paris of anything. It's far too unique for those kinds of comparisons--in my case, far too personal.
