A Love Letter to Pittsburgh
For this one-time city resident, the siren call of some stolen moments here still remains simply irresistible - even from Manhattan.
By Ellen T. White
Illustration by Juliette Borda
Does a city have the power to woo? Can a landscape sweet-talk? Would you call it "heartsick" if you wistfully daydream about a place you never really called home, but to which you imagine you might return to pick up with the life you left long ago? I'll admit I carry a torch. Let me take you back to when it all began, with the town that stole my heart.
My romance with Pittsburgh began in my mid-20s on my very first visit to the city for the wedding of a friend in the 1980s. The bride was the sleek, only daughter of descendants of a prominent steel-manufacturing family - Pittsburgh aristocracy. The groom, my friend, obscured his humbler origins with his charm, staggering good looks and a wicked sense of humor.
The posh country-club event featured 17 ushers. (The groom had been unofficially designated "Most Popular" by his college classmates.) Eight bridesmaids were outfitted in fuchsia silk and looked as if they'd been pulled from the pages of Vogue.
Though for all its pomp, the event didn't stand on ceremony. Dancing was fueled by champagne so free-flowing that it might have come from a spigot for all I knew. The air was electric with flirtations, a few of which lined the pockets of wedding planners in the years to come. The bridal couple, reluctant to break away, were finally pushed out the door just as the sky was beginning to turn morning gray, and they almost missed an early takeoff for their honeymoon in the south of France.
Then as now, I lived in New York City. But the hills and mountains of Western Pennsylvania, a special topography that was new to me, filled me with passionate reverence. I remember standing on the stone terrace behind Longue Vue Club and marveling at how the red-gold shafts of the setting sun illuminated the deep ravine that cascaded down from the peaks in front of me. Later that night, in an occurrence oddly prescient, I caught the bride's bouquet, which soared from the balcony of Longue Vue Club's ballroom directly into my hands without my so much as moving an inch.
Years later I was pursuing the scrappy, "Sex and the City" dating existence in New York and had painstakingly carved out a writing career. For all its hardships, New York City gets into your blood - a sentiment no less true for being a cliché. Romantic and professional setbacks are the proud battle scars of survival in a city that trumps all others for urban thrills.
By the time a friend insisted on "fixing me up" with a childhood friend of hers in New York on business, I was fully adept at turning dating mishaps into comic material. My cynic's heart melted when my blind date, a designer from Pittsburgh, wooed me the way New Yorkers rarely do - with flowers, impromptu picnics and love notes. I threw myself into the romance with an incaution I'll never regret. We commuted between our cities for long weekends. On Valentine's Day we officially got engaged at Mount Washington's LeMont restaurant, overlooking Pittsburgh's bold and glittering skyline. Six months later, we married in New York. I moved into his handsome white-brick house in Pittsburgh's Schenley Farms neighborhood.
Like every longtime New Yorker, I feared losing my "edge" but was determined to keep a firm grip on it. Working from Pittsburgh, I continued to take jobs in New York, where I had established a niche writing about luxury hotels and turning out funding proposals for not-for-profits with the efficiency of an assembly line. Yet my articles for New York's smaller magazines and newspapers, fair journalism all, rarely put me exactly where I wanted to be - which was doing profiles, delving into the lives of people who either incited public interest, or soon would after what I hoped would be my enlightened exposé.
That first year, for an issue marking Valentine's Day, Pittsburgh magazine took me up on my proposal to profile several of the region's "most interesting - and eligible - singles" ["Pittsburgh's Most Wanted," February 1996] with as much enthusiasm as I offered it. Then, at the magazine's request, I took on another assignment, a feature comparing the personal and professional style of native television-news legend Patti Burns with that of her talented rival, WTAE anchor Sally Wiggin ["Anchors Away," February 1997] - just the kind of substantive profile work that I had always longed to do. Teeth chattering from nerves, I dived in and managed to pull it off. It brought me a satisfying measure of minor celebrity. I went on to write about Pittsburgh's television-news directors ["The Men Behind the News," March 1998] and about its rising hometown girl, singer Christina Aguilera ["Dream of Genie," May 2000].
A fascination with contemporary art led me to write to the Carnegie Museum of Art asking for work. Without much deliberation, I was put in charge of media relations for the 1995-'96 Carnegie International. Through it I met and wrote about artists from all over the world. I still boast that Richard Armstrong, the recently departed director of the museum and current director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum in New York, was the best boss I ever had. No one since has ever made a job seem less like work.
Pittsburgh believed in me in a way New York never really had. How could I not warm to its confidence? But my affection amounted to more than that. Something about the landscape of the city, so affecting on that first visit years before, started to feel like home.
My first year in Pittsburgh, it snowed 17 times. My husband taught me how to ski at Seven Springs, and, since then, just the word "blizzard" fills me with childish delight. I loved the Tudor-style houses, the neat lawns, the bridges and the way the rivers carved up the city - although I always got confused about whether I was on the North or South Side.
After the clamor of Fifth Avenue in New York, the pace of Saturday shopping on Walnut Street in Shadyside was a civilized stroll. Sometimes, zipping through the passageway under the Carnegie Museums, I'd stop, breathe in its familiar smell, and think - oh, no, am I falling in love?
My husband had always wanted to live in New York, so the game plan had been to move back East once he got work. Just as I was beginning to question the strategy, he landed a couple of lucrative design jobs. After I'd only spent two years in Pittsburgh, we were packing up a U-Haul, selling the house in Schenley Farms and moving into the rambling, rent-stabilized apartment I had sublet on the Upper East Side. Sure, it was great to be back. Who doesn't thrill to the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps, the nerve center of whatever it is that gives New Yorkers that "edge" they can't live without?
As luck would have it, the marketing chief for New York's Museum of Modern Art was a transplant from the Carnegie Museum of Art. She hired me to write ad copy for the Museum of Modern Art and proposed me for managing editor of The New York Public Library - a recommendation that gave me the winning edge over a field of 350 aspirants. Curiously, national magazines were no longer tossing out my writing samples. Several gave me assignments for the first time.
In legend, of course, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. Yet I seemed to be experiencing a professional phenomenon of another kind. Having started in New York, it was my Pittsburgh work and contacts that were giving me a leg up in New York. Sadly, my marriage unraveled. But this didn't quite explain why I missed Pittsburgh so much.
Sitting in my steel-and-glass office on 54th Street and, later, on Fifth Avenue, I felt what can only be described as heartsick. I would imagine how that stretch of Forbes Avenue near the Cathedral of Learning looked after one of those cathartic, near-tropical summer rainstorms. Or I'd daydream about the lights of the city's pretty little houses in the gloaming as they winked beside the London plane trees after a snowfall. To the amusement of my brothers, I would fall on Pittsburghers who passed through town as a chance to dish. "You!" the perplexed Pittsburgher would say, "you live in New York. Could anything be more exciting than that?" But to borrow from writer Michael Chabon, I preferred to dwell on the subtler mysteries of the 'Burgh.
Does anything beat the spectacle of the city's skyline as you're coming out of the Fort Pitt Tunnels into town, I'd say, or the kick of an incline ride down the slope of Mount Washington? Nothing literally rocks like Fallingwater in the late spring, when everything green and flowering comes roaring back to life again. Does anybody make lamb the way Casbah does? The sweet chutney side the Shadyside restaurant once offered brought grateful tears to my eyes. Don't get me started, or we'll be here all night.
Last Feb. 13, Valentine's Day eve, I flew into Pittsburgh after an absence of several years. I had just published a book called Simply Irresistible - profiles of the great seductresses of all time that offer lessons in love for women today. I had received a thumbs-up from The New York Times and was making radio and television interview rounds. Yet I knew that on this milestone occasion, nothing would feel quite right until I'd touched down in Pittsburgh and stated my case.
With characteristic humor and generosity, my pal Sally Wiggin threw together a Valentine's story for WTAE-TV. Beginning at the Waterworks Barnes & Noble and ending up at Shadyside's Soba Lounge that night, we canvassed Pittsburghers for their views on the secrets behind what makes a person simply irresistible. From start to finish the story was a hoot to do. But for all the laughs, my day and night in the 'Burgh left me with a feeling of wistful curiosity.
What shape would my life have taken if I had made Pittsburgh my home? Do I romanticize the city that much more for having so abruptly left it behind? But there's no going back now on that decision made a decade ago. In truth, I am a committed New Yorker and happy to be. But it is hard - very hard - not to feel a sense of loss sometimes for the town that got away and a life that might have been.
Ellen T. White, a freelance writer in New York, last wrote about New York "Fashion Force" Robert Duffy in the October issue of Pittsburgh magazine. She is the author of Simply Irresistible: Unleash Your Inner Siren and Mesmerize Men With Help From the Most Famous and Infamous Women in History (ellentwhite.com), published by Running Press in January 2008 and reviewed in Pittsburgh magazine last February.