Two Pittsburghs: Privilege in the Golden Triangle

I have written about "Two Pittsburghs" before. It's not a new mode of analysis; we saw John Edwards talking about "two Americas" before he imploded. Sue Kerr has been out in front on the topic. Mayor Bill Peduto has talked about it on NPR.

First Pittsburgh is America's Most Livable City. If we'd gotten Amazon's HQ2, we'd rename it Pittsburgh Prime. This is the Pittsburgh we saw after the Tree of Life massacre; caring, empathetic, enlightened; smiling happy people holding hands. The yard signs say, All are welcome.

Lesser Pittsburgh is racist, unprivileged, and Old School. The flags are confederate, or worse. The yard signs say, Make America Great Again. We don't mourn black deaths in Second Pittsburgh the way we mourn dead white First Pittsburghers. Legacy Pittsburgh makes a bigger deal about a killed Police Dog than a dead black Pittsburgher.

Rob Rogers

I thought First Pittsburgh and Lesser Pittsburgh were colocated, sprinkled among each other with varying distributions. Last week my friend MCC suggested: First Pittsburgh is between the rivers; Forgotten Pittsburgh lies outside the rivers.  Think about an expanded Golden Triangle as the sweet spot.

I've tried to map the two Pittsburghs. I think it's a map of privilege vs poverty, of an easy life vs a struggling life, of diversity vs homogeneity, of professionals vs working class. It's a map of Uber-Robotics Pittsburgh vs. Inconvenient-Unfunded-Throwback Pittsburgh.

It's Uber vs. jitneys. It's walkable communities vs car communities. It's a map of the Penn Plaza evictees vs the gentry who'll be moving in. It's a map of privilege. It's a map of UPMC and colleges. It's probably a map of NPR donors.

It's deadly. It's a map of developers making a killing vs a map of where cops kill people. It's the map of people who were killed at Tree of Life vs. the people who did the killing. It does, to an extent, follow the rivers with the exception of an unprivileged column that starts in Bluff/Uptown, runs through the Hill, and flows east to East Liberty, Larimar, Lincoln-Lemington, and Homewood. I wonder if I've coded Bloomfield correctly.

There's Gold in the Golden Triangle, in the space between the rivers; it's just not evenly distributed. It's Richard Florida's Creative Class vs people struggling to get 40 hours a week out of their boss. It's FLSA-exempt vs non-exempt, it's managers vs workers - you can say it's Normans vs. Saxons. It's the place where capital will invest vs. places capital passes over.

It's the 18 funded neighborhoods out of 90; it's political power vs #WontWorkHere; it's EastSide and BakerySquare2 vs East Liberty. It's increasing life expectancy vs decreasing life expectancy. It's similar to a map of the Bike Share stations.

There's pockets that don't fit the map (for instance, the Mattress Factory / City of Asylum / Randyland node is outside of the rivers). If anybody has feedback about what neighborhoods are First Pittsburgh vs. Inconvenient-Unfunded Pittsburgh, please make a comment.

The black-white areas outside the Golden Triangle are not Enlightened, Fred Rogers Pittsburgh. And the burbs surrounding Pittsburgh are often throwbacks too, like these fine folks in West Mifflin flying a swastika flag because of their mixed-race neighbors.

Mr. Rogers weeps.