City Scenes: Jerry's Records in Squirrel Hill

Jerry’s Records has been on my Pittsburgh to-do list ever since I first arrived in the city many years ago. My personal preferences in urban media spaces tend toward film venues, bookstores, and art galleries. Record stores typically don’t make it on my itinerary. When I was still buying CDs I would make it a point to peruse music shop shelves, but that seems like a previous life now and I never got into collecting vinyl. But Jerry’s is a local institution: a longtime independent shop and neighborhood fixture that was renowned for its enormous collection.

As is so often the case with the people and places that are so near-at-hand that they become taken for granted, I kept putting off a visit to Jerry’s until some indeterminate point in the future. Even when I moved to Squirrel Hill, and was living just down the street from Jerry’s, my appointment with the shop was relegated to “someday.” Proximity and familiarity tend to produce indifference, as that which is right in front of us is so easily overlooked. So when my musically-inclined sister and brother-in-law visited this summer it provided a perfect opportunity for finally ascending to record heaven.

The shop is an expansive space that nearly overwhelms with its sprawling assortment and towering stacks. Musical genres and themed sections are helpfully and whimsically designated with colorful decor.

Oh, and did I mention the milk crates? As I’ve reported previously, these polyethylene receptacles have recently become somewhat of a personal obsession. The portable, versatile, and stackable storage containers are put to good use throughout the record shop.

My developing milk crate connoisseurship has inculcated an appreciation for varieties of color and form, but I’m also keen on the different legal warnings against misuse that adorn the objects. The nooks and crannies of Jerry’s offered a veritable milk crate menagerie.

Pedal PGH 2022 (w/ video!)

Back on the last Sunday in August I took part in Pedal PGH for the first time. Although this event had never been on my radar, it's been held every year since 1994. Having now participated, I recognize the color-coordinated route markers placed throughout the city to guide cyclists from previous summers; I always assumed they were left over from the Pittsburgh Marathon or other running event. This year there were four routes to choose from in mileages of 10, 25, 40, and 60 miles. In an honest assessment of my fitness level I would’ve opted for the lowest mileage option, but the 10 mile route only covered a loop around the South Side river trail, and I’m on those paths all the time as it is. So I opted for the 25 mile City Tour route.

Suggested start times were staggered based on your intended route length, but everyone began from the same place beneath the South Side end of the Birmingham Bridge. It was fun checking out the variety of bikes and cycling gear represented around the starting lane, particularly the more fanciful conveyances.

Streets along the routes were open for business as usual, so cyclists were sharing the road with other traffic, but with the energy of a massive group ride that was an entirely new experience for me. This year’s Pedal PGH coincided with the annual national meetup of Black Girls Do Bike, an advocacy organization committed to growing a cycling community for girls and women of color. I saw numerous riders with BGDB gear throughout my route and they were among the most active in calling out stoppages or traffic at intersections, especially through downtown. There were two rest stops along the 25 mile route with the first being in the Allegheny Commons Park on the North Side.

The inclines began to overcome me climbing out of the Strip District and crossing the 28th Street Bridge. Polish Hill really wore me out although it was cool traversing new streets and seeing neighborhood landmarks like the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church up close for the first time. There were also some great views along that stretch.

The next rest stop was in Highland Park, which was timely for a number of reasons. Firstly, I was feeling fatigued and famished at this point and was happy to find a somewhat shady spot to wolf down the lunch that was provided. Secondly, during the ride into Highland Park I started having issues with my bike that made me nervous.

Upon mounting my bike and attempting to resume the ride my rear wheel fishtailed dramatically, confirming my fears that I had a flat tire. Thankfully the rest stop also included a bike service station and I was able to get the flat fixed.

From there it was back toward the South Side passing through Bloomfield, Friendship, Squirrel Hill, Oakland, and Greenfield. The ride ended where it began beneath the Birmingham Bridge.

I gotta admit I was pretty wiped out by this ride and it took my body a few days to recover.

Here’s a compilation of footage I shot during my ride. I tried to record the whole trip but my phone was too low on battery after a couple of hours, so this video only covers about two thirds of the route. It’s a shame because it misses out on some of my favorite parts of the ride, particularly going through Schenley Park into Oakland, and riding Swinburne Street down into Greenfield. Also, apologies to the North Side neighborhoods that I don’t know well enough to properly shout out in the video…Manchester? Chateau? California Kirkbride?

Bridges, Biden, and the Sublime Object of (Pittsburgh) Infrastructure

Last Friday President Joe Biden stopped in Pittsburgh in order to use some of the Steel City’s post-industrial transition into technology research and development as the backdrop for a speech about the Infrastructure Bill. News of Biden’s visit only broke the day before, and the timing seemed coincidental for me personally because Biden was to deliver his remarks at Mill 19, a redeveloped tech office-park in Hazelwood that has featured in my research for several years and that I’m currently writing about (and also visited during Open Streets last July). The timing of the President’s Pittsburgh pit-stop would end up proving much more coincidental, however, when the Fern Hollow Bridge that traverses a ravine in Frick Park in between the neighborhoods of Squirrel Hill and Regent Square collapsed around 6:00 AM Friday morning, just hours before Biden was scheduled to touch down in the city. No one was killed in the collapse, though the loss of a major thoroughfare will pose ramifications for mobility and accessibility in the city for a long time.

The timing of the collapse seemed like an unwelcome surprise engineered by the Cosmic Coincidence Control Center (although I saw several Twitter users deduce that the bridge failure was a false flag event designed to further Biden’s radical-left agenda; a conflux of phantasms). Throughout the news coverage journalists and other commentators made the absurdly obvious observation that the bridge failure underscored the importance of funding for infrastructure maintenance. The impotence of these assertions is only exacerbated by the preceding months of political discourse that hinged upon the necessity of public infrastructure investment so that, you know, bridges don’t collapse.

Biden visited the collapse site prior to his speech and talked with the local officials and first responders who were on scene. It seems that one of Biden’s aides included the trivia about Pittsburgh having more bridges than any other city in the world into his briefing; Biden repeated the factoid throughout the day. I lost my bet that Biden would refer to his credentials as a “bi-partisan bridge builder” in his remarks, but I did correctly predict that he would trot out the well-worn anecdote about “going to the McDonald’s parking lot to use the WiFi” that seems to feature in every single one of Biden’s infrastructure stump speeches. 

Locally the Fern Hollow bridge collapse was seen as a call to action, even as experts advised that it will take far more than the Infrastructure Bill to address all of the region’s outstanding issues. It also sparked reflection on previous instances of infrastructural deterioration and breakdown.

At the beginning of this month I wrote about the inauguration of new Pittsburgh mayor Ed Gainey and the legacy of outgoing mayor Bill Peduto through the lens of mobility infrastructure. I highlighted Peduto’s choice to describe his place in Pittsburgh history as “a bridge over troubled water.” Immediately after the collapse of this troubled bridge last week the incident was politicized as residents sought to assign blame. Many assigned fault to Peduto: some ascribed the collapse to Peduto’s choosing to fund police over infrastructure (Peduto has been very active on Twitter discussing the collapse and responding to other users); others claimed it was the result of diverting money to bike lanes (this is incredible but true…the goddamn “bike lane” discourse lives on!).

The excited murmuring over Pittsburgh infrastructure that the Fern Hollow collapse incited seems like a locally-inflected variant of the politicking that played out in national discourse over the past many months. Even the signifier “infrastructure” has become as ubiquitous as its signified, just part of the background of everyday life. Something that you tend to take for granted and overlook until it breaks down or fails. The constant repetition of this word, the application of its meaning to a vast array of potential interventions, indicate a “sublime” aspect of infrastructure as both materiality and discourse. In a material sense the all-encompassing and pervasive nature of our infrastructural environments suggest an inexorable sublimity.

And in this recent political discourse – whether on the national or local level – the way the term is operationalized and the various ideological investments revealed in these debates illustrate how infrastructure may function as sublime objects, imagined as the satisfaction of our desires.

Moving forward in Pittsburgh

The New Year started with a boom in Pittsburgh, and this period of calenderial transition portends more changes than usual. When I returned to Pittsburgh this past summer after an extended absence I had to steel myself for the changes wrought by the pandemic. It seemed unfathomable that a popular nightlife spot like Brillobox would close, or a hallowed neighborhood haunt like Take A Break would go for up for sale (however, the proximity of both these venues to Lawrenceville leads me to wonder how much the pandemic can be faulted, or whether the economic impacts of covid-19 only exacerbated the already established patterns of gentrification, capitalization, and dispossession…see also the massive new development taking shape on the former Penn Plaza site, a project that seems to have shifted from stalemate to speed train after the advent of coronavirus.). The closing days of 2021 saw similarly unthinkable news with the announcement that Pamela’s was shuttering its iconic Squirrel Hill diner location.

The long tail of the pandemic and the pervasive encroachment of gentrification will continue to remake the landscape of Pittsburgh, just as they are shaping cities around the world. But this new year also marks a political shift in the city. Today (January 3rd) Ed Gainey will be inaugurated as the 61st mayor of Pittsburgh and the city’s first mayor of color. Over the past weeks there have been numerous reflections and retrospectives on the legacy of outgoing mayor Bill Peduto. For me, Peduto’s mayoral tenure will always be associated with mobility and infrastructure. Not only did his administration create the Pittsburgh Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, but these were central focal points for my research into neighborhood change and development in the city over the last several years.

The final year of Peduto’s term saw further inroads in transit policy and innovation. Last July the city launched Move PGH, which was touted as the country’s first transit app for non-car transportation. The new initiative was accompanied by the introduction of e-scooters onto Pittsburgh’s streets, part of a comprehensive approach toward making the city a “leader in car-free mobility.” The fleet of electric scooters soon became an ubiquitous presence in Pittsburgh and sparked a rash of complaints over where the vehicles were being ridden or abandoned on city streets and sidewalks. Local media began covering scooter sightings on highways and in tunnels. As with the introduction of autonomous vehicle testing on the city’s streets years earlier, the Pittsburgh city council had to explore ways of legislating and regulating the new transportation technology.

In August a transit report ranked Pittsburgh the third-best 15-minute city in the country. The 15-minute metric refers to the availability of daily necessities and amenities within a 15-minute walk or bike trip. The study also highlighted the impact of affordable housing on mobility and accessibility, echoing a recent report that linked public transit funds to racial equity. That same month census data revealed that Allegheny County saw its first population growth since 1960, while also providing further statistical support for the much-discussed displacement of Black residents from Pittsburgh.

In September the Peduto administration announced the 2070 Mobility Vision Plan, a framework for the next 50 years of infrastructure investment in the city along with a commitment to “mobility justice.” The announcement of the vision plan was preceded by a host of new and proposed transit initiatives from the Pittsburgh Port Authority. The latter half of 2021 brought numerous other transit-related developments in the city including debate over the impact that a proposed Amazon distribution center would have on the streets of Lawrenceville, and a grant to transform a section of South Side’s 21st Street into a “complete green street.”

The closing month of 2021 saw a final flurry of mobility moves in Pittsburgh. Mayor Peduto announced plans to transform an abandoned road behind Bakery Square into a “living street,” with visualizations of the re-imagined streetscape. Residents of Hazelwood received news of a long-awaited sidewalk improvement, while mayor-elect Gainey announced a pause on the Mon-Oakland Connector that has long featured in debates over the remake-formerly-known-as-Almono that has been incrementally emerging in Hazelwood. Also in December, the city passed new legislation that bans parking in designated bike lanes.

All of these mobility-related initiatives are “on brand” for the Pittsburgh identity that Peduto has promoted during his term, but the bike lane legislation is a particularly appropriate measure for his final days in office. As I’ve mentioned before, bike lanes took on a distinct symbolic resonance in the mayor Peduto era. The newly dedicated lanes and other cycling infrastructure became synecdoches for the generational culture wars: bike lanes were regularly mentioned in letters-to-the-editor and the comment sections of local news websites as Pittsburghers decried a perceived shift away from traditional Steel City values toward the lifestyle preferences of the hipster-millenial-industrial-complex. While my own political values were typically at odds with the spirit in which bike lanes were cited in these cases, there is a germ of truth in what these Pittsburghers were responding to: bike lanes have been mobilized by municipalities as attractors for members of the “creative class,” and the social disparities inherent to “walkability” and “complete streets” rhetoric have long been noted. Indeed, my main contention with Peduto’s tenure hinges upon an overreliance and uncritical acceptance of “creative class” development initiatives (in conjunction with a pervading ethos of hegemonic liberalism that often expressed the right sentiments while falling short of inscribing them into policy).

This inherent ideological antagonism between the residual imaginaries of Pittsburgh’s gritty industrial heritage and the glossy banalized tech-sector landscape that has taken its place was aptly captured in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial published on New Year’s Day. Aside from correctly identifying the dominant contrasting urban identities that characterized Peduto’s mayoral term, the editorial seems ambiguously ambivalent toward the outgoing mayor (the conclusion is that Peduto was good for Pittsburgh but could’ve been better?). The compromised tone of the editorial may indeed be the result of a compromise among staffers: the Post-Gazette editorial board has long been highly suspect if not entirely disreputable due to the nefarious and noxious influence exerted by its right-wing ownership, but it seems that the editorial board will also be changing in the new year.

Mayor Peduto has given several interviews recently, reflecting on his accomplishments in office with a considerable degree of candor (I want to especially recommend this excellent write-up from Public Source). In one such reflection Peduto said that he might be remembered as “a bridge over troubled water.” It’s such a perfect cap to Peduto’s history of on-brand messaging rhetoric, drawing upon the bridges with which Pittsburgh is so closely identified as well as the emphasis on mobility and infrastructure that he foregrounded as mayor. It occurred to me this week that Peduto was first sworn in as Pittsburgh mayor in 2014, the same year that I arrived in the city. I remember watching his episode of Undercover Boss later that year. His approach to governance and vision of the city that he put forth has been integral to my experience of Pittsburgh.

Moving forward, and as long as I remain in Pittsburgh, I will continue to track the unfolding patterns of neighborhood change and development strategies, particularly as they relate to both old and new mobility infrastructure initiatives. Some of the ongoing infrastructure investments I am most interested in are not necessarily driven by transportation. For instance, Peduto’s “Dark Sky initiative” to combat light pollution by replacing 35,000 streetlights with LEDs. And more recently the Pittsburgh City Council approved the designation of six greenways to become city parks, a move that among other things addresses the importance of urban greenways in a post-pandemic world.

Incoming mayor Gainey has reasserted his commitment to a more diverse and inclusive Pittsburgh. As I’ve stated before, I am excited for this new era of civic leadership in the city, while also anxious about the racist rhetoric (whether explicit or implicit) that will surely emerge in public discourse during Gainey’s tenure. I wonder what will replace “bike lanes” as the metonymic signifier for competing cultural values and ideological struggles in the coming years.