Posts Tagged ‘Pittsburgh’
Downtown Pittsburgh, Sept. 11, 2001 — A city in shock
On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, as the country was in shock from the horrible events in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pa., my job at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was to go out into the abandoned and strangely silent city of Pittsburgh and report what I saw. Here’s what I wrote: Empty Downtown offers…
Read MorePittsburgh’s Phantom Pandemic — as misreported by The New York Times
‘Pittsburgh Seemed Like a Virus Success Story. Now Cases Are Surging’ ‘Pittsburgh, a sister city to Wuhan, China, saw only modest cases for months. In the last two weeks, cases are suddenly soaring’ The headline and content of this July 12 article about how Pittsburgh has dodged the Covid-19 bullet are a perfect example of…
Read MoreGov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania — America’s worst?
The governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, continues to make sure he holds on to his well-earned title of worst governor in state history. He and his dictatorial health department bureaucrats completely over-reacted to the initial threat of Covid-19, issuing strict statewide shutdown orders and social-distancing decrees when they should have been concentrating their efforts…
Read MorePittsburgh’s Phantom Pandemic
OK, OK, though it’s getting less likely every day, I know the coronavirus could still flare up. But so far, since early March and as of April 20, there have been a total of 55 Covid-19 deaths in Allegheny County, where the city of Pittsburgh is located. In a county population of 1.3 million Steelers…
Read MorePittsburgh 1980
January 20, 1980 CALENDAR LAST PAGE PITTSBURGH: UP FROM THE SMOKY PITS BY BILL STEIGERWALD This is another in the running Calendar series on cultural scenes this one on Pittsburgh, whose Steelers probably will lose today’s Super Bowl game to the Rams. The writer, a native of Pittsburgh just back for a vacation visit, is…
Read MoreMore Bad Reporting on Pittsburgh, plus the Usual Uber Hate, from the New York Times
Once again, for the dozenth time in my lifetime, the New York Times parachutes in and writes about Pittsburgh in a lame, biased, sloppy way. Not only did the article erroneously talk about the Strip District being a place where steel mills once flourished, it also did its usual hate-job on Uber by under-mentioning the…
Read MoreRemembering when Pittsburgh’s ‘square white men’ dropped their A-bomb of development on the city’s ‘Little Harlem’
Pittsburgh and its people have pioneered a lot of important stuff over the years. Industrialism and post-industrialism are its major historical innovations. The city’s fortunes — and population — rose and fell precipitously with the rise and fall of manufacturing and steel from the late 1800s until the 1960s, when the heavy industries that once…
Read MoreA critique of Richard Florida’s new book “The Urban Crisis” in Forbes nails it — it is the zoning and land use regs, stupid
The smart young man — Scott Beyer of http://bigcitysparkplug.com/ — who wrote the smack-on critique of my pal Richard Florida’s new book The New Urban Crisis for Forbes — is coming to Pittsburgh next year. His visit will be part of his 30-city project to study the incredibly stupid things that have been done by…
Read MoreA good re-meeting with crazy talker John McIntire in the hallowed and potent studios of KDKA 1020
John McIntire kindly asked me to visit his regular Wednesday/Thursday night talk show on KDKA-AM, the powerful and once important radio voice of Pittsburgh that I grew up listening to religiously. They used to say when the world ended, everyone in this tawn would turn to KD Radio’s 50,000-watt signal to get the details. Now,…
Read MoreJohn McIntire invites me to talk about ’30 Days a Black Man’ on KDKA
Wednesday night at 9 on Newsradio 1020 KDKA John McIntire will grill me without mercy about any fictions or lies I might have put into my book 30 Days a Black Man. Actually, he wants to talk with me about star Post-Gazette journalist Ray Sprigle’s daring and important trip into the 1948 Jim Crow South…
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