Steel to Libraries

An impromptu trip creates a research project and a delayed middle school field trip.

I don’t show up. I just don’t and say I did. I was different this summer. I was invited to a get together six months earlier, and I showed up. I ran into family members I hadn’t seen in a long time. You know the conversations that are had at events - we should get together, we should go on an adventure, what happened to that book club? One of those conversations at this event was, “you should really visit me in Pennsylvania”. With two more weeks of summer vacation I took them up on the offer. After Yellowstone, I really wanted to see parts of the country I hadn’t gotten to.

It’s the research with me. When you say Pennsylvania, I think of two things - Carnegie and my kids memorizing the Gettysburg address at the end of the year. I wanted to do it all in the span of a week. The French & Indian war lasted nine years, but I would crush it all in days. It was Carnegie libraries that I always had an interest in. The Jeff Bezos of the Gilded Age sold everything for a bundle to JP Morgan (who overcharges me in 2025) and spent it to build over 3,000 libraries across the globe. Cool guy, right? Opinion halted.

It’s about 80% aesthetics for me. The styles of his libraries fell into mostly Georgian style or mid-Atlantic. I pictured someone winning the lotto and just spending his or her time designing these libraries that would rival Alexandria. That’s a way to spend your golden years. His rags to riches story about starting out as a paperboy and then working in steel turning into one of the first American titans. Cool story.

The libraries he loved provided me with the research on him and his compadres. I was in to “Hell on Wheels”. Bohanan making his way across the country with the Railroad Pacific? That is a grail quest. To be Carnegie who saw his friends prepping to hit the road and he decides to stay and just invest in steel, skipping the adventure? Half his friends would lose everything on the railroad and die, the ones that made it to the goal line have Universities named after them in California. Did Carnegie have a psychic who told him not to go? Then I read more and it turns out on top of the steel he truly made his fortune in political alliances and market manipulation. Yeah, that makes sense, but that’s not as much fun as the paperboy who made it up the ranks and gave his fortune to make libraries.

Road Warrior

There was a hiccup at the Pittsburgh airport (I went through every rental until I could find one that could quickly connect to my CarPlay) and I was over an hour late arriving at my family’s house. A concerned call was made to me as I was halfway to town. I answer the phone with the windows down and the music blasting on the radio. This did nothing to calm the rumors over the past few years that I’m a mess. It was recommended that for safety, I should go with the group to Gettysburg, but just stay around town during the week. I stay up until 4am catching up and enjoying the conversation.

At 8am the next morning I agree to have breakfast and possibly visit the Heinz museum for my activity. I agree and so I don’t get prepped for my initial plan. Once I’m behind the wheel to find a drive-thru Starbucks, I say to heck with it and I take off for Fort Necessity. It’s only a two and a half hour drive, that’s the same length of time in LA traffic. I arrive at Fort Necessity and regret it a bit. I dressed to grab a coffee in town, I should have worn my walking gear. I decided to tour the museum and just lie and say I made it to the fort. Like all field trips, I stopped at the gift shop. I picked up a t-shirt and then I saw a National Parks passport. I remember seeing the stamp station in Yellowstone and I always love things that involve collections and checklists, especially if it involves the Nation. This stems from the fact that I never got to be an Eagle Scout. The minute I stamp my new passport I feel like a fraud. It would hurt, but I had to. I stepped out into ninety degree heat and walked out towards the fort. It was a quarter mile walk, I found shade and made it. Do you know it’s sunny with bugs in Pennsylvania?

I arrive at the Fort and it was smaller than I expected. There was an actor with a musket sitting outside the Fort waiting to give a presentation. I huddled behind the fence and multipied him by a hundred, yeah, I probably wouldn’t have made it, but it would have been a stray that took me because I wouldn’t be inside that tiny Fort. The sign outside stated that there was an additional mile to the tavern, but you could also drive there from the museum. Say less. I leisurely made my way back to the air-conditioned museum and drove in my air-conditioned vehicle to take my photo in front of the tavern. I earned my stamp and I headed back to Pittsburgh.

Have you ever had an “aha” moment? I connected the dots of Fort Necessity and Gettysburg and realized how important Pennsylvania was during the Revolution and Civil War. I always knew, but standing there in real time it starts to hit home. I make my way to Braddock Carnegie - Braddock is also connected to Fort Necessity. I felt like all of my tourist stops were connecting to make my adventure more exciting, but it turns out it was always the case.

Libraries

Braddock library was beautiful. When I walked inside I realized the dilemma they had. Turning a historic building into a functioning city library that could service the community takes funds. Floor space that used to house books were cleared for computer stations. There’s no way around it, you need the Net to make it anywhere these days. The shelf space was predominantly leisure reading. I don’t know if Braddock Library was ever a research library in the past, but it gave the impression of a county library for the community today. There were spaces that were under construction, but it didn’t seem like the construction was new. Having worked at a county library I understand how an expansion project in a historical building can drag on for over a decade. The buildings were built, but the infrastructure was dependent on tax-payer dollars and grants. Standing in a Georgian building built by a titan, not even the history and vigor of its founder could save it from what has happened across the country. America is in a recession and public libraries are definitely feeling it.

With a pang of melancholy I crossed the street and saw Aunt Cheryl’s Cafe. Its motto was that it served the best sweet potato pie in the country. That’s a tall order. I walked into an unassuming diner on the bottom floor of a community center and I ate the best sweet potato pie in the country. I almost ordered a second, but I was running on the adrenaline of war generals and tycoons. I wanted to keep going.

The Fear in Art

The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh is made up of three different buildings. There were exhibits by artists I had seen before like Yayoi Kusama, but I went for Rebecca Shapass. I love immersive art pieces. The ability to create a walkable scene from your POV, but distorted so the ambiguity of the scene allows a personal interpretation. Fragments of scenes produced to have each visitor filling in their own story. Mine was crippling fear.

I entered the Monterey building and the front desk greeter informed me that the exhibits were on all three floors and they asked that you not exit back to the entrance, but to walk to the third floor and exit through the outside door. My Spidey senses came alive, but I had just survived the French and Indian war, what did I have to fear?

Stairs. I had to fear stairs. The building is over a hundred years old. I realized this when I took a step up to the second floor and immediately stopped. You know how old buildings creak? Multiply that by a hundred and that's what happened to me on the steps. They weren’t even normal steps, they were cinder block height, which meant I had to put my healing meniscus to work. I attempted to gracefully walk down the steps and play dumb as I walked out the ground floor entrance, but more people started walking up the stairs so I was stuck. I made my way to the top and everything started to creak.

I know that artists are given a pittance to put together their work, especially today, but I wondered if they had at least put a few million into fortifying the building. The answer was the creaking beneath my feet with every step. In a room with about six hundred square feet of space, the entire group behind me decided to come stand right next to me on the same floor board. Call me Rose Dewitt-Bukater, I’m sorry, there’s no room on this board. They were all so happy I was afraid they’d all start jumping for joy right there and then we’d all be done for. I pressed my hands against the wall and made my way to the door.

More fear. Shapass has a vision and I respect an artist’s vision, but for her exhibit it involved the staircase up to the third floor shrouded in darkness which invoked in me abject terror. Standing there on the second floor landing, I could either trip and fall down cinder blocks to a life filled with pain and inconvenience, or I could walk up a dark, narrower staircase towards my obvious demise. I’m no coward, I went up.

The staircase took me a while. Every step was filled with a cracking creak. Also, I felt like the steps were moving. By the time I was halfway up, I couldn’t see a thing, that’s how dark it was. I reached down to grip the rail to calm myself and the only thing I could grab onto was the hand of my ancestors from across the veil because there was no railing. It wasn’t until I took another step and the walls touched my shoulders that it hit me I wasn’t on a staircase to a third floor, I was climbing attic steps. I’ve never climbed attic steps before because I have common sense. Four steps from the top landing I reached up and planted my hands on the groud to ensure it was there because I was blind. Those last four steps were a lot of shadow work. Nothing to hold onto, unable to see, but trusting that you were entering a room. New fear unlocked. I’d rather ride thousands of miles across the tundra dying of hyperthermia than ever climb a small space cloaked in darkness where I don’t know what lies ahead.

A few minutes or a lifetime later I’m finally standing upright in the attic. The hall leading into the room is also pitch black. I grab onto the door post and make my way into the next room where the only light is a blinking red one. The visual is supposed to evoke finding yourself from fragments of yourself. Is that frightening? Not as frightening as ending up at the Pittsburgh ER and not being offered Norco because you look tough and there aren’t any noticeable broken bones and Radiology is fully booked for the next six hours. Which is to say that at that moment I was hard inserting my own thoughts into the exhibit and not viewing it openly.

I enjoy each portion of her exhibit and when I hear footsteps coming up the staircase it was my queue to leave. I make a dash for the exit, walk through and breathe the air of freedom with my eyes closed and the sun beating on my face. The door closes behind me and I open my eyes to see that I’m standing on a metal fire escape, with no other way but down. I grip onto the rail and I make my way down almost crying, but once I’m only a single story above the ground I feel fine. Touching the floor at the end of that adventure was a feeling of relief. I looked back up at the attic and I was happy that I had done it, but I would never step foot on the top floor of an old colonial building ever again.

The exhibit was beautiful and I’m glad I braved my fears to see it. I can’t wait to see her work in the future in concrete buildings like SF MOMA.

Bay Girls

What are the odds that one of the nights I’m in Pennsylvania, Goapele is playing at City Winery. We had to go. Walking into City Winery for a great night out was definitely one on my checklist. Limping in there because I’d spent the day following the steps of George Washington followed by walking through a colonial house that I now know I can never live in meant I wasn’t at full strength.

Goapele brought the Bay with her that night. Do you know what happens when you’ve walked 10,000 steps with only water and sweet potato pie in your system? You get drunk on a single glass of red. While Goapele sang, I was plowing a charcuterie board into my mouth so that I wouldn’t fall asleep before the night was over. By the time she sang “Closer” I’d gotten my second wind. Everyone told me the day I’d just had was madness. I told them it was nothing and then I slept ten hours that night.

Everything was a beautiful memory and I hadn’t even gotten to Gettysburg. What I really enjoyed was the solo cruises across roads I’d never driven with the music blasting. That will always be a good time for me.

I have checklists. Here is the map of the U.S. and what I have left to cover. I’m counting about four excursions to finish it and then I’m attempting Canada. I still have locations in Pennsylvania I have to cover, but for a week with close to no planning, I think I handled it well. The blue states are the ones I haven’t hit yet.

Also, I’m horrible with saving photos and videos. If you’d like to see snapshots of the Pennsylvania trip - find it on my Instagram.