Steelers dominate Pittsburgh's landscape

PITTSBURGH — For fans of the Steelers, the Terrible Towel is a holy object.

It's that gold piece of terrycloth waved maniacally at every game. Beloved former broadcaster Myron Cope created it 35 years ago, and all proceeds go to charity. Degrade it at your peril.

Now, this town, rabid about ending its 26-year championship drought, has erected a new object of worship.

In the courtyard of the Allegheny County Courthouse stands a two-story evergreen. Several weeks ago it was your basic Christmas tree.

As the Steelers launched their improbable playoff run, an idea was hatched to festoon it with Steelers gear. Thus was born the Terrible Tree.

You might expect a star at its crown. But, no, not now. Instead, it's a Steelers hard hat. The tree is trimmed with cutouts of buses hung in honor of star running back Jerome Bettis, aka "The Bus."

A child's drawing adorns one branch. It shows a kid's room, with Steelers posters on the wall, a jacket hanging on the bedpost, and a Steelers lamp. A child kneels in prayer. The caption: "and please God, let them win this one."

Seattle vs. Pittsburgh:


$550,000 house

Bungalow in Maple Leaf

3 bedrooms

2 baths

2,070 square feet

Jetted tub

Updated kitchen

vs.

Tudor near universities

and museums

6 bedrooms

3.5 baths

4,650 square feet

5 fireplaces

Stained glass

Standard-issue outfit

vs.

Coolest dead artist

Kurt Cobain vs. Andy Warhol

Sassy political figure

Jim McDermott

vs. Teresa Heinz Kerry

Most telling celebrity endorsement

Matt Hasselbeck pitching Qwest vs.

Big Ben's (Roethlisberger) Beef Jerky

Signature food

Salmon chowder at Ivar's

vs. French fry sammich at Primanti's

Beloved statue

Lenin vs. Roberto Clemente

Quintessential movie

"Sleepless in Seattle" vs. "Flashdance"

Gay nightlife

Capitol Hill

vs. "Sorry, that's private"

Jogging suits and parkas — trimmed in black and gold.

Skirts, even lingerie — stitched from Terrible Towels.

And watch out for the black-and-gold pickup, tailgate emblazoned with "Terrible Truck."

While it's possible that not every one of the roughly 320,000 people who lives here is a Steelers fan, it sure feels as if everyone is.

So how did this transformation become so complete?

The answer is complicated.

On his Monday radio show, local sports disc jockey Mark Madden argued that the Steelers' run allows folks to ignore that this is a city in decline.

Others will credit the long history of the team-owning Rooney family and, of course, those four Super Bowl victories so long ago.

Maybe the adoration is a product of geography. After all, Pittsburgh was a frontier town, built where two rivers — the Allegheny and Monongahela — met to form the mighty Ohio. The city lies on the western edge of the Appalachian mountain range, further isolating it from the Eastern seaboard.

Jim Graci can't say for sure what fuels Steelers mania. But after nearly 10 years in Seattle as the Sonics public-address announcer, and stints in Phoenix, Atlanta, and even sports-crazy Philadelphia, he's yet to find anything that matches the passionate Pittsburghers.

Now the program director at the sports-radio station WEAE-AM, Graci can count 18 Steelers songs, including a polka, a rap number, several new-wave ditties, and one written to the tune of Arlo Guthrie's "City of New Orleans." These are no slick Super Bowl Shuffles. They're made by fans for fans, and during the playoffs they blanket the airwaves.

"People here absolutely adore the Pittsburgh Steelers over anything else — except their own families," he said.

Steeler mania — nationwide

When people outside the city envision Pittsburgh, they're likely to focus on the image of shuttered steel mills and long unemployment lines. Between the late 1970s and mid-80s, the steel industry imploded, shedding 130,000 blue-collar jobs and sparking a mass exodus. Workers in their 20s and 30s scattered across the country.

Bill Flanagan, executive vice president of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, calls this the lost generation. Prime wage earners left, taking their children and hampering the city's future recovery.

But they took a piece of the Steelers with them. There are now at least 80 Steelers clubs across the country, with some 880 Steelers bars, including at least seven in the Seattle-Tacoma area. When the team goes on the road, expatriates turn out en masse. It's a major reason why an away game for the team can feel like home.

Novelist Michael Byers, 36, says Pittsburgh reminds him of Seattle. As a boy he lived near Montlake. Byers recalls an emptiness in the city as it tried to rebound from another Boeing bust.

Pittsburgh "is Seattle in 1976," said Byers, who now lives there. "The economy is somewhat depressed. It's a working-class town, but it does have stuff Seattle had then. It's got these really pretty rivers — and they're nice."

It's the rivers — and the city's green hills and parks — that hold the imagination of Pittsburghers after they've moved away. Many long to return, and they maintain deep connections to the city even after decades away.

Barbara Johnstone recently encountered the intense nostalgia many exiles feel.

She's a linguist at Carnegie Mellon University, studying Pittsburghese, a collection of colloquialisms that reflect the city's European heritage and near-Appalachian location.

The dream of bringing home a new sterling-silver Lombardi trophy from Detroit has unleashed an obsession that cannot be ignored:

In Pittsburghese, "you" is yinz. "Up there" sounds like up-air. The Steelers sound like Stillers. And if confronted by obnoxious Seahawks fans in Detroit, a Yinzer (Pittsburgher) is likely to threaten them with a good beat-down n'at (and that).

Since the playoffs started, Johnstone's e-mail has been flooded with messages from former residents who found her Web site and wanted to reminisce.

"People here have a very strong sense of local identity, of being different and special," she said. "When they leave, they come back more than other people. They realize they're losing something. This is not just an occasion to think about the Steelers."

But the economy is improving and some "boomerangs," as they're called, are moving home. Since the nadir of the mid-80s, the region has reinvented itself, fostering its own high-tech industry, branching out in medicine and education, while old-school businesses such as Alcoa and Heinz march on.

Last month, Google said it would open an office with 100 software engineers at Carnegie Mellon. The Internet giant will join Intel and Apple with branches at the university. Flanagan said Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, with its huge medical facility, have added 30,000 jobs to the economy over the past decade.

There are now shopping and residential districts on the sites of two old mills. A few months ago an REI opened where the LTV Steel South Side Works once stood. It's just a carabiner's throw from the Steelers practice facility, also on the grounds of a former steel mill.

Do they really bleed black and gold?

How deep does the love run? Let's look a little closer.

On a recent evening in Squirrel Hill, which is kind of like Seattle's Capitol Hill but with more children, Sara Leitera and Brian Johnson sit, enjoying a few beers. Locals call the bar the Squirrel Cage, and on this evening it's peopled with hipsters and intellectuals.

Leitera, 29, is a social worker, and Johnson, 28, a graphic artist. They're into the latest underground bands, are involved in the arts and are exactly the sort of people who should be too cool to care about the Steelers.

But underneath her coat, Leitera wears a weathered Jerome Bettis shirt. And once the couple start talking, it's apparent just how intensely people love this team — and, by extension, this city.

"I might be a little obsessive," said Leitera, who spent an hour a couple of weeks back creating a Terrible Skirt with pleats. "There's not a Sunday where I'm not going to watch. In the few years they were bad, I didn't pay as much attention. I'd do laundry. But I'd still watch."

Both Leitera and Johnson considered leaving the city for someplace with more jobs and better pay.

"I don't think about leaving anymore — I love it too much here," said Johnson. "But I have so many friends who are leaving. Not because they want to, but because the city is not taking care of them. The people making the decisions are the ones who held onto the steel industry for too long. They don't want to let go of how Pittsburgh used to be."

Gearing up in the Strip District

Along Penn Avenue, in a neighborhood called the Strip District, people packed the sidewalks on a recent day, oblivious to the snow. Tables line the way, selling Steelers gear — hats and sweatshirts, big fuzzy black-and-gold blankets, bumper stickers and lots of T-shirts.

The Steelers won the last of four Super Bowl championships back in 1980, before many of the team's current stars were even born.

Information

Want to speak like a native?

Try this Web site: www.pittsburghese.com

Or try professor Barbara Johnstone's site, Pittsburgh Speech & Society Project: http://english.cmu.edu/pittsburghspeech

The scene isn't unusual. The tables are here year-round. Even in June, fans need to gear up. The difference now is the whiff of a winner in the air. People crowd the tables pulling frantically from huge piles of stuff.

The most popular shirts aren't the officially licensed gear. Instead, it's the stuff with a Pittsburgh flair. There is the one for Bettis, the fifth most prolific running back in league history. The shirt shows a charging bus with Bettis' face for the front window. "This bus never stops," it declares.

Some of the shirts are crude, especially the ones aimed at Cleveland, the city's eternal nemesis. But the most popular shirt is for Troy Polamalu, a defensive player with a wild style of play and even wilder hair — curly raven locks that cascade past his shoulders and obscure the name on his jersey. The T-shirt of choice refers to him as the Troyzmania Devilamalu. It's a Stillers thing.

Talk to people down here, and one thing becomes clear: Pittsburgh doesn't just want the Steelers to win next Sunday. It needs them to win.

"The people in Seattle need to understand we want it more," said Jonny Jones, 21, who clutched a bag with $300 worth of gear to sell on eBay. "If we lose, it won't just be sad, it'll be devastating."

John Zebrowski, a former Seattle Times reporter, attends the graduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh. He is working on a novel that has nothing to do with the Super Bowl.