Pittsburgh: Why this native son left but came home

The Falk Laboratory School, a little gray brick building atop a hill in Pittsburgh's Oakland section, overlooks a heart-stopping vista of the city that unfurls straight down to the Monongahela River. This was my elementary school, and the song we sang about it in music class featured this line: "Above a city of bridges and steel, of rivers and mill fires burning."

As I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s, this was the city I saw from my school's playground. One afternoon, a teacher happened upon me looking off into the distance at some of the smoke and said something like this: "You're watching an era end." I had no idea what he meant.

Three decades later, after a 20-year absence from the city I know most intimately, I finally understand.

The Pittsburgh put forward this week by the Obama administration for the G-20's backdrop is intended to stand as an example of what a city can do, how it can change from one thing into something else and still retain the flavor of that first thing. I see it today and I am astounded.

It is difficult to convey to an outsider how bleak Pittsburgh felt at that moment in the early 1980s when the fruits of its century of hard labor were collapsing. It was dying, gasping, and it could not yet see ahead, through the future's mists, to its eventual rebirth.

I remember a class trip we took downtown to meet the mayor, the kind and gentle Richard Caliguiri, and he talked passionately to us about Pittsburgh's past and present. In particular, he used one word I remember to describe Pittsburgh: We were, he said, "solid."

It didn't feel that way sometimes. Each morning newscast on KDKA-AM, listened to faithfully by my mother, told of another mill failing, another unemployment figure rising, another union fretting. Downtown - the downtown I remember from Saturday morning field trips with my father to a vibrant, teeming business district - was sprouting boarded-up storefronts like dandelions.

So I left.

I graduated from high school, went to college, put Pittsburgh in the corner of my mind that held fading childhood memories. This was a town of nostalgia, I figured, a town of yesterday, and I was moving on. Bigger cities, more vibrant cities, awaited. I came home on holidays to see parents and friends, drove around to old haunts, then returned to my "real" life.

Twenty years passed. Then I realized, as so many Pittsburghers do, that I had unfinished business to transact. What I didn't realize was how many people felt the same way. Everywhere you go in Pittsburgh these days - in bars, in stores, at ballgames - you hear refrains of the same tale: I grew up here. I left. I never thought I'd come back. But I did.

In my case it was my aging parents, now in their 80s. They needed support, and my sons needed to get to know them. So we moved to Pittsburgh - back into the house where I grew up, in fact. One of my relatives, scoffing, accused me of trying to recapture my childhood. I bristled. But when I thought about it, I exonerated myself. Because Pittsburgh had changed as much as I had.

In one sense, it was ahead of the curve. It crashed early, but it came back early, too. I found childhood friends - some of them the grandchildren of steelworkers - employed in health care, in green initiatives, in high-tech. I found old industrial buildings resurgent, living second lives as condominiums, restaurants, design firms, edgy bars. I found traditional ethnic foods converted into haute cuisine.

This week, the national news anchors are talking about how odd a choice Pittsburgh was for the G-20. Why, they wonder, would President Barack Obama bring people to a place most famous for its choking smoke and 20th-century endeavors so he can talk about the 21st century?

They miss the point. Americans lack a sense of history, I think, and we focus so hard upon the future that we ignore the past except for its anecdotes. Rarely do we really learn from it.

Pittsburgh, though, is different. I see people my age, kids who ignored history when we studied it in school, now talking about how important it is to our future. But I hear them talking, too, about how Pittsburghers are committed to outthinking and outfoxing the devils of recession and stagnation and limited thinking.

And it occurs to me: Given what we've been through, where we went and what we clawed back to, where else, really, could the G-20 be held?

Today my wife, a committed New Yorker born and bred, has fallen in love with Pittsburgh. My 6-year-old son now attends Falk, my elementary school of so many years ago. The little gray building from the 1930s still sits atop the hill, but attached to it is a brand-new, glass-encased addition that opened three weeks ago. From its windows, my little boy sees more of Pittsburgh than I ever did.

He sees bridges and steel and rivers. The mill fires may be mostly gone, but our city is not empty. It has lost none of its sense of the past, but it feels as if, somehow, it has secured its future. Solid, it turns out, is not just a building or a girder. It's also a state of mind.

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EDITOR'S NOTE - Ted Anthony covers American culture for The Associated Press.