The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on the many new developments happening in Ambridge, PA. One of which is the product the Committee to Clean and Beautify Ambridge, a Grassroots grant recipient. (more…)
I doubt that anyone in Pittsburgh heard the barrage of artillery that signaled the beginning of the Battle of Bedford, the way that the “softening up” of Union troops echoed over 140 miles to the ‘Burgh just before Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. But to these 21st-century eyes and ears, Saturday’s reenactment of a Civil War assault on the new pan coupe redan at Old Bedford Village was close enough to the smokey chaos of 19th-century combat to make me thankful when my cell phone rang, hauling me back to the modern age.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently reported on Fisherman’s Tale, an Allegheny County Grassroots Project supported by Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections. (more…)
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently previewed Out of This Furnace, an Allegheny County Grassroots Project supported by Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections. (more…)
In the long-dormant dramatic adaptation of Out of this Furnace, Thomas Bell’s classic novel of immigration and labor in turn-of-the-last-century Braddock, prejudice against Eastern European mill workers is part of everyday life. But while most Pittsburghers know that history, the trials of Pittsburgh’s other laborers and immigrants has gone less noted.
In addition to producing a revival of Out of this Furnace for Pittsburgh 250th anniversary, Unseam’d Shakespeare Company wanted to tell stories of immigrant labor and discrimination as continuing issues, not just pieces of history. To do so the Company has commissioned two new plays: Wali Jamal’s Braddock 76, about the African-American experience in 1970s Braddock, and Anya Martin’s Teatro Latino de Pittsburgh, about the contemporary Latino immigrant experience in the city.
If Andrew Carnegie were alive to see playwright Wali Jamal’s Braddock 76, he may not like what he sees. Romodore Mubarek, portrayed by Victoria Bey, is the protagonist’s grandmother. “Her husband was killed working in the mill,” says prolific Pittsburgh actor Jamal. “She curses the soul of Andrew Carnegie in the play. She has a symbol made of steel from the Edgar Thompson Works that she swears has a part of her husband in it.”
The tale of Braddock 76 is a Shakespearean juxtaposition of a young, black, motherless boy falling in love with a young, Slavic, fatherless girl. The twist? Each one’s parent is running for mayor of Braddock: he to be the first black mayor, she to be the first woman. (Sound familiar?) All this allows the playwright to explore issues central to Braddock in 1976 from opposite viewpoints.
Encompassing race relations, gender inequality, and the central role of labor unions, Braddock 76 draws from the collective memory of Braddock’s residents as told in oral histories gathered by Jamal and Unseam’d Shakespeare.
Jamal’s research showed that in 1976 things appeared to be pretty darn good and most people had no idea what was coming or how drastic and lasting the impact would be.
“It was no different from the Titanic seeing that iceberg off on the horizon,” Jamal says of the soon-to-be disastrous introduction of foreign steel. “And by the time you’re about to hit that iceberg, it’s too late.”
Anya Martin admits that with Teatro Latino de Pittsburgh, she’s done something other playwrights may see as unorthodox, but she sees it as theater’s purpose.
“I’ve written a play that can only be performed in Pittsburgh,” says Martin, a graduate and now employee of Carnegie Mellon University’s drama school. “Theater should do what TV or film can’t do. It should be for a very specific audience. I’m writing for who’ll be in the audience: white theater-going Pittsburghers, and the Latino community.”
When Martin was commissioned to write Teatro as part of the Out of this Furnace project, she encountered a curious phenomenon involving Pittsburgh’s Latino community. Not that there isn’t one – Martin knew, after working on experimental theater involving immigrant communities in New York City and Lancaster, PA, that Latinos were all over Pittsburgh. The problem was that most Pittsburghers didn’t know that.
To create Teatro, Martin engaged a group of Latino immigrant students from area high schools. Using contemporary theater techniques aimed at “teaching how to write theater, not just on the page, but in time and space,” as well as oral histories and interviews with Latino immigrants, Martin discovered that today’s immigration stories closely resemble the days of Out of this Furnace.
“The two stories don’t just intersect, they’re almost the same,” says Martin. “People are still coming for the same reason: For a better life for their families, and because most feel like they don’t have a choice. I really try to associate these people with the things people love about Pittsburgh: People see this city as earnest, honest, and hard-working, and that’s a big part of this community’s traditions; very blue-collar and hard-working, and extremely family oriented.”
When Out of this Furnace was first adapted to the stage in the late 1970s by Pittsburgh-based labor-focused theater troupe The Iron-Clad Agreement and playwright Andy Wolk (who went on to direct for The Sopranos, amongst many others), its cultural relevance and political intentions were clear.
Director Marci Woodruff wants the play’s revival to be just as relevant for today’s theater crowd and an opportunity to introduce the non-theatre-going public to the potential of live performance. Woodruff sees Out of this Furnace, Braddock 76, and Teatro Latino de Pittsburgh as having profound opportunities for creating social change.
“I believe in the power of theater to change people,” says Woodruff. “If you can make people think for an hour that they’re poor if they’re not, or black if they’re white – you can change minds. And you can sit at the kitchen table and argue ‘til you’re blue in the face and never get that to happen.”
For Anya Martin’s Latino cast, that process may not need to rely on acting skills. On a tour of Carnegie Mellon University, Martin brought her students to see what was, for all but one of them, their first sight of a real theater. But experience isn’t the only thing that can lead to profundity.
“For some, they’re acting in their second language – English – and it’s been a struggle just getting the reading, the pronunciation, up to par,” says Martin. “I’m hoping that, with these people’s courage and personalities in front of you, the poetry of that person will carry the show.”
When the Executive Women’s Council of Pittsburgh (EWC) first circled 2008 on its calendar two years ago, the organization knew that it had to provide a way to mark the city’s 250th anniversary for professional and business women.
What the EWC came up with was Women’s Voices, Women’s Votes – a project bringing together women from a vast array of regional women’s organizations next Thursday, June 19, to network and build consensus on which issues are of utmost importance to women professionals as Pittsburgh enters into its next quarter century. It’s a simple idea, but, according to Dean, one that’s been a long time coming.
An impressive array of regional women’s organizations are already slated to attend Women’s Voices, Women’s Votes, including everything from the Coro Center for Civic Leadership’s Women in Leadership Program and the Women’s Bar Association of Western Pennsylvania to Women in Film and Media and the Association of Women in the Metal Industries.
“These women’s groups have not been very connected in the past,” says Mary Frances Dean, chair of this year’s Women’s Voices, Women’s Votes program. “We need to figure out, ‘What do our organizations subtly have in common? Where do we overlap?’ It’s truly a collective effort and a collaboration: With Women’s Voices, Women’s Votes, each woman’s single voice will be heard, disseminated through our facilitator, Sherryl Nufer [of Pareto Consulting].”
After opportunities for networking and conversation, Nufer will help the group to build a list of issues to be tackled by women’s organizations over the coming year. Then, the women present will vote on these issues, determining areas for collaborative focus.
And, a woman needn’t be an officer or official representative of an organization in order to participate. Any member of a women’s professional organization is welcome to join in and let their voice – and vote – be heard.
The history of Southwestern Pennsylvania has always been one of a people looking forward with a creative and industrious spirit—from the founding of Fort Pitt 250 years ago, to the medical and technological breakthroughs of the 21st century. When the Allegheny Conference on Community Development began planning to celebrate the region’s 250th anniversary, the organization knew it had to do so with that same forward-looking spirit.
The Conference charged a committee of regional representatives with a mission: To build a program that would actively engage the people of Southwestern Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh 250. Community Connections was developed to create relationships, provide community engagement opportunities, and spur regional pride through an innovative grantmaking model that ultimately funded 100 projects across 14 counties of Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Community Connections engaged the citizens of Southwestern Pennsylvania in a pioneering process to create, streamline, and invest $1 million in a diverse array of community projects. Each month in Making the Connections, we’ll take a closer look at the story behind Community Connections.
As director of the Bedford County Endowments, Kay Reynolds is no stranger to community meetings. As host of Bedford’s Community Connections ideation session, she had good reason to believe that she’d see a lot of familiar faces. So when she arrived at the Bedford County Arts Center for the session last summer, Reynolds was pleasantly surprised to see many new faces among the 50 people from around the county gathered to discuss and define their ideas for Pittsburgh 250-related projects.
“I think we had just about the best turnout of any [outlying county],” says Reynolds. “There was a remarkable representation – we have a lot of local historians, but there were also a lot of conservationists, and people interested in the Great Allegheny Passage; there were people from the north of the county, who usually gravitate more towards Altoona for [community-related projects].”
It was clear to those organizing the initiative that, for Community Connections to work, applications needed to be submitted from all corners of Southwestern PA and the process needed to be accessible not only to seasoned fundraisers and veteran organizations, but also to regular, everyday citizens.
“Many of the applications that we received following the ideation sessions were from individuals that had never engaged in this type of activity before,” says Dustin Stiver, Community Connections Program Coordinator at The Sprout Fund. “Our goal was to reach out to - and into - communities by creating a program that solicited ideas from both professional grantwriters and everyday citizens alike, and I think we accomplished that. Hundreds of people attended the ideation sessions, some with long-held ambitions, and others with newly found ideas, but all demonstrating a passion for this region.”
Community meetings are nothing new, but the Community Connections ideation sessions were not your typical community meetings. Utilizing a format that promoted creativity and encouraged innovation, last year’s sessions, held in each of the 14 counties of Southwestern Pennsylvania, began by asking attendees to complete the statement, “My Community is…” As you might suspect, answers to that question varied considerably; however, it was effective in creating a global framework from which to consider the second statement, “I wish…”
In small working groups, a moderator guided participants through a discussion of ‘wishes’ that could potentially be granted by Community Connections. As Stiver put it, “the Ideation sessions had two purposes; to introduce folks to Pittsburgh 250 and to encourage them to think creatively about the types of projects Community Connections was designed to support.” Moderators were knowledgeable of the goals of the program and helped participants refine their project ideas, ensuring that the most competitive ideas would be submitted to the decisionmakers for consideration.
Guinevere Anderson served as a moderator at several of the ideation sessions. According to Anderson, an Arts Management professional currently working with the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, the moderator’s job was twofold: First as “traffic cop,” making sure everyone gets their chance to speak. But then, as projects began to take shape, things got interesting.
“There’s definitely a role in guiding that conversation,” says Anderson. “Taking those brainstorming notes and delving further into them, to see what details people could specify; what could really become a proposal. I haven’t come across other granting programs that help [grantees] along so much – right from the beginning.”
“I really felt like we were empowering people,” says Union Project Marketing and Development Coordinator Katrina Struloeff, another ideation moderator. “So that they knew their ideas could be something. I’ve only lived in the Pittsburgh area for a few years, so I got to play the card: ‘I’ve never been to Cambria County – can you explain, why would this [project] be important here?’”
As attendees talked, graphic facilitators – visual artists recruited from the Pittsburgh area – drew their impressions of each project idea, to create a visual complement to the verbal discussion. The graphic facilitator’s job was to create a visual image to bolster the moderator’s brainstorming notes.
Pittsburgh artist Chris Schmidt served as graphic facilitator in Bedford and several other sessions, and to him, the graphic facilitator’s job wasn’t just to draw peoples’ ideas, but to show the group what they had in common. “You’re listening for general intent, that overall message – listening between the lines, and trying to convey that idea [visually]. When you finally drill down to that [level], you’ll generally find there’s consensus.”
When Dr. Steven Catt, executive director of planning and external relations at Butler County Community College, co-hosted his county’s ideation session, he saw something else produced beyond the prospect for grant support– something akin to the consensus Schmidt saw, but perhaps more subtle.
“The money was the carrot that brought everybody together,” says Dr. Catt, but perhaps not necessarily the most important part of the ideation sessions. “People [gravitate] towards their own networks, and once you’re in your own world, it’s hard to break out. I was pleasantly surprised with the people that came out of the woodwork for these sessions, and that networking, the new communications that came out of [ideation] – I think that was the best part.
It would be nice to see these kinds of initiatives continue; to look for [ways] to get the region to work together, because I know Pittsburgh doesn’t turn 250 all that often.”
The intersection of North Braddock Avenue and Kelly Street in Homewood is one that Aliya Durham knows well, though not happily.
“That’s a tough intersection - open drug dealing,” says Durham, executive director of Homewood’s Operation Better Block and a co-chair of the Homewood/Squirrel Hill/Point Breeze Redd Up Coalition.
So on the first Saturday in May, when the Coalition held its Spring “Redd Up” day in Homewood, Durham made sure to visit the intersection to check on the retired Squirrel Hill school teacher stationed there to clean up garbage as part of Redd Up’s mission of beautifying the neighborhood.
“I know the neighborhood, and I was uncomfortable where she was,” says Durham. “But when I stopped by to check on her, she said that yeah, some guys had come out on the corner, ‘But I talked to them and told them I needed to clean [it] up, and they moved out of the way.’ Here it is, Saturday morning, they could’ve been making thousands of dollars selling drugs, and they move for this lady!”
Durham laughs out loud recounting the story, but she’s not entirely surprised by it. That Saturday, 80 volunteers from around the city converged on Homewood to collectively remove 16 tons of refuse from the neighborhood’s streets. But the more important contribution to Homewood is incalculable. When people from other places show an interest in a neighborhood, Durham says, it changes the psychology of the whole neighborhood. “And that,” says Durham, “changes everything.”
Quaker Valley Middle School teacher and Millvale resident Brian Wolovich can rattle off a list of local cultural landmarks befitting a town twice its size. “We’ve got Pittsburgh’s best French bakery; Kitman’s famous furniture store; the Lincoln Diner – where Pamela’s [restaurants] started; Riverfront Park; The Attic record store and Mr. Small’s Theater, which are both world famous.”
But Wolovich will also be the first to tell you what Millvale is lacking – and it’s a list at least as long. So Wolovich has joined with a few friends and family members to form New Sun Rising, a non-profit organization with lofty goals for Millvale – most notably, the creation of a Millvale Public Library (phase one of which opens next week for the summer). But while the impact of Millvale having its own local library is obvious, another aspect of the project takes a more subtle tact. With the Grant Avenue Pocket Park, New Sun Rising hopes to create an open patch of parkland near the library, in the middle of Millvale’s business district.
“Millvale’s not the most relaxing place in the world,” says Wolovich. “The best amenity we have is Riverfront Park, but it’s severed from the community [by] Route 28. The green space will have so many benefits, but [most of all], it’s just a place for people to relax.”
Beyond simply providing a breather for people already in the community, Wolovich sees the green space as the next stage in building a new Millvale – a place that can take advantage of its low cost of living and opportunities for home ownership, and begin to bring new families into the community to buy houses and invest in the neighborhood.
“If you buy it, you care for it more,” says Wolovich. “Millvale has a much higher-than-average percentage of renters, so you see houses falling into disrepair. I think combinations like the library and the green space, they impact [people’s interest in] buying into the community. Young families can afford to buy a house here, so I see it having a domino effect.”
Millvale isn’t the only community in the region to build or refurbish a small, neighborhood park as part of Community Connections. In Parker in Armstrong County, the “smallest city in the U.S.,” an appropriately-sized Postage Stamp Park is about to open, similarly placed right by Parker’s business district. Everson Borough in Fayette County recently dedicated its new Veterans Parklet, and in Monaca, Beaver County, a small shelter added to the borough’s public playground has recently opened to the delight of nearby schoolchildren.
Pointing to the words as he speaks them, Bill Horner passes his hand along a worn gravestone. “Jacob Horner,” he says. “Founder and Proprieter of Sandyvale Cemetery.”
The other gravestones here at Sandyvale, in the Hornerstown neighborhood of Johnstown, are few and random – the result of Johnstown’s famous floods of 1889, 1936 and 1977 – although burials here date back to the Revolutionary War era. A few trees and some weathered statuary dot the landscape, and dog-walkers and joggers frequent circular paved trails at lunchtime.
Standing in the middle of Sandyvale Cemetery Memorial Garden – in a neighborhood named for Bill Horner’s family – there’s little to signal the ambitious changes that Horner, Diana Kabo, and the rest of the Sandyvale Cemetery Association board members have in mind for this plot of hallowed ground. But Sandyvale is about to see its landscape overhauled again – this time, not by the chaos of floodwaters, but by careful planning executed by dedicated stewards.
“We had landscape architects Marshall-Tyler-Rausch do a master plan for us,” says Bill Horner, waving the finished document in his hand, “and they determined that this project could impact 100,000 people.”
The plans for Sandyvale are remarkable: Johnstown City Council recently approved plans to build a hiking-and-biking trail along the Cemetery’s perimeter, which will link up with established trails such as the Path of the Flood Trail and the James Mayer Riverwalk. A disused barn at the land’s edge has been donated to the Association, to be transformed into the visitor’s center. And long-range plans include multiple botanical gardens and an arboretum. To Horner, it’s all part of a renaissance in Johnstown.
“This is a city in transition,” says Horner. “Steel’s gone, coal is somewhat gone, now it’s defense and information technology that run this area. But people are taken with the quality of life here, and that’s what this project impacts.”
Horner and Kabo stress that the master plan they’ve produced will take years to complete; they’ll need to raise $2 million just for phase one, which includes opening the visitor’s center, conservatory, four gardens and an events space. But with master plan in hand, money from the city for the trails, and help from Community Connections to get that planning and work underway, Bill Horner can already imagine his predecessors’ glee.
“What we needed was to start,” says Horner. “It’s like my father always used to say: ‘A job begun is a job half done.’”
Across Johnstown from Sandyvale, just beyond the city’s borders and into Lower Yoder Township, Rose Howarth understands the importance of simply getting started. As vice-president of the West End Improvement Group, Howarth is one of the driving forces behind the Haw’s Pike Welcome Garden project, landscaping a disused space right at the Johnstown border on Route 56.
As of a few weeks ago, the space was, according to Howarth, “full of road litter and weeds.” Now that the group has cleared the land, they can begin choosing native Pennsylvanian trees and flowers to plant. And once those plants begin to grow, Howarth hopes that people will see it as a symbol of Johnstown’s resurgence, and hometown pride.
“People that don’t live here, it’ll give them a good first impression,” she says. “People who do – we’ll hold our heads up high. I’m proud to be from Johnstown. We’ve had some rough times [in Johnstown], but there’s still a lot to be proud of, and I hope this becomes a part of that.”
The “welcome” theme seems to be another common thread to Community Connections’ beautification projects. The Committee to Clean and Beautify Ambridge received a Grassroots grant to highlight the “Gateways to Ambridge,” by beautifying existing entrance points into the community. And with the Bridge to Broadway project, the Borough of Pitcairn in Allegheny County will see the roads connecting its main street to the town’s significant historic sights similarly beautified.
Planting trees for shade, picking up litter, leaving a parklet green: There’s a satisfying immediacy to community beautification projects with tangible results. But perhaps the true benefits of projects such as these aren’t measured by the numbers of trees planted or tons of litter removed, but by more permanent, subtle changes in the level of investment residents have in their communities.
“On the surface, we’re cleaning up the community,” says Homewood Redd Up’s Aliya Durham, “but what we’re really doing is building social capital. Because afterwards, while people eat hamburgers, they’re talking to one another. What it’s done for Homewood is raise the visibility of our neighborhood – show that there are good people who live here. When people come and participate, they see our neighborhood in a different light.”
The reasons for enacting community beautification projects vary – economic development, safety and quality of life, or just to make that little patch of Southwestern Pennsylvania shine. But the people doing such work as a part of Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections all share one vital, motivating characteristic: Pride.
A few words of Roger Kirwin’s Beatles-esque accent and it’s clear that this Liverpool native isn’t the average American-history buff. As executive director of Old Bedford Village – the living-history center on the site of Bedford’s French and Indian War fort – Kirwin has helped make it a world-renowned site for living-history authenticity, with touches like the new fortifications that were recently constructed. This month, Bedford celebrates its own 250th anniversary, a few months before Pittsburgh – a fact Kirwin never fails to point out!
How did Bedford come to be, 250 years ago?
In 1758 America was at war. The two superpowers – Britain and France – had come here to fight it out. And at that time, there was one road that led out of Philadelphia, through Carlisle and into [what’s now] Bedford, where the British built Fort Bedford with the objective of marching on Fort Duquesne – [in modern-day] Pittsburgh. We look at Pittsburgh as our younger sibling – Bedford was actually established a few months earlier!
And how did you come to live in Bedford?
Well, I immigrated to America in 1995 and earned my living from Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Running Old Bedford and a Harley dealership are both businesses – you try to remain profitable, and take success from there. It seems a radical departure, but I’d been a keen amateur historian, and a [French and Indian War] reenactor for years. Motorcycles were a hobby and history was a hobby, and now I’ve gotten into both [professionally]. I’ve lived all my American life in Pennsylvania and you’re surrounded by history here. The French and Indian War was all about movement – moving armies back and forth across the state – and when you move around Pennsylvania, you’re really tracing those movements. When I ride along the turnpike I see this woodland that looks the same today as it did 250 years ago. There are very few places in Europe where you can look at history and not have a building or a town in the way.
Assuming there are no impending French attacks, why the new fortifications?
What we’re building is called a pan coupe redan, which is basically a series of tree trunks, sharpened like pencils, set at an angle, and covered with earth like a World War I trench. During the Revolutionary War, they were everywhere! When you start to build these you realize, ‘oh, this is how they did it – and this is why they did it!’ When you can bring the places and characters of history to life, the public gets more interested. They can see how they dressed and lived – it takes things out of the realm of academia and into a tactile, tangible way of understanding history. The redan has become a community project. We’ve had a lot of volunteer labor, and not just from reenactment groups. The Church of Brethren called and they wanted to help; the Bedford Boy Scouts are down every Monday to work. It’s very physical, sawing wood, digging holes, and it’s hard work – but don’t tell the Boy Scouts! They think it’s fun!
So, to be clichéd about it, ‘if you build it, they will come’?
The thing about Old Bedford Village is its versatility – it’s constructed in a way that was around for a few hundred years, in Europe as well as America. So reenactors come here, and we give them a marvelous canvas for reenactments, and in return, they give the public something to come see.
Pop City Media reported on the evolution of the Academy of the South Side, an organization supported by Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections to create a Citywide Salon in concert with this year’s anniversary. (more…)
Sitting on the lakeshore, Rodney Bryant points east, away from the North Park boat house, towards the deeper part of the lake. “Down that way, I used to catch catfish, trout, everything,” says Bryant, sat in his combination walker and chair. With a blue fishing hat, complete with 2008 license stapled to its lid, Bryant’s the kind of venerable fellow says things like, “I caught a fish this big!” without even holding his hands out in fish-tale implication: It’s not cliche, it’s just Rodney. (more…)
Beginning the week of June 4, 2008, The Allegheny Front’s Environmental Oral History Project will begin airing stories from across Southwestern PA that capture and communicate residents’ experiences with Pittsburgh’s environmental past, present, and future. (more…)
The Daily Courier reported on several art projects currently being undertaken in Connellsville, PA, two of which have been supported by Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections. (more…)
On a gorgeous June morning, in the equally gorgeous Connoquenessing watershed, located but one hour’s drive from Downtown Pittsburgh, two dozen people gathered to experience the calming effect of Wild Waterways–the Wild Waterways Conservancy, that is. For many of us, this was our first experience with the Connoquenessing watershed, or the Connie as it’s affectionately called, but I’m convinced it won’t be our last. (more…)