Last Sunday, at a monthly flea market held at an abandoned mine outside of Pittsburgh, I stumbled upon a cache of racist collectibles. For context: This flea market is less the kind of place you’d find bingo daubers and inexpensive hardware, and geared more for serious collectors of high-end antiques. So the goods on display often reach back several hundred years in origin. Having been to this flea market dozens of times, I’ve noticed these types of pieces in the past — Golliwogs and items of that nature — but this time around there was an odd abundance of peculiarities: Namely a stationery embossing tool used by the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (i.e., the “Busy Bee Klan”) and a ghetto-themed Monopoly knockoff called Ghettopoly. Read More »
The Truncated Life of Ghettopoly
Into The Wild: Santiago Street
Of the four houses that remain on Santiago Street in Lincoln Park, two are vacant and two are not.
When I parked my car at the end of Santiago Street, I half expected to find a cul-de-sac devoid of houses. Chris Blackwell, principal planner from the Penn Hills Department of Planning and Economic Development, told me how his department had demolished nearly all the street’s blighted properties in recent years. “There’s almost nothing left down there,” he said. Almost was the key word. Read More »
Stranded in Canton: William Eggleston’s Southern Gothic
“Shot in 1974 with a Sony Porta-Pak, the crazily careering Stranded in Canton documents a cast of hard-drinking Southerners with the intimacy, ease and instability of a seasoned participants. Whiffs of Southern Gothic are not new to Mr. Eggleston’s work, but here they rise to the surface — fierce, tragic and proud.” Read More »
The Hi-Riser On The Hill
Homestead, Pennsylvania.
Each day I drive past this hi-riser on my daily commute through Western Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley. In three years, it’s never moved, yet somehow it retains a shine — like the owner still regularly washes and waxes it even though he stopped driving it long ago.
Read or Regret, Vol. I: Hard Truths and Unshakable Horrors
The Soul of America, Esquire magazine's 1986 essay collection. (Photo: Matthew Newton)
Since I first started reading comic books as a kid — most memorably, a dusty stack of 1970s-era Captain Americas and Spider-Mans I inherited from my sister’s best friend — my obsessive nature always sends me sifting through any stash of old books or magazines that I encounter.
A month or so back, for example, I unearthed a copy of The Soul of America (1986) — Esquire‘s state-by-state look at life in 1980s America. A Ken Kesey essay on rodeo culture in Kansas is what prompted me to buy the book, but after paging through the table of contents some more, I discovered a story written by Lynn Darling titled “True Blue.” The story, which looks at the demise of the famed National Works steel mill in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, is told from the vantage point of laid-off steelworker Falco Paterra. Darling traces Paterra’s career arc from part-timer at National Works to his eventual promotion to night-shift manager — a role he cherished. Darling tells of how Paterra’s demanding work schedule caused him to miss every holiday and his son’s games and his daughters’ dances. Later in the story, however, Paterra is demoted and relegated to janitorial work, before losing his job altogether. It’s a hard-truth story, but one that became typical given the omnipresence of the steel industry — and its decline — in and around the city of Pittsburgh. Read More »
