Driving Through Neighborhoods

My town doesn't really have neighborhoods.  There are areas with expensive homes, others with marginal housing and crime.  We have a shell of a downtown.  But homogeneity rules.  At one time Jews lived in one place, Italians in another, African Americans of all incomes largely together.  We have largely dispersed, with enclaves notable primarily for housing prices.  Our major employers have succeeded in creating ethnically diverse payrolls.  We do not even have a dominant university where young adults cluster.

Visiting family in Pittsburgh a few times, taking a tour by bus, and now driving around to get to different places around town, my impression is very different.  My family lives in a once run down area being revitalized, but still with a ways to go. The main street, where I have walked and driven, contains small businesses.  After a meal out, I counted places to eat over each of three blocks we walked returning to the house.  The tally:  5-8-4.  All these places are small, no chain franchises.  Each restaurateur must have a dream of creating something from scratch.  None seemed to be magnet eateries attracting guests citywide.

Pittsburgh has lots of schools.  The closest to where I stay is Duquesne, a Jesuit university which I visited by walking tour.  Not an enormous number of kids out.  I went to the bookstore where I purchased a souvenir mug.  Then I walked past classrooms, their relatively new Osteopathic Medical School and affiliated hospitals, probably some dorms and an athletic complex.  Squeezed in were a city fire station and an aging red brick church of uncertain denomination.

After returning to my hosts, I had an event to attend in Squirrel Hill.  This section remains predominantly Jewish, both by residents and by institutions.  My route took me past three large synagogues, including the Tree of Life Building, where a massacre during worship occurred in 2018.  It had construction fencing around it.  The other two congregations have massive buildings, cramped grounds.  In Squirrel Hill, I drove past two Jewish Day Schools, a Mikvah, two start-up Orthodox synagogues, but no hangouts.  Housing appeared mostly single-family with two-story masonry, many fewer driveways than I would have expected, and some light shopping at its perimeter.  I encountered almost no pedestrians.

My hosts recommended lunch in a section known as Shadyside.  Restaurants and specialty shops without national franchises re-emerged.  Few driveways but a city parking facility nearby, as street parking took me a few blocks to find.  The place we visited for lunch has a specialty cuisine.  At noontime most tables were filled by young adults.  I found the housing more mixed.  Apartment buildings and houses subdivided for tenants seemed to dominate.  The buildings seemed worn but rehabbed.  Few yards.  Essentially no litter.  And no pedestrians until arriving near the two business streets.

Driving to my host's house took us through a few more places.  Carlow University I'd not heard of before but we drove past an impressive campus center.  The University of Pittsburgh is well-known.  They have a spiring tower at its center but hoards of young people in hurried transit at noontime on a Friday.  Big football game there the next day.  A little farther took us past the synagogue we would attend on Sabbath, the current home of Tree of Life.  It had a cathedral appearance.  As a Reform Temple, its members had no reason to walk from home on the Sabbath but those living within easily walking distance occupied mansions.

For Sunday, my hosts wanted to shop for baby clothes at a thrift store.  Getting there from their South Side neighborhood brought us through two tunnels and up hills with tricky driving curves.  The housing seems more spread out, likely a place where members of the United Steelworkers lived.

Downtown I saw only from the car, but tall buildings marked its place.

No doubt, places I did not drive past would house people like my wife and me.  House with two-car garage and driveway.  They must be there, maybe outside the city limits.

Pittsburgh's leaders seem to have thought their future through a little better than most city officials.  I don't even know where the steelworks once stood.  Perhaps even a few still do.  Yet in the absence of a primary industry, I saw elements of commerce, hi-tech, a food industry, medical centers to match others across America.  Places seemed crowded, some quite worn, but with little neglect.  A Jewish enclave remains recognizably Jewish.  A major and secondary universities teem with students.  Big Box stores did not clutter the city landscape.  A city of character attracting people of character.

A Travel Day

Visiting Pittsburgh where my son and daughter-in-law recently purchased a house.  Guest room saves a lot on hotel, which means I will be the sport for meals out.  Last time I went as a tourist, eager to see a new city.  This time I come as a visitor to maximize family time with only Tree of Life Synagogue or its current format and Flight 93 Memorial as designated places.  

It's a long drive, likely with one or two stops in each direction.  Gas tank filled.  Pennsylvania EZ Pass transponder filled.  Taking very little recreational gear.  Camera.  Cell phone.  Chargers.  Pen and pad.  Brief outline of what I want to do while there but no colored pens or weekly planning pouch, even though I will be there on Sunday.  Limited clothing.  Were it not for the synagogue visit, I might have left all long pants and collared shirts and undershirts home.  

At the end of each month I take a three day treadmill break.  This month four days, which hopefully will contribute to some knee and ankle healing.  But mostly, a few needed days away without mail delivering notices of NJ EZ Pass toll violations assigned to the stolen plate of my last car, dinners to assemble each evening, TV shows to record and then watch or delete months from now.  A few days of different routine.

Readjusting

Took a few days to visit my son and daughter-in-law at their new home in Pittsburgh.  Good to see them settled a bit, renting a pleasant starter house while they seek a purchase.  Son has real job, earns enough to pick up the tab twice while we dined together.  Pittsburgh itself creates loyalty to the people who live there though I think it my be a better place to be from than to go to.  It has a grimy history but a civic resurgence. And our hotel was optimally located and more than pleasant.

I return home tired, though.  Two drives of 300 miles each tried my attention span, even with rest stops at about 100 mile intervals. Not at all used to daily restaurants, nor desire them, even though all differed from what I might seek from a restaurant at home.  While away I did very little toward my semi-annual projects, though I could have.  While devoting a lot of effort to staying upright during my waking times, that failed at the hotel.  Treadmill effort incomplete.  Took a book but read less than I could have.  Took a lot of pictures, though.  Wrote nada, though the hotel had a full computer and I took a flash drive, so I could have.  Suspended by FB and Tw limitations.  

As I got back home, I flopped into bed, not disturbing the made bed with neat bedspread.  Just napped, set timer to read more from the book that was being discussed at my medical alma mater's reading group later in the evening.  Later half-heartedly unpacked.  Attended the session, outlined the rest of the week, had two slices of pizza, and set my cell phone sleep tracker.

Next day has arrived, week outlined. Day's activities extracted from week's initiatives, recorded, and organized.  I'm ready to resume those twelve things I set out for myself a month ago, and a couple more that came my way.

Massacred

I've never known a terror victim before, or even somebody murdered on the street.  Along the way patients, mostly minorities from the cities, have related a child or other relative who had been murdered, though I never knew one personally.  Shootings are common, appearing in the news pretty much every day.  Terrorist explosions have become all too common.  But those are other people with names, with families, but known personally to other people.

An old friend from college, however, became the first for me, a victim of a mass shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue where he attened Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist congregation that rented space in the building.  I suspected it might be him as soon as the names with ages were released the day after the assault, confirmed within an hour or two.  Jerry Rabinowitz, UPenn C'73/M'77 had been my friend in college for four years.  We served together on the freshman rowing team, both as coxswains, he departing wisely at mid-year when the coach had a hissy-fit and made us all run beyond our reasonable capacity.  Jerry went on to excel at his studies, gaining admission to UPenn medical school and then settling in Pittsburgh as a primary care physician.  I would learn from the tributes and more formal obituaries that he got in on the ground floor of managing AIDS, being among the first to introduce anti-retroviral medicine as it became available to those with low CD4 counts.  We lost contact, and when the photographs appeared in public media, I probably would not have recognized him in a social situation but the identity would click in a minute or two with name tags at a UPenn event.  I remember Jerry as kindly and maybe somewhat direct in our conversations.  I do not recall him going to shul or having a girlfriend.  I cannot even remember for sure his major, though I think it was biochemistry as we shared classes into our junior or maybe even senior years.

Forty years of separation can be reconnected up to a point in an obituary.  He had only been married 21 years, he served as a pillar of the Reconstructive synagogue that rented space where the massacre occurred during shabbat morning worship.  In doctor fashion, his first inclination was to attend to the wounded in his presence.  His mother and his in-laws survive, though he had no children.  Some relatives, likely on his wife's side, had made Aliyah with many characteristic Israeli names among the survivors. 

For a while, I considered driving to Pittsburgh for the funeral.  That was not to be, as I had a deadline project that would delay travel and unknown to me, the funeral took place this morning, the first set of funerals for four of the eleven murdered.  I just could not have gotten there.

Does knowing a victim change how a mass murder of this type registers?  I do not know yet.  There is the function brain part of me that is well aware of targeting of Jews through history, whether by spontaneous pogroms, pre-meditated Holocausts or inquisitions, assassinations targeting individuals, or terror attacks where randomness that creates a who's next is integral to the plan.  The hatred that drives this is never rational, but there is usually an agenda from not allowing Jews who Islamists regard as dhimis from owning land to diffusing perceived economic power, to keeping the Church free of non-believers.  While murder usually gets condemnation, at least in America, the underlying desire to identify an external target to avenge one's social travails, often does not.  That's where we seem to be now.  Prosecution of perpetrators does not stop this.  Elections sometimes do.  We have an opportunity for this in just a couple of weeks.  My friend Jerry's shooting was random, but indirectly enabled.  It has to be disabled and I am optimistic that enough people will have connected to this to make for a return to some of the decency that America's electoral leadership has not seen as important enough to protect.