Preserved Paramount logo on Boulevard of the Allies side of old Paramount Film Exchange building.
Photo by Kevin Creagh for TPOP

If you’ve ever been on the Boulevard of the Allies, heading west into the city and approaching Duquesne University, you’ve passed by the old Paramount Film Exchange building.  I’ve personally zoomed past this building at 60 mph (OK, probably faster) countless times without ever knowing about it until discovering it recently.

It’s hard to believe in today’s digital age, where business is done electronically and massive amounts of data are sent back and forth to places near and far, but there was once a time where movie theater owner had to travel downtown to screen the movies they would subsequently rent.  One such place is the Paramount Film Exchange, located at 1725 Boulevard of the Allies.  It was sandwiched between two other film exchanges, one by Warner Brothers and one for 20th Century Fox, which led to this stretch being called Film Row in its day.

There were screening rooms and storage vaults for the celluloid films.  The vaults were necessary from a safety standpoint, as the nascent material of celluloid film was highly flammable due to the presence of the camphor. Laws were passed requiring film exchange buildings to be fireproof , so film exchange companies over-built sturdy buildings with foot-thick, brick-walled vaults to store the celluloid film. Films were projected in screening rooms so theater operators could watch the films before they showed them in their theaters.

Although I never knew about this place until just recently, I actually ate dinner one time at a re-purposed film repository similar to this in Chicago.  The restaurant, since closed, was called Opera and you actually could eat in little alcoves that once housed the old returned films.  Much like the Paramount Film Exchange, it was a tank of a building.

The Paramount Film Exchange was in operation from 1926 until the late 70’s/early 80’s when VHS swept through the industry and started to render the need for storing celluloid moot.  It sat relatively unused, with UPMC owning it for a period of time, until young preservationist Drew Levinson made a short film in 2008 to champion its status for historical preservation.  The issue had a positive resolution in 2010 when the Historical Commission of Pittsburgh granted it Landmark status as the last remaining building of the once famed Film Row.  City Council then approved the designation in an 8-1 vote.

The artistic flourishes that exist on this building, from the bas reliefs to the intricate cornices in the picture shown above, just are not done anymore on buildings.  Things are sleeker, more cookie-cutter, put up with a speed that does not lend itself to the artistry of working in marble or cut stone.

In 2014, the space was re-opened as a home for burgeoning startups by a group of investors called Pittsburgh Film Exchange, Inc. (PFEX).  There is 6,400 square feet of office space on two floors and an 1,800 square foot artistic studio space.  When I stopped down to grab a picture for the article, there are six companies featured on the glass door to the entrance off of the Miltenberger Street side of the building, with a dozen plus more listed on the directory inside.  It is hoped that the re-purposed Paramount Film Exchange building will jumpstart investment in the Uptown neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

We live in a world of Big Data.  Every minute of every day we are inundated with data or content.  We are also changing the way we consume data and content.  There’s a chance you’re reading this article on your phone, in between checking your email, sending a Tweet, or a text.

Data about how we perceive our world is ever-present.  As Kelso said in Heat, “This stuff is just beamed out all over the place.  I just know how to grab it.”  The demands of our daily lives sometimes run headlong into our need to process all the data that is dumped on during the day.

To that end, a relatively new field has cropped up called data sonification.  The concept is that humans are evolving in how we process data, so this methodology allows people to learn datasets by sonic means.  If there is a dataset that compiles data over a long period of time, rather than putting it onto an x-y chart, data sonification puts the data into audio form.  The reasoning behind data sonification, per prominent neuroscience studies, is that humans get data quicker aurally than visually.  It takes 70 milliseconds to see and process data, while it takes just 20 milliseconds to do the same with our ears.

As an example, imagine a simplistic dataset of date and temperature.  With data sonification, Jan 1st’s temperature point would start off low and then the sonic tones would build higher and higher until July/August, when they would start to decrease until December 31st.  If you were to do this over a multi-year period, there would be a soothing rise and fall for you to listen to.  Although I personally am not musically inclined, all humans have an inherent built-in feel for rhythm.  It’s a primal part of our nature.

Data scientists are using this field from everything to charting solar winds, to median costs of rents along a New York City subway line, to charting floods based on climate change.  Perhaps Pittsburgh and their Department of Innovation & Performance could look to utilize data sonification for their projects, as well.  To me, one of the projects could involve a different way of police cars patrolling.

Imagine a police officer with the standard scanner going in the patrol car.  But simultaneously, a dataset of historic crime records is playing sonically to their relative geographic position controlled by GPS.  As the officer navigates through their beat route, the rise and fall of the sounds corresponds to the number of historic incidents that police have responded to.  This could help the police officer stay more vigilant when in a known hotspot area of crime.

Perhaps the data could be contoured to specific types of crime, like drug activity for narcotics units or prostitution arrests for vice.  Although the police officers who live these beats day to day are well aware of hotspots already, it could be a necessary tool for the higher-ups in the Police Department that have to take a broader view of crime.  For this management subset of police, as they drive their whole territory with crime stats sonified, it may help them re-direct their units more effectively or show the need for more presence in a certain area.

At first glance (or listen, I suppose), data sonification doesn’t seem worth the hassle of converting it to another format.  But if you believe that we are evolving as our world changes around us, then data sonification can be seen as the future of how we process and interpret the world around us.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Things are going to get quite, uh, interesting come January 2017 when the new President is sworn in.  The crux of his campaign was about creating more jobs that would provide good wages for hard-working Americans.  His campaign also frequently discussed taking better care of our veterans.

On the other end of the spectrum, the incoming President is not exactly a fan of certain Cabinet-level departments and has at times talked about either eliminating them entirely or curtailing them severely.  One of those departments in Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which provides important grant and loan opportunities to state and local governmental bodies to create and maintain affordable housing for low-income families.  At this juncture, I’m not getting a warm and fuzzy over his commitment to this department, as evidenced by his proposed appointment of a neurosurgeon in Dr. Ben Carson to head the country’s biggest conduit of funding and policy for housing.  To me, it seems like he wants it to die slowly on the vine.

To stem this off at the pass, Democrats and fair-minded Republicans should force his hand by creating an initiative that enables him to keep his campaign promises, while also getting something they want in good affordable housing.  That program should be one that fosters the creation of veteran-owned and staffed construction companies, not just the token veteran-owned ones that get a few extra points on the grant funding application.

Whether you picture it as a new New Deal or just a jobs training program, there are plenty of recent veterans that can be re-purposed into excellent contractors.  Many soldiers have to learn rudimentary building, plumbing, and electrical skills while serving just to maintain their own situations while out in the field.  By focusing specifically on skills training for creating a whole armada of building contractors, the federal government can take care of their own when they return home if they don’t have a stable profession.  The Department of Veteran Affairs would the logical jumping off point for returning veterans, or veterans in need of a new field, to apply for building construction re-training.

Once the new workforce is properly trained, they can be funneled directly into various HUD-sponsored building projects as designated contractor units.  The project doesn’t necessarily have to be staffed entirely by veterans, but there could be some percentage of re-trained workers assigned to each project, even if it’s just a small number.  Contractors local to the area that are veteran-staffed would be given priority in HUD contracts.

According to the National Association of Homebuilders, as of September 2016 there was a 200,000 person shortfall of qualified housing construction workers in this country, a jump of 81% over the last two years.  Returning veterans can help backfill a portion of that gap.

Just look at the projects page for Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority.  There are plenty of affordable and mixed-use housing projects on that list, with virtually all of them buoyed by some sort of HUD-based grant or loan.  It’s simply how things get done in cities to provide quality housing stock.  It’s engrained at this point.  The potential to re-integrate veterans into this workforce is untapped.

Certain types of jobs are simply not coming back to the States, no matter how much bluster is given in a soundbyte.  But construction is a constant in this country, especially in the housing market.  Americans are always looking for newer and better.  Our affordable housing stock that ghettoized communities in the 1960’s and ’70’s needs to be turned over or rethought entirely.  There are ample opportunities to give our returning soldiers a solid profession of dignity, while addressing an issue of importance nationwide.  It’s the type of initiative that could garner bi-partisan support and attempt to kick off this next olympiad of interesting times on the right note.

Award winning rum has been coming out of these copper kettles since October 2013.
Photo by Alex Stumpf for TPOP

Tim Russell, the founder, owner and head distiller of Maggie’s Farm Rum, does not always dress the part. With the doors open to those looking to buy a bottle on a Wednesday afternoon and expecting a shipment later, he walks around his establishment in a plain white t-shirt and gym shorts. His attire is closer to the fourth job he jokes he has: janitor.

However, it has not been Russell’s dress but rather his product that have had people flocking to the Strip District the last three years, where the craft rum distillery serves award winning drinks.

“A lot of the trends with craft spirits were following behind craft beers, so I had a good eye on that,” Russell said. “We’re putting that craft beer spin on things. This is the next step.”

Russell had worked for a defense contractor before getting laid off and abandoning the field to start the framework for Maggie’s Farm. He attend the Feebles Institute for their inaugural craft distillation course in May of 2011.

After the Commonwealth started to allow the direct sale of spirits, Russell became a member of the American Distilling Institute, getting rum specific training. With the change in the law, he was convinced to pursue rum over beer. As the publisher of Craft Pittsburgh Magazine, he had his thumb on the pulse of the craft scene in the city and was convinced it would succeed.

After failing to get a loan, which would happen five times in their three year history, Russell decided to cash in his 401K, sell his house and move into an apartment closer to the city, living off of the money he made from the magazine. All told, he had about $100K available.

Finding a place took him a year and a half.

“It was sort of a Goldilocks situation,” Russell said. “I needed a place large enough to support the manufacturing aspect of it, but still small enough that it was affordable and a retail space.”

The search resulted in setting up shop at 3212A Smallman Street. The blue bricked building with the hand painted “the rum room” sign hung on the side came when that part of the Strip District was still uninhabited.

Inside, the 100 percent copper stills are visible from every part of the bar or booths. The walls are decorated with local art, foreign currency above the bar and a “Rum- Make America Great Again!” sign that has the “T” and “P” scribbled out.

Photo by Alex Stumpf for TPOP

Maggie’s Farm got its liquor license in October 2013. They were selling bottles by Black Friday and opened the bar in January 2014. Bottles are sold Wednesday through Sunday while the bar operates on the weekend and ‘unofficially’ Sunday.

It was the first commercial producer of craft rum in Pennsylvania since at least Prohibition.  Russell’s bet that there would be a market has paid off.

“There was enough interest here that people were willing to pay to try it out, and they’ve been coming back for three years,” Russell said.

Like all rums, Maggie’s Farm’s product is a byproduct of sugar cane. Russell said that 90 percent of manufacturers use molasses, but Maggie’s Farm uses turbinado sugar, which is a very lightly processed sugar cane. Russell said the change in sugar gives a white young rum more flavor.

While that does contribute to a higher price tag than most commercially produced rum, Russell said it is on par, if not a bit cheaper, than its craft counterparts. An unaged 750 ml bottle runs between $28-35.

The extra cost has been worth it for customers to partake in their award winning rum. Maggie’s Farm (Allegheny Distilling) was named the Pennsylvania Distillery of the year in 2014 in the New York International Spirits Competition and five of their rums have combined for 23 accolades since then.

The lion’s share of those awards have gone to their Queen’s Share. Russell learned the process from a master distiller named Eric Watson, who himself had it passed down from Jamaican distillers.

A rum consists of three parts: the head, the heart and the tail. The tail is the final part, and it’s where the flavors are located. Most distillers throw the tails into the next batch because there is still alcohol in them, but those tails are instead set aside for its own batch of Queen’s Share. It gives the beverage more body and character while also being smoother despite being sold at a higher alcohol content, usually in the 110-120 proof range.

The Queen’s Share has won 13 awards from four different sources over the last three years.  It takes about 10 batches, which usually take about 2-3 weeks each, to get enough tails for an unaged Queen’s Share. Aging it takes another year or two.

“It’s a process that’s really disappeared, and the people who know about it are trying to bring it back a little bit,” Russell said.

Maggie’s Farm has started to expand outside the Pittsburgh area. It can be shipped to anywhere in the state, and now it can be found at stores, bars and restaurants in Philadelphia. They recently just signed a deal to have it sold in Nashville as well, with an expansion in Washington D.C. soon to follow.

While Russell said he would like to expand to bigger markets like New York, he wants to make sure that he does not stretch himself thin and have his rum get buried under the competition.

“There’s no point in being in 10 to 20 markets and only selling a case a month to each state when you can sell 10 cases to one state and gain traction and grow favorability,” Russell said. “You build a really good consumer market, care about that and hope to get a good return.”

While they plan to continue to expand, Russell remains adamant in adding different spirits. Maggie’s Farm will be adding liqueurs either in the last two months of 2016 or in early 2017, but they will still be rum based.

“I always felt that you should do one thing and do it right,” Russell said.

So far, so good.

It seems like every city life blog or paper in Pittsburgh has its neighborhood that it predicts or suggests should be the next to gentrify. The most popular at the moment seems to be Garfield, but neighborhoods like Larimer, Allentown and Troy Hill get some play as well. Deutschtown seems to be a favorite here at TPOP, likely because the light rail extension Kevin and I proposed, which got this whole damn experiment started, cuts right through the middle of it.

But there are two problems with gentrification. First and foremost, people already live and have social ties in those neighborhoods that are becoming more desirable. When they can no longer afford their homes, people are displaced and a community that’s formed there breaks down and dies. Bonds are broken and culture is lost being replaced by something that’s assumed to be better because it’s economically more viable. Second, you eventually run out of places in geographically attractive spots to gentrify. Typically, the key to the first spots to gentrify are the ones close to more established, desirable locations or are accessible to those places with transit or bike/pedestrian paths. After these located neighborhoods have turned over, prices skyrocket.

When home buyers and renters get priced out of the already gentrified neighborhoods and the remaining locations aren’t worth having your bike stolen every two weeks, people start moving out of town to smaller cities in the exurbs. Across Pennsylvania, Phoenixville with its Blob Festival and Sly Fox Brewery, has become a cheaper, more laid back alternative to Philly. Portland, Maine and Providence are bigger and further afield than Phoenixville, but they’re providing an alternative to Boston. Mountain towns and suburbs near Portland and Denver are getting hipper as well.

At the moment, Pittsburgh is still a place where folks from elsewhere come to save big bucks and get more space, but housing costs are escalating particularly in the most established neighborhoods in the East End. Maybe we’ve been spoiled having both lived in Pittsburgh for ten plus years, but my wife and I experienced notable sticker shock even in Swissvale when looking to get on the other side of the Squirrel Hill Tunnel for work around this time last year. We mutually dislike most of the other more suburban options along the Parkway East, Routes 30 and 22, so we had a look at Greensburg. It felt like a neighborhood in Pittsburgh that flung off and drifted all the way to Westmoreland County. A shade over 4 square miles with a touch under 15,000 residents, we spent four months looking for a house and another four months trying to finance it while retaining our home in Mt Washington as a rental. Our new house, just a few blocks from downtown, was much more affordable than it would have been in Pittsburgh. While housing overall is slightly more expensive here, it seems like there is a cap on the market at around $300,000 with plenty of nice options under $150,000. Most do need some work. The rental market is roughly 17% less according to census.gov. Greensburg isn’t prime for economic gentrification, but with almost 18% of the population past retirement age, a more generational revitalization could be starting.

Though we had a taste, prior to moving we had no idea what we were getting into. We’ve both been pleasantly surprised. Due to it’s compact nature, Greensburg is extremely walkable. There are plenty of retail vacancies, but just before I started writing this piece, I hit the bank, a got a cupcake, visited the locally owned hardware store, and learned about the difference between grain alcohol available in PA versus West Virginia at the state store. I was home within thirty minutes. It took me that long to just walk to Shiloh Street.

There are a handful of solid restaurants here as well. Oliver’s Pourhouse easily replaces Redbeard’s for drinks and bar food. The quasi – Jack Nicholson themed gastropub and cocktail bar, Fat Jack’s, offers a higher end yet accessible meal. Headkeeper’s offers an always solid American Tapas options, a huge selection of bottled beers to choose from and outstanding outdoor space. Little E’s Pizza has craft beer, a parking lot turned patio and excellent traditional and glutton free pizza. If you’re not in the mood to leave the house and you want pizza with the sauce on top of the cheese and a side of pierogies, Bubba’s has you covered with delivery. There are also an absurd and inexplicable amount of Japanese steakhouses to choose from. Of course, La Vita is the reigning champion. It’s excellent Italian American food, but it takes a little planning and could remind you a touch of “The Soup Nazi” episode of Seinfield. Here’s how you do it. Don’t just show up except at lunch. Then you get whatever the one woman show who runs the restaurant feels like cooking. You need to make a reservation for dinner but you also order when you call it in. You have a 50/50 shot of getting the wrong order from placing the call. However, it’s worth the effort and makes for one of the most unique and delicious restaurant experiences I’ve had.

Greensburg is a minor college town with Seton Hill and Pitt-Greensburg just around the corner and it comes with all the accoutrements associated with minor college towns. There are plenty of coffee shops to choose from, the best of which is The White Rabbit which easily ranks in my top five in Western PA. They have a solid selection of quality coffee and an even better selection of desserts and baked goods like cookies, panna cotta, creme brulee, trifles and homemade caramels. There are also plenty of bars to choose from ranging from the bourbon and craft beer Hugo’s to the divey Mr. Toad’s. Starting at the end of May, Summer Sounds brings regional and national bands to Saint Clair Park for free concerts. The historic Plaza Theater brings the best surviving acts of the early 60’s not called The Who, Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney.

However, there are certainly foibles and oddities. Downtown is most active during normal business hours and save for the mysterious bag pipes at 8:30 in the morning every Sunday, the town rests on the Sabbath making it a great day to make the “forty to ninety minute depending on traffic” drive into Pittsburgh.  The Friday night lights aren’t bright but the loudspeaker is clearly set at 11, as I’m pretty sure the entire city and much of Hempfield can hear play by play. Sadly, half the store fronts downtown are also vacant and we could use more than one train in either direction each day.

Pittsburgh is a ways from needing a local alternative, but it won’t be long. When it does, there is a good chance it’ll be Greensburg. One thing I will say is that I enjoy it here considerably more than I had expected. People may want to give it a shot. I got more house than I could afford in Pittsburgh, and I don’t have the icky feeling of knowing I displaced someone else in the process.  Greensburg isn’t primed to be gentrified in the same way as the neighborhoods I listed earlier. However, it’s more established, still pretty cheap and should be at least be an option for suburban pioneers.

Artistic Rendering by Ben Samson for TPOP

Some ideas start their germination as the tiniest of seeds.  Like when Steve sends me this tweet:

A job for @thepointofpgh ? https://t.co/kY31qjJsMq

— Steve DiMiceli (@SteveDiMiceli) April 13, 2016

I was intrigued by it.  Mount Washington Community Development Corporation was hosting an open design competition for an idea to revitalize the Boggs/Bailey corridor.  Even though it was just a three minute drive from the Monongahela Incline and a few blocks away from Shiloh Street, I had never been in this sector of Mount Washington before.  As a Mount Washington resident, Steve had been through there plenty of times.

Steve and I met Neil Grbach from MWCDC on site in early April to get a walkthrough of the project and a feel for what they were looking to achieve.  Steve and I both keyed in on certain elements that we wanted to incorporate into our final design.  Steve wanted to utilize the steeply sloped terrain of the main parcel to create a tiered building that sloped down away from Boggs.  I wanted to take advantage of the area’s greatest asset in the form of the potential views of Pittsburgh.

This is how The Elevated City concept came to fruition.

The image shown above is the end result of work, which wouldn’t have looked nearly as elegant if Steve and I did it (although I greatly enjoy Steve’s preferred medium of crayon).  For that we enlisted TPOP contributor, Ben Samson, and thank him for taking our crude sketches and making them into a gorgeous artistic rendering.

Steve’s building would occupy the majority of MWCDC’s 5-acre parcel that they control.  Commercial businesses would occupy the ground floor, with street level access to Boggs, while residential units would occupy two floors on top.  The roof would be a large, communal green roof that would help with stormwater reduction by absorbing the first inch of rainfall into the plant matrix.  Balconies off the residential units would also have small green areas, both for aesthetics and environmental reasons.  We envisioned recycled barnwood for the siding and frontage of the building, but any type of re-used material would fit the motif of what we were trying to accomplish.

The center piece of the development, though, is the elevated tower with an observation deck.  An elevator shaft would take you probably 60 to 70 feet in the air to the observation deck that would allow the visitor to see over top of Mount Washington’s buildings to Pittsburgh below.  This tower and observation deck would be clad in material to resemble a tree, with some type of metal architectural feature to create a canopied effect over the observation deck.  The long-term vision for this project would be to install two additional tree towers near the Monongahela Incline and at Grandview Park and have elevated, canopied walkways connect these three points together.  The pathways would follow the alignments of Wyoming and William Avenues, but more than likely run behind each of these streets due to utility conflicts.

The City of Pittsburgh is focused on making Grandview Park the next great park and this concept could help accelerate this process.  Once the tower would be in place at Grandview Park, the expansion possibilities are myriad to other directions.

We know that The Elevated City is not a practical solution, nor is it one that is going to happen anytime soon.  But what it does is it forces people to consider the possibilities of such a concept and how it could revitalize a flagging corridor.  It was meant to be fanciful, not utilitarian, and to allow people to dream about the possibility of such a concept.  The Elevated City would be a conversation piece and a major tourist draw tied into the already in place draw of the Monongahela Incline.  People can go from The Elevated City down the Incline to Station Square (and in reverse), which may help to spur on new interest in a Station Square that has seen better days since its late-1980’s/early 1990’s peak.

Unfortunately, we did not win the design competition.  That honor went to QK Architecture for their excellent design called The Bend (it has a suspended monorail!).  Although we did not win, hopefully this design can live on one day in some form or fashion.

A lot has changed in the last ten years in nightlife in Pittsburgh. You can get a ride at 1:45 in the morning within a matter of minutes. The bar scene centralized to South Side after the Strip District club scene imploded before fanning out in a huge way to every corner of the city and even into the suburbs. Lawrenceville has gone from divey, to hip, to hip with douchey pockets moving in. It only seems like a matter of time before the AMPD Group opens a roof top bar with a hot tub likely breeding the super-bug follow up to Zika and a menu that falls well short of mediocre. In the blue collar, artsy spirit of the neighborhood, it’ll be called “Hipster” and will be as hipster as “Local” is local and serve an assortment of “house made” charcuterie that amounts to a bunch of Uncle Charley’s sausage varieties left to dry out on the underneath a radiator.

Besides Lawrenceville, Downtown has gotten a huge boast to its nightlife with some slightly more upscale joints extending business hours into the small hours of the morning. Shadyside remains a strong option for a night out but has a considerably younger feel than it did 10 years ago. Either that or I’m ten years older and I’ve just gotten past the cut off.   East Liberty has a real “we’re gentrifiying the place and don’t a give a crap. That’ll be eleven dollars for a three ounce mixture of gin, sours and lavender infused water I gave you” vibe. Even Mt. Washington’s Shiloh St. has become a hotspot. Breweries and multiple suburban iterations of some Pittsburgh city classics have opened up the suburbs to nightlife options.

Fueling the nightlife expansion is a new youthfulness in the city and capital investment. Pittsburgh has solved the policy mystery of attracting early millennials with career prospects by getting them drunk and keeping them drunk, thanks to disposable income leftover from a still reasonably priced housing market. Still, I have to question whether or not we’ve reached a saturation point. Ten years ago, the newest and hottest place on the South Side would be elbow to elbow just past midnight. The Abbey, Upper Lawrenceville’s sprawling new addition, was crowded but had enough space to easily order from without leaning on some sweaty dude just after twelve. Coupled with a walk past a shuttered New Amsterdam and it’s easy to question how much more room for new nightlife there is. Either that or it’s just the churn needed to keep a scene vibrant and fresh.

The expansion of the nightlife has led to an increased offering in live music, something sadly just beginning to enter Pittsburgh’s late night experience a decade ago. In the early days, you’d get a guy with an acoustic guitar playing standards to lure people up to a seldom utilized second floor bar or prolific party bands covering all mid nineties and early 2000’s staples playing three shows a weekend or groups like Irish inspired Ceann who mostly wrote about drinking but also delved into stranger subject matter like imaginary norse scapegoats.

By and large though, the scene in 2006 was crap metal bands composed of a few dudes who had some musical ability on guitar, but by and large could not sing (or even scream properly) or compose music in any coherent manner.  God love them, they tried, but they sucked. I sat through a countless number of them before I could see a friends act, Forgotten Nobody. Now broken up, they were a bass heavy power/punk pop trio who churned out some legitimately catchy music. They had their flaws, but they were a breath of fresh air following two hours of garbage that did little more than damage my hearing.

Ten years later and I still had to sit through metal bands before getting to see my friend’s group, though it has improved considerably. The openers now have some serious chops, more expensive equipment, and often did us the courtesy of not trying to sing. While there were a few good songs to start the evening, metal isn’t my thing and I know I’m not alone in saying that. There was still a little too much meandering and a few solid riffs and rhythm sections I enjoyed that were played once and never revisited.  Our friend’s act this time is the grunge three-piece who would certainly fit on the Alice in Chains end of the early nineties Seattle spectrum. They feature gritty,  but enjoyable vocal styling, a strong bass guitarist with a knee injury that doesn’t seem to heal and to their credit write easy to follow songs. While they operate on the metal fringe, they’re still the easiest band to listen to of any I’ve heard.

This isn’t to say that the Pittsburgh music scene hasn’t had its wins over the past decade. Bizarre rap offerings that dominated locally in the early 2000’s like Grand Buffet made way to more mainstream successes Mac Miller and Wiz Khalifa, with the latter ranking among the area’s most noteworthy national pop stars ever. Though Cleveland could also claim him, the South Hills’ Girl Talk has gained national attention with his brilliant mashups. The rock scene, however, has gone largely unnoticed. Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s produced indie darlings like the War on Drugs, Santigold, Strand of Oaks, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Kurt Vile, where only Donora seems to flirt with success here.

Something’s holding Pittsburgh back and it’s certainly not opportunities to play and be heard. There is plenty of nightlife, plenty of venues and a plentiful audience in the target market. So much has changed in this city, but the metal remains. It could be that our most often heard style from this writer’s perspective is a little outdated.  Maybe this isn’t a bad thing, as it does feel like a great tie in to a city that’s losing some of it’s hokey, traditional feel as lower middle class residents get priced out, but in a town that has taken steps into culinary, technological and cultural cutting edge, why shouldn’t music follow? Metal should be able to coexist with something more.

His and her running shoe cake Photo by Mike Bradley

I’ve attended a wine themed wedding were I sat at the “Merlot” table while my parents sat at the “Chianti” table.

I’ve also attended a Las Vegas themed wedding with magicians, high wire acts and Elvis himself.

Why not a running themed wedding, especially on Pittsburgh Marathon weekend?

Melissa Harmon agreed and has started PR’d in Love, a business coordinating running themed weddings.  For non-runners,  a “PR” stands for personal record: any time you run a distance faster than you’ve ever ran one before.

“Carb loading” for the half or full marathon

Melissa experimented with this concept at her own wedding last summer and planned a wedding reception in Lawrenceville this “Marathon weekend” at the Teamsters’ building.

“Attendees will either think its amazing…or really weird but I think the runners will love it,” said Harmon.

old bib “flowers”

Harmon thought of many of the things the standard Pinterest mom would’ve liked: bibs for invites, running shoes for bride and groom, pasta and pierogi dinner to “carb load” for Sunday’s race.  But there was more.

“Melissa really thought of everything. Every way that you could have worked running into the reception she made it happen…and it wasn’t obnoxious,” said Becky an IT Manager at PPG and maid-of-honor in the event Friday.

Instead of signing a guest book, attendees signed a quilt with a sharpie.  The quilt was made by Harmon and was comprised of race T-shirts that the bride and groom had acquired over the years.  The attendees often signed squares that were races they competed in as well.

Centerpieces and favors

The “flowers” for the races weren’t flowers at all.  They were Eat ‘N Park smiley cookies, which are often given at the end of local races to finishers and paper flowers made from old race bibs.   The “vases” they were in were Nalgene water bottles.  The favors were bags and race T-shirts.

With downtown Pittsburgh being one of the youngest cities in the country and the millennial population rising quirky ideas like this might not be too crazy. Young people love different….and cheap.

“I GUARANTEE this is one of the cheaper themes you’ll find for a wedding,” stated one of the guests who also belongs to the Pittsburgh chapter of the Green Building Association.  “It’s also very green.  The bride and groom could have easily thrown all this stuff away, instead it’s being used as decorations.”  Maybe this is something the Green Building Association would like being involved in.

Harmon, who teaches at the Community Day School in Oakland says that she’d be able to plan 5-10 of these a year, with the weekends of The Great Race and the Marathon making the most sense, but acknowledges the other great races in Pittsburgh (with a lower ‘g’).  The Pirates and Penguins races, the Run Around the Square, the Race for the Cure as well as the non traditional Color Me Rad and the Mud on the Mountain are all races worthy of pairing with states Harmon.

Harmon’s PR’dinLove is another new Pittsburgh business taking its innovation and energy in all sorts of directions and we locals are the beneficiaries.

Schematic showing the augmentations that Grindhouse is developing
From Grindhouse Wetware.com

We all want to stand out, be that special and unique snowflake.  For some it is how we dress.  For some it is we decorate ourselves with tattoos or body piercing.  Maybe it is a speech affectation.  Or a personality trait.

But there is a small subset of our population that wants to stand apart from other humans by becoming more than just a human.  This sector, that is growing and gaining in acceptance every day, want to become technology-augmented humans, commonly known as cyborgs.

Much to my initial surprise, one of the leading groups of cyborgism is located right here in Pittsburgh, a biotechnological collective known as Grindhouse Wetware.  The two most visible members of the group are the 36-year old Tim Cannon and 26-year old Ryan O’Shea.

Cannon, whose Twitter handle is the aptly-named @TimTheCyborg, is a self-described “grinder”.  When I ask him to explain the term he says it’s “being a DIY (do-it-yourself) practical transhumanist using skills and resources to very slowly, incrementally implement a cyborg future, but in a less pie- in-the-sky way.  Instead of creating the perfect graphics driver, it’s trying to design Tetris.”

It’s quite a commitment to decide to physically implant a foreign object inside your body, by choice and not for a medical reason, so the logical first question is can’t humans accomplish the same thing with wearable tech that’s advancing on the market?  “We get this all the time,” says a weary-toned Cannon.  “Eventually implants are going to be desirable.  We feel it’s an unnecessary step to wait for wearables to come to fruition.  We have the technology now, so why even wait?”

“I think a better question is ‘why wearables’?” adds O’Shea.  “I’ve forgotten my cell phone. I’ve forgotten my keys, my wallet, my fitness trackers.  These things can be lost or stolen. You know what I’ve never forgotten or lost? Things that are inside of me.”

Cannon’s path to becoming one of the leading voices in the world on cyborgism, frequently speaking and attending international conference on cyborgism and transhumanism, was an asymmetrical one.  He’s a high school dropout that got his GED and then eventually went to a two year diploma mill that gave him a certificate that said “hey, this guy can program.” So that’s what he did for 10 years until he helped formed Grindhouse Wetware in 2011 with some like-minded individuals.  Grindhouse is primarily a research and development think tank, but Cannon envisions a time “where we spawn several commercial companies to serve the general public commercially with implants.”

Grindhouse Wetware currently has four products in development that can viewed on their site.  One of them is the Northstar, a subdermal star implant that lights up with the use of magnets, that will be implanted into Cannon in the very near future.  If you are in possession of a strong constitution, here is a video that contains footage of the original test embedments in some Grindhouse team members.

A love of science fiction coupled with a love of technical challenges drew Cannon to cyborgism originally.  He currently has embedded in his body three magnets, two RFID chips, and at the end of April the Northstar prototype.  He’s only had one removed, but that was a planned removal after 90 days, as they were just testing the concept.  He admitted that he was scared during the first implant, but he feels that “at the end of the day this is the direction that humanity has to head, in order to survive in the universe over a long enough timeline.”

Cannon has two small children.  What do they think of his desire to be a meld of man and machine?  “I tell them our body is what we were naturally put in, but I want to become something more to see if I can help the world evolve into something better. The best way to learn from mistakes may be through technology.”

The conversation turned existential when we started to discuss the boundary line (or lack thereof) for when a man is no longer a man, but rather a machine.  In O’Shea’s words, “Well, that’s hard to answer, but we can certainly say what DOESN’T make us human. It’s not our fleshy arms and legs. There are amputees, and they are still human. It’s not sight, hearing, taste, or touch. People without one or more of these senses are certainly still human. How much can you take away and still have a human? Well, it seems that what makes us human is our thoughts, memories, opinions, personality, etc. As far as we know, this is all stored in our brains. The legal system seems to agree with this definition, as there can be a ‘brain dead’ person on life support that is considered legally dead despite the fact that their body is still ‘alive’. Is seems that both life and death are really undefined terms and we’re not exactly what either of them mean.”

Hopefully these two fine gentlemen don’t create a version of Skynet, like from the Terminator movies, and usher in our robot/cyborg overlords.  But both Cannon and O’Shea are embracing a cyborg future.  For Cannon, the endgame is “to be 100% non-biological. I would want to spend time off planet, searching out answers for questions we want answered. Humans want to be peaceful explorers. We may need to abandon our biology and travel the stars to find what we want.”  O’Shea is even more straightforward about our cyborg natures by saying that, “many academics and philosophers would already say we are cyborgs, that our smartphones are extensions of our intelligence and our technology is an extension of ourselves. This can be seen as the Extended Mind. We might as well already be cyborgs. Even judging from perhaps the more common definition of that term – a human/machine combination – many people already meet that definition. Many modern humans have pace makers, cochlear implants, prosthetic limbs, joint replacements, artificial organs, and more. Some would even elect to have these devices for traditionally non-medical reasons.”

Cannon shows no hesitation when discussing how he thinks that humans can evolve by melding with machine.  “There will be practical augments in next couple of years and over the next 20 years it will progress rapidly. In 2050 we will reach a tipping point. figure out what will do with 1000 IQ minds, being powered by the sun, humans designed to live 1000 years, and no need for calories anymore.”

But what about those who do not want to become part-man/part-machine?  Whether it is for moral, ethical, or religious reasons, there will be a faction of the populace that would have no interest in this.  Would there develop a class divide between cyborgs and natural humans?  Cannon doesn’t believe so. “A cyborg future is inevitable, but there will be people will want to stay natural. Divides will be over needs. Humans need wheat, calories, sugar, salt, fat. Plants have vastly different needs than humans. Humans will have different needs than cyborgs and won’t compete for same needs.”  O’Shea drew the interesting comparison between modern humans and sects of us that don’t use technology today.  “Currently there are communities of Amish people who don’t use modern technology. I certainly wouldn’t view these people as lesser beings. Likewise, I’m sure there will be humans that choose not to augment themselves and live and die as biological humans. They should be able to do this, and I certainly don’t think they should be looked down upon for this.”

As O’Shea said, “Grindhouse is taking the first steps towards increasing our consciousness, overcoming limitations, and replacing biology with technology. We feel this is the natural course of human evolution.”

Artistic Rendering from McCaffery Interests Inc. showing the potential renovation of the Strip District Produce Terminal

The City of Pittsburgh is moving forward with a revised development plan from Chicago-based McCaffery Interests Inc. to renovate the Produce Terminal along Smallman Street in the Strip District.  The total cost of the project is estimated to be $70M, as per Dan McCaffery of McCaffery Interests.  Of that total, nearly $20M is pencilled in as coming from either foundation grants or public subsidies.

The plan itself is bold in nature.  It would be a “food-centric” plan that seeks to harmonize itself with the existing Strip District, which represents the stomach of Pittsburgh.  There would a public market and food-based stores, complemented by 20 live-work apartments, general office space, and restaurants.  The fear that some people have and have already raised is that this renovation will make the Produce Terminal too new and shiny, a stark contrast to the gritty nature of the industrial warehouse look of the Strip District.  I remember when I first started visiting the Strip as a kid, it was dirty.  Back then, you weren’t quite sure if the food you were getting was safely prepared or safe to eat, but that was all part of the adventure.  It’s been greatly cleaned up today, but it is still a no-frills adventure to get the raw food goods to prepare not only your personal meals, but the meals for many of the restaurants throughout the City of Pittsburgh.

The artistic rendering shown above comes from McCaffery Interests’ vision for the property.  There shouldn’t be a whole lot of apprehension to McCaffery Interests, as they were the developer responsible for the renovation of the Cork Factory and the construction of the adjacent Lot 24, both right up the street from the proposed Produce Terminal project.  The Cork Factory has maintained an adequate amount of grit, coupled with a heaping dose of renovation.

The Produce Terminal rendering has a promenade feel to it, with an encouragement towards pedestrian traffic to walk along Smallman Street and then buzz in and out of shops on the elevated dock portion of the project.  This would essentially create a narrowing of Smallman Street, a typical traffic calming measure that is implemented in other settings to slow down traffic, which would be a positive development.  As currently situated, Smallman is too wide, which leads to people passing cars all the time without regard to pedestrians.  On the other hand, this eliminates a huge amount of on-street parking that currently exists.  This plan proposed by McCaffery did not explicitly mention parking, but some type of low-rise parking garage would have to be built between the Produce Terminal and the river to compensate for this loss.

Setting aside the nature of the project and whether or not they can make it shabby chic to blend in with Penn Avenue/Smallman Street, what I’m concerned about is the bridge funding that will be sought out to pay for this project.  I hope that the City does not go for a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) plan to make up the shortfall of funding.  Quite simply, TIF’s are scams that benefit only the developers and leave the host municipalities holding the bag.  The basic premise behind a TIF is that the developer receives a certain amount of money interest-free to complete their project.  The host municipality is paid back under the premise that there will be a significant incremental increase in tax revenue generated from the project than if the project never moved forward.  But as can be shown with Pittsburgh Mills out in Frazier Township and their current $1.3M shortfall, these estimates of revenues are typically wildly overestimated and the revenue falls short to the municipality.

What I would like to propose is some sort of diversion from the revenues of the state’s casinos for this project.  The City of Pittsburgh receives a healthy cut of tax revenue from the roughly $280M that Rivers Casino generates each year, but they also receive a share of the total amount from the statewide pool of casino revenues, as well.  These monies are already being used to renovate and revitalize parts of the City.  Additional monies are dedicated to projects in non-City of Pittsburgh municipalities through the Community Infrastructure Tourism Fund (CITF) and Gaming Economic Development Fund (GEDF) to improve infrastructure and support programs.  I would like to see a dedicated revenue stream of perhaps $666,666 per year for 30 years (with a low interest increase of 1-2%/year) set aside from the gaming industry to support this program, rather than a TIF which the City would never see the full return on anyway.  This way the monies are not being diverted from existing earmarked City funds and are small enough that the State Department of Revenue could bleed it off without disrupting over funding streams like the CITF/GEDF.