A Tale of Two Cities: Chicago and Pittsburgh Illuminating My Life

Downtown Chicago. Photo by Federal Highway Administration [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

I fell in love with two cities.

Both because of the same reason.

Lights.

By all rights, the first city I should have fallen in love with is Chicago, the nearest city to me during my childhood. In the suburbs, and even in the nearer rural areas, it’s a relatively easy drive to downtown, which provides a plethora of skyscrapers, museums, and zoos for every flavor of field-trip. By the time you graduate from high school, the city’s touristy areas are old hat. Until, however, you see the city in a different light. Literally.

My paternal grandfather worked night shift in the John Hancock building on one of the upper floors. When I was a teen, my family went up to visit him and I got a different perspective of the city. There, 90+ stories above the street, I could see the nerves of Chicago in negative. Darker golden lights snaked through the city showing where interstates cut through neighborhoods. Intersecting these were paler yellow points. East and west and north and south, they revealed the tidy grid of smaller streets. These lights all fell away suddenly at the dark abyss of Lake Michigan.

Chicago shoreline from Views from John Hancock Center. Photo by Dasha, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I stared out the window following the lines, eyeing the pattern upon which the Second City was built. In the darkness, the city was not an entity of people, living, breathing, and moving, but the foundation upon which those lives are built, illuminated by the streetlights.

In one my earliest stories, I wrote a description into a pivotal scene, that vision of the city from above. The jagged black shoreline gave biting contrast to the neatly organized street system with its hierarchy of roads. A black night and gold lights: another golden coast.

Speaking of black and gold, there’s another city that I fell in love with first, and the character of this city is as different from Chicago as day and night.

My family spent Thanksgivings with my maternal grandparents outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Going to Pittsburgh held quite a bit of appeal to a rural Midwesterner such as myself. In those short days of late autumn, we would usually reach the city after dark. We would spend the last hours of our trip driving in the hills and mountains of western Appalachia, winding through the dusk until we kids were lulled into quiet sleepiness.

Then we’d hear one of our parents from the front seat, “There’s Pittsburgh.”

Our heads would pop up from our seats. Moving out of the dark, forested Allegheny mountains, we would cross over the Allegheny River north of the city, wind through the skyscrapers — our necks craning to see their tops — and around the mix of old stone buildings and shiny new glass ones. A city, not spread out along the banks of a lake, but stuffed between two arms of the gently rolling rivers.

After crossing over the one river, we would turn along the northern bank of the second, the Monongahela, crisscrossed with bridges leading to the other shore. Across the river, my favorite sight of the trip: the homes and inclines on Mount Washington. A thousand pinpricks of light, fireflies that never blink, like a fistful of stars thrown into the hillside. There was no rhyme or reason to these lights; they just twinkled against the black velvet night bidding me welcome to the city.

Pittsburgh, PA. Photo by Ronald C. Yochum Jr., CC BY-SA 2.5 , via Wikimedia Commons

I’d watch these lights until we wound around the hill again and through the tunnels that engineers had dug through the mountain. (Because even stone can’t hamper mankind and our desire to settle and build and conquer.) My family would then pass through the boroughs to Grandmother’s house, a trip that had taken us literally over the river and through the woods.

There’s an age to those boroughs, with the red brick houses sitting like sentinals on their hills. I second the feeling that Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli felt when they entered Fangorn Forest.

“Old, very old…and full of memory.”

Pittsburgh was the frontier before the frontier. A war started over that 36-acre piece of ground where the Allegheny and Monongahela meet to form the Ohio River. Except that it wasn’t a fight just for 36 acres: it was for the future of the nation, a future they could not see any more than a tributary of a river can see its delta.

I could not see my future back then, as a girl playing with my siblings and cousins on those hills.

Meanwhile, time passed, and the rivers kept flowing and the lights kept twinkling in the dark. Industry changed, the fortunes of the city rose and fell. Three Rivers Stadium where I watched my first professional baseball game has been demolished. My grandparents who lived there have both passed on and lie in their final resting place on, of course, the crest of a hill. So I carry those memories with me. Happy memories that sparkle from the joy of them, that tell me why I am who I am, because they tell me where I come from as a woman and where we come from as a nation.

There’s a funny story from my childhood. My mother is from Pittsburgh, and they pronounce their letter O’s almost like it’s a hill, tall and round. I hear it the most when a Pittsburgher (or “Yinzer” as they’re called) says the word “God.” Anyway, one day, my mother called out to me and I, with my little sassy pants on, corrected her. “It’s not Olive,” I pronounced in my flat Illinois accent, “it’s Ah-live.”

Though I love the city of Pittsburgh, my heart will always belong to the flatlands. If Pittsburgh is my city of memory and nostalgia, Chicago, rising from the farmlands to west and the lake to its east, is my city of independence. I spent most of my 20s living in the suburbs, appreciating the benefits of a world-class city. With friends, I partook of performances by the city’s symphony; I sampled the variety of its foods. I took an architectural tour of Chicago and learned so much about the history of the buildings that populated downtown.

I learned that the Chicago River used to flow into Lake Michigan until engineers turned the flow of the river around.

Conquering. Settling. Building.

The history of Chicago, a city built and then rebuilt, is the history of transportation, of agriculture, of food industry, of architecture. All of which are interests that have made my way into my stories that I write, the grid upon which my creativity can grow and thrive.

Driving down the streets of Chicago outside of downtown, one passes all the little storefronts. I’m always so fascinated. I know that there are probably a hundred more like them in other neighborhoods. Each one represents someone’s hard work, or a family legacy, or a dream fulfilled.

Humans: conquering, building, and settling.

Ah, living. So like these two cities. It’s a wonderful symbiosis of its hills, those foundational things we can look back to such as our memories and our history; and its waters, the ever-meandering streams taking us to new frontiers and the shorelines that shape them.

And also…

The lights illuminating the darkness.