It made me think of Wheeling when I first heard him say it, and it’ll likely sound familiar to you, too, because of the popularity of the late-great Anthony Bourdain. He was the chef who evolved into the journalist who defined a city’s or a country’s culture by eating and describing its food.
And, for one episode anyway, Bourdain was right up the road.
“Pittsburgh is a city of neighborhoods, each with its own rights and rituals; a patchwork of cultures that took shape more than a century ago. Back then the city was a beacon for hope and possibility for people from all over the world, offering the promise of work, prosperity, and new life.”
Not only can you hear him when you read it, but you can see it, too. Bourdain had a way of painting a picture while telling a story, and in this instance, he described a region and not just the tri-state’s biggest town. Replace “Pittsburgh” with “Wheeling” or “Steubenville” or “Follansbee” or “Bellaire”, and Bourdain could have been talking about the Wheeling area instead.
Once immigrants traveled along the National Pike and arrived at Wheeling, they made choices where they would settle. Some crossed the mighty Ohio before and after the Suspension Bridge was constructed and then rebuilt, and others either stayed put or turned to the north or the south. Germans, and Irish, and Polish, and Italian, and Lebanese, and other Europeans made Wheeling and it’s surrounding communities the center for industrial and commercial activity.
At one time during the early 1900s, Wheeling competed with Pittsburgh for continued industrial and residential development, and while the “Steel City” grew larger over time, national and international politics have had negative impacts on economies in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and the northern panhandle.
That’s the history of what’s now known as America’s “Rust Belt” region, and that’s why Bourdain also stated about our neighbors to the northeast, “Pittsburgh could have been another company town gone to beautiful ruin, but something happened. The city started to pop up on lists as one of the most livable in America. It became attractive to a new wave of people from elsewhere looking to reinvent themselves and make a new world.”
Here in Wheeling, well, we’re still waiting for reinvention. For the most part anyway. Some of those “Great Place!” lists have included the Friendly City, and there are some employment opportunities added that have attracted new folks to our neck of the woods. It seems the “run-away” era is over, and the valley’s population seems to be a battle between death rates and birth rates, but we’re still waiting for one of those big announcements to come true.
Like the theme park, or the cracker plant, or the skyscraper apartment building in downtown Wheeling, right?
Those waiting games, though, don’t mean it’s impossible for this rusted valley to realize the same resurrection we’ve witnessed in and around the ‘Burg, and once it does, we’ll likely wonder the same Bourdain did during his visit in 2017.
“And so,” the chef said, “we find ourselves asking the same questions we ask in other cities in transition: Are the new arrivals, new money, and new ideas saving the city or canabolizing it? Who will live in the Pittsburgh of the future?
And will there be room for the people who have stayed true (and) stuck with it their whole lives?
If not, Wheeling will have lost its soul.
