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Pittsburg
In the early twentieth century, Charles Henry White traveled throughout the United States and wrote a series of essays on American cities—including Salem, Charleston, and Pittsburgh—which appeared in Harper’s Weekly, accompanied by White's etchings.
If provoked and inclined to extend himself, in a five-minute talk he can fill you so full of miscellaneous industries--natural gas, steel rails, tin plate, petroleum, steel pipes and sheet-metal, fire-bricks, tumblers, tableware, coke, pickles, and all that sort of thing--that you will begin to feel like a combination delicatessen and hardware store. I have not begun to enumerate the different data I have collected on this subject, as I have no desire to make the reader feel small or to lose confidence in himself. As I have pointed out before, the Pittsburger, or the man who is under the influence of Pittsburg, must be provoked before he unburdens. The difference between the Bostonian and the Pittsburger is that the latter talks of actual figures, while his more cultured brother is prone to drag lay figures into his conversation--great uncles and aunts, whom he represents as being socially prominent, or hypothetical grandfathers who are dead and buried, and therefore inaccessible to the careful and cautious investigator. It is not easy to tell what may turn the conversation into the channel of hardware. Take a case in point.
A shimmering silver river, spanned by many bridges, threads its way between two great rocky promontories and loses itself in an exquisite distance of gray mist faintly flushed with an opalescent pink, where the forest of mammoth stacks is belching clouds of smoke and iron-ore dust, sending great banks of rose-colored smoke soaring, tumbling, and rolling upward in phantasmagoric shapes. A great veil of smoke stretches out for miles and moves majestically over the valley like a funeral pall that threatens to obscure everything. It is not unlike some vast, ghostly flood-tide coming in from the gray, invisible country beyond, beneath which the river, the factories and bridges, the city itself, are soon submerged. Through the shroud of smoke loom gigantic shadows of the mighty promontories; a long shaft of fine golden sunlight sifts across the valley where a galaxy of lights flicker and die away like will-o'-the-wisps in the envelopment of the night; the pinnacles of the hills glow with an amber phosphorescence, and Pittsburg begins her night. "I wonder whether an artist can ever render the significance of this," I ventured, after saturating myself with the beauty of the vista. "I can tell you something about the significance of this place that ought to hold you for a while," began Stone, the Pittsburg member of the party. I had no desire to interrupt him, and he proceeded. "Why, you won't believe what that signifies," he continued, embracing the valley with a great sweep of his arm. "I won't tell you that the pay-roll is three hundred and fifty millions in cold cash, for instance, because I have no desire to frighten you. I might drag in the fact that three million five hundred thousand cars bring a hundred and thirteen million net tons in and out of Pittsburg district, and I might make you feel still more up in the air by adding that I'm not including freight in transit when I mention these figures. I won't do it. It wouldn't be right. But what I will say casually is that if you add the harbor tonnage to this amount, it will make one hundred and twenty-two million net tons." At this point he paused for a moment and looked about to collect applause. He got it. Helping himself to a cough-drop secreted somewhere in his vest pocket, he cleared his throat and proceeded: "Why, say--right down on that river in a single day they shipped three hundred and ninety-three thousand three hundred and fifty tons. I guess that's going some--eh? Why, in the valley where we're looking they are consuming daily two hundred and fifty million feet of natural gas." He had completely withered me, and I hung limp on the railing. A few pedestrians, attracted by the vigor of his declamation, had gathered at a respectful distance. Stone was bathed in perspiration, and paused to get his breath. Before he had time to recover himself a small, wiry man with a gimlet eye and a prominent Adam's apple had seized the helm and was piloting his own narrative with a good start and a fair road ahead of him. "Scuse me, gentlemen; I come from down there," he began, waving a stump of a hand that possessed but two fingers. A look of encouragement was all that he desired. He got it. "Why, gentlemen, fingers is going down there like bananas at a country fair. Half of the big concerns have their private ambulance and surgeon, and I have known times when the undertakers and cabinet-makers were working with night shifts. When you see a man howling and coming your way in a die-punching department you have orders to grab him and hold on to him until the doctor gets him." "How did yours go?" I asked, indicating the stump with the two solitary fingers. "Down there in the slaughter-house." He motioned to a well known Pittsburg factory which has earned this significant title.
"Five of us entered the department that day--we were all suckers, good and green--and at the end of the day three of us had lost fingers. The record for one week in that department stands at twenty-one fingers." He then called upon the Deity to strike him dead if things were not as he represented them to be. He waited a moment to let us look at him; nothing unusual happened, and he proceeded: "In Allegheny County alone the number of deaths from accident were two thousand six hundred and sixty. I call that getting busy." He looked about him with an injured air for a dissenter, but nobody dared to contradict him. He paused an instant to replenish his quid of tobacco, when the fishy-eyed individual who had gradually edged up to our group stepped in briskly with a "gentlemen," and in a moment had the conversation well in hand. His face was an intelligent one, though dissipated. His collar was of celluloid; his voice thick; and his eye as uncommunicative as a glass marble. Put him on a corner in a New England prohibition town, start a two-knot breeze against him, and let an excise officer pass to the leeward, and he would immediately bustle about to look for contraband. He shook his cuffs down, and with his face flushed with enthusiasm, began: "I notice that you did not mention the enormous consumption of cork in Pittsburg. It runs into thousands of tons; and when it comes to churches and benevolent institutions I regret that I have been too intimately connected with them to be able to speak freely." "It's a hard life we lead--a hard life," mused the first speaker, gazing at the mighty hills, whose lofty crests, with their little clusters of pygmy cottages clinging like barnacles to the barren rocks, towered high above the valley. "Most of us is parrot-toed from climbing home at night," he sighed. "You are what?" I gasped. "Parrot-toed ... ain't you ever noticed it?" I confessed that I had not. It must be said, however, that the traveller who, in idling about this rolling country in quest of the picturesque, falls a prey to this ridiculous affliction is amply rewarded for his sacrifice. Once he becomes addicted to the habit of exploring Pittsburg, the towering hills above him have an irresistible fascination. The incomparable vista revealed from their crests--the tiers upon tiers of tumbling hills--sends him onward and upward tingling with a new sense of the picturesque, of space, and of limitless power and strength. The indescribable freshness of its motives, the infinite variety of its moods, the miragelike appearance of distant hilltops, suspended for a moment in the turquoise haze and dropping mysteriously from view, the tender distances, light and volatile as ether, revealing for a moment a band of glimmering silver spanned by weblike bridges, the masterful disposition of architecture with a landscape at times primeval in character, lend an exotic beauty to this restless background that furnishes the jaded traveller with what he has begun to look upon as the unattainable--a distinctly new thrill. My two letters of introduction brought me in contact with a type peculiar to Pittsburg. I allude to the involuntary resident--the victim of circumstances. The first was Jack Holloway, architect, originally from Boston, but recently from the Beaux-Arts, Paris. He listened patiently while I delivered my eulogy on Pittsburg. "I admire your enthusiasm," he began, coolly, in a somewhat patronizing manner. "But you don't live here. My dear fellow, the only thought the people have here is to make money enough to get out. You can imagine how that sort of attitude gets on the nerves of a Bostonian like me. It's too sordid for words." "Why don't you get out?" I asked. "I'm saving up money with that end in view," he replied, gloomily. In the pause that followed I produced my letter to Archibald Downing, and asked Holloway whether he knew him. "Downing is a capital fellow and a good example of the effect Pittsburg has on a man. It ruined him--yes, absolutely. Able architect--saved some money, and fell in with a man who was full of convincing propositions--natural gas and all that sort of thing. Persuaded Archibald to take a little flyer with his wad. Wanted to let him in on the ground floor. Did. Archibald is still there--can't get out." I was somewhat at sea, when he enlightened me. "Boring for gas isn't the pastime for a man who is in the habit of undermining his health for the sum of thirty dollars a week. Archibald drilled a thousand feet and got nothing but hot air. Then his capital gave out. It changed his entire nature--altered his whole philosophy of life. His soul has been consumed with the idea of making enough money to clear out, and he has become fearfully peevish and intolerant. Tread gently when you meet him." My letter to Downing brought me through a labyrinth of high buildings to an office on the top floor. In the corner of a large draughting-room sat a tall, thin, bony individual, whose long, wiry neck formed a complete circuit with an immense drawing-board, on which he was marking with feverish energy. He undid his legs with some difficulty from the tall stool on which he was perched, and advanced with a cordial greeting. I asked him how he liked the place. "You mean this room?" he asked, in amazement. "No, I mean this--" indicating with a wave of my arm the incomparable horizon of river, sky, and smoldering factories. "That?" This somewhat incredulously. I nodded. "Wait till you live here," he whispered, looking about him to make sure we were not going to be overheard. "You don't know anything about it. We Easterners are a totally different race and, if I say it myself, a superior race. Imagine a whole population desperately working with the sole idea of making money! That's bad enough, but they are making money to get out. I tell you it is disgusting, and makes a fellow feel so horribly restless he hasn't the heart to pin his favorite pictures on the wall. Everything is so transient, so passagère." "Why don't you pull out?" I asked, sympathetically. "That's why you see me here in this office after hours bending over this drawing-board. I am saving up a little wad with that end in view--this is in confidence, of course. "Have you met Holloway?" he suddenly asked. I replied that I had just left him. "You no doubt saw what Pittsburg did for him. He is a good example of the manner in which a man can degenerate in this town. His ideals are like the ideals of the rest of the people here. People go money-mad ... they can't talk about anything else. Why, it would make you sick to see the amount that is made in this town. Did it ever occur to you that Pittsburg is the second city in the United States in banking capital?" It had not. Archibald fixed me with the glassy, anxious, and unnaturally brilliant eye of the man who has a message to deliver. I felt instinctively that he was about to scatter decimals and tried to retreat, but he had seized me by the buttonhole. "Pittsburg is at the head of American cities in earning capacity. Did this ever occur to you?" I hung my head in silence and tried to shift away from him, but he closed in. "Did it ever occur to you that Chicago, with more than five times Pittsburg's population, averages less than sixty percent of Pittsburg's bank earnings?" Never before in my life had I felt such abject humility, and I explained that I had just left the sleeping-car. "Did it ever occur to you that Pittsburg's capitalization exceeds the combined capitalization of Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Cincinnati, and Detroit?" I remember muttering something unintelligible. "Would you like me to put it in another way?" he asked, with an indescribable gleam in his eye. "Go as far as you like," I feebly answered. "Pittsburg's capitalization exceeds that of Boston and Cleveland combined, or of St. Louis and Baltimore combined." There was a triumphant ring to his voice as he concluded. I reached nervously for my hat. "One moment!" he exclaimed, anticipating my intention. "Downing," I began, with a dangerous gleam in my eye and my fingers twitching convulsively with a suppressed desire to seize him by the windpipe, "you are tiring yourself. You are a weak man and becoming feverish. Stop it, man, before you get typhoid or something horrible."
"It's your move. I pass," I replied, limply, as my inert elbow picked up an inverted drawing-tack. "It means a sum greater than the combined capital of Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas!" It was said in one breath, and his face was purple. "It is eighteen millions greater than Chicago and Baltimore combined!" he concluded, digging me in the pit of the stomach with a long, bony forefinger that left me for a moment paralyzed. "Eighteen millions!" The temptation is very great for the writer who is handling Pittsburg to fill pages with ponderous figures, and to take the unsuspecting reader into his confidence and tell him how he struck a 200,000-pound blow by the mere touching of a button; or to talk glibly of mill buildings a quarter of a mile long, or to casually refer to steel plants a mile in length. Once one gives way to this sort of thing he can fill pages with those charming little incidents--word-pictures--in which the author is seen standing alone in the foreground, clear-cut, with a high-light glistening on his forehead, thrillingly careless of his own safety, dodging the 180,000-pound ingots as they swing gracefully overhead, stepping lightly aside as one of the sixty-seven locomotives owned by the steel plant where he is at large rushes past into the night, only to bring up against a 190,000-pound fly-wheel which has stopped for repairs.
You leave with an overpowering sense of your utter insignificance, and sit speechless, gazing through your car window as titanic hills loom up in all their grandeur and race past in mighty pageant into the night, their sides and crests flaming with acres upon acres of coke furnaces, tingeing the vast rolling forms, slowly pacing across the glowing heavens with the golden splendor of some gigantic conflagration.
"Pittsburg" by Charles Henry White. Originally appeared in Harper's Weekly, November, 1908. TABLE OF CONTENTS | ABOUT THE PROJECT | EVENTS | CNF WEBSITE |
The Pittsburger can carry more figures of large denomination on his person without your suspecting their existence than any other citizen of the United States. He is a reservoir of decimals and statistics. He must have ample justification, however, before he turns the spigot, but when he does there is a torrent no man can stem. 
Late one afternoon, after a tortuous climb across a rugged country that heaves in billows like the ocean, we emerged on one of those great hills encircling the city. Below us lay Pittsburg, the huge, smoldering, roaring monster, flecking the uniform gray of its background with white puffs of steam. Upon the ear fell muffled detonations, varied at times by the distant metallic shriek of steel or the rumbling groan of tons of red-hot metal, twisted and tortured into new shapes. 
"A slip of the foot on the treadle when your hand's below--down she comes and off they go." He was delightfully cheerful about shedding a few fingers here or there, and I felt guilty when I let myself consider how miserly some of us are in this respect. 
Beneath its soot and grime he will discover in Pittsburg one of the most picturesque cities in America. Here he will find nothing stolen from Europe--nothing derivative. It is the very quintessence of what one is in the habit of styling "American." 
"Tut, tut! I knew it would interest you," he replied, with distressing geniality--"I knew it would interest you. I don't mind the exertion at all--I like it. I was just going to say that the capitalized strength of Pittsburg's banking institutions is one hundred and fifty million twenty-five thousand four hundred and sixteen dollars. Guess what that means." 
I shall make a supreme sacrifice and deny myself the pleasure. The bare statement that the iron and steel production in Pittsburg is 6,593,117 tons annually, conveys little meaning to one who has not seen a steel plant at night in full operation. It is a spectacle never to be forgotten, but to attempt to describe the full glory of these thundering, flaming infernos is to feel the limitations of the language and to grope about for some new vehicle of expression.