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Passing Through Pittsburgh
Tom Coyne, his three brothers, and one sister all immigrated together, having walked from their village of Leenane west of Galway City to Queenstown, or Cork, where they took the boat for America. Whispers in family archives gossip a melodramatic flight from British authorities due to the body of a priest found pitchforked on the family sheep farm. This was the time of "the tithe" and the Coynes’ father, Black Phillipe, was supposed to have had enough of the ecclesiastical ripoff, whether by the Roman Church or the Church of England. So, the story goes, they were on the lam and someone may have said, "You have cousins in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They’ll take you in." But they all split up once coming ashore in the New World, further suggesting they were running from something, and, in fact, when my grandfather made his only return to Ireland at the age of ninety he tried to get a passport under an assumed name. He still might be wanted, he feared. Whatever, he was the only one of that family to come to Pittsburgh, and he was vague about his time here in 1875. It seems he was only passing through. Carnegie, McCandless & Company had been founded by 1873 and the Edgar Thomson Steel Works in Braddock had already installed the first Bessemer. Frick’s coke empire was underway; glassmaking was a close second to steel as an industry in this boomtown where one could feel "the actual physical presence of power," to use the words of a contemporary Wall Street Journal article. Tom Coyne must have breathed the power of the place, felt the heat and rhythm of its industry. The great number of steamboats and barges on the rivers probably impressed him for they served the largest inland harbor at the time. He was fond of such assessments; the largest this, the greatest that, the most powerful other, maybe because he was a small man himself, wiry and resilient but with a Celtic fury in his eyes to compensate for his stature. After his Army career, his life would be fitted to heavy machinery, locomotives, the great locks of the Panama Canal--engines to cross and move the earth, divert oceans. Along with the river vessels, the six railroads that focused on Pittsburgh must have firmly centered this fascination. And in all probability, he arrived in Pittsburgh by train, coming from Kings Point, Brooklyn, where he landed--this some twenty years before Ellis Island--to Philadelphia and then Pittsburgh. Just two years before, in 1873, the train trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh had been cut down from twenty-five hours to only twelve--what better proof to this young immigrant of the powerful society he thought he had joined. The place fired his sentience for human invention to a white-hot fervor that was never too cool. Why didn’t he stay? "The mill work was too much for me. I wasn’t strong enough for it." But he was strong enough to break and handle cavalry horses only a couple of years later. Strong enough to construct railroads all through Mexico and Central America. In Ecuador he built and ran the railroad from Quito to Guayaquil--an arduous construction that crossed the Andes. In his seventies he was strong enough to disarm two muggers in Kansas City, send them fleeing, and capture one when the man fell over a fireplug. When the police showed up, they found Tom Coyne kicking the thief’s behind. He had to be restrained. So it wasn’t that he was weak or fragile, but for some other reason he got back on another train after a year or two in Pittsburgh and headed West. He was a Connemara lad and perhaps there were aspects to Pittsburgh, with all its industrial wonder, that were too much for him. Or not enough. Some years later, I am going by train in the opposite direction, and I am eight years old. My mother and I take a Missouri-Central from Kansas City to Chicago, where we changed to a Pullman sleeper on the Pennsylvania Railroad. The next morning my father will meet us at the Pennsylvania Station in New York and we will taxi across town to Grand Central, where we will get on a train of the New York Central’s Harlem Division that will take us, on a roadbed laid down in 1852, to a small town near a rented farm house in New York's Columbia County. The whole trip will take the better part of two days and a night. It is a summer pilgrimage I would make many times to fulfill my parents’ peculiar concept of a family, for my grandparents kept me nine months of the year. But that’s another digression. This particular trip East occasioned my first look at Pittsburgh, and it was a sleepy look from beneath the blind of my Pullman berth’s window, but it was a sight that burned into my remembrance. Midnight or early morning, the train’s scheduled arrival in Pittsburgh is unknown to me, but it is pitch dark. Some change in the train’s rhythm has awakened me. I snuggle down in the cozy cave of my upper berth--no bed linen will ever match the crisp luxury of Pullman sheets; they had the cool freshness of a fine memory. Nor, if I may switch onto a little sidetrack, has the special effect of train travel been matched by any other form--something’s been lost. Train travel permits a passenger to encounter others in a different space, poses a relativity between object and viewer which Einstein fully appreciated. These days we mostly travel cut off from the world we traverse, only our destination and arrival time are defined. But to pass by train through a countryside, to take up temporary residence in another place, and to intersect, however briefly, with other lives waiting patiently at a road crossing, that particular human experience has been all but lost, and I think the human imagination, without this free association, has been impoverished. But, here I am, entering Pittsburgh at eight years of age, on a Pennsylvania Pullman to New York City, coming up the Ohio River, McKees Rocks on the right, then into that cut through West Park and across the Allegheny at 11th street into Daniel Burnham's gorgeous terminal, erected to replace the old depot that was burned down during the 1877 railroad riots. The riots would have occurred a couple of years after Tom Coyne came to town. Tom Coyne must have had a similar view. The air was clogged by the particled residue of coal fires, not just from the mills but from the city’s fireplace grates. Perhaps my grandfather warmed himself on cold winter mornings at one of these narrow grates; let’s say, staying with a Coyne cousin. He never said. So I am free to wonder. Maybe he didn’t hit it off with the relatives--personal relationships were not his forté--so he might have rented a bed in one of the many rooming houses that boarded single men, mill hands, and perhaps in one of the rowhouses of my neighborhood on the North Side in which the floor planks of yellow pine still show the old nail holes that marked off those cramped corners which transformed a normal-sized living room into a crowded dormitory. Surely, he might have thought, this was a paltry citizenship he had exchanged for the fresh air of Connemara, the dew of Galway still upon him. For these grimy alleys he had left the clear streams where trout fought for a place on the hook. For this gritty domain, he had turned away from the long vista of Killary Bay where salmon entered to spawn and Viking ships had once ghosted on a westerly breeze. It may have been this mystical perspective that pulled him away from Pittsburgh, and not the hard work, for his whole life was one of hard work, and it would be too clever a hindsight to suggest that he objected to being separated from the product made by his hard work, and with borrowed tools, or that he felt himself made expendable, dross to be burned out to make more efficient fuel. Those ideas were around then, of course, but he never thought that way. No, I think those mythical images he carried from Ireland pulled him away. He tried to duplicate them on the coulees of Montana, in the jungles of Central America, and the heights of the Andes. Then, there were those riots of 1877. The management of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the same company that had brought him and me through Pittsburgh at different times, had decided to do a little downsizing in 1877. Trainmen's salaries were to be cut 10 percent; moreover, freight-train lengths were to be doubled, thereby reducing the number of jobs. The city rebelled. Burghers blocked the tracks. Mayor William C. McCarthy refused to call in the police, and the members of the local state militia would not raise arms against their neighbors. Under pressure from the railroad company, Gov. John Frederick Hartranft called up the militia quartered in Philadelphia, and after arriving by train, these men assembled, confronted the citizenry, and, on July 21, fired into a crowd, killing twenty people. All hell broke loose. The mob drove the troops out of Pittsburgh. Over a thousand freight cars were demolished and nearly a hundred and fifty locomotives were destroyed. Dozens of downtown buildings, including the depot, were burned to the ground. The city was brought to a halt, to the edge of total anarchy, and it was the most violent uprising in America since the Civil War, not to be equaled--if then--until the riots of the 1960s. I can understand how it discouraged my grandfather. How was this oppression of a citizenry any different from the history he had just left? Exchange the Pennsylvania Railroad’s board of directors with Queen Victoria’s cabinet, and it looked like the same sort of tyranny he had learned to hate at his father’s knee. It had been waiting for him here, in Pittsburgh, and the air was bad, too. Something else to conjure. Almost exactly a year before, on July 4th, 1876, George Armstrong Custer had led the Seventh Cavalry to its destruction on the banks of the Little Big Horn River. The battle had made all the papers. The stupidity of Custer’s foray was glossed by the glory of his death, for his opponents this time around were not the old men, women, and children slaughtered at Washita and Sand Creek but, as my grandfather was to say later, "the greatest light horse cavalry ever to go into battle." So it was something like a fair fight, and in the clean, open air as well. He even might have been cheered by the Sioux victory; the underdog had won this time, and though he was to spend five years in the U.S. Cavalry, his sympathies were always with the Indians. The irony was not lost on him that to gain his own citizenship he had to suppress and diminish the status of others. The awful paradox would sometimes make him weep. So he left Pittsburgh. "I worked on the railroad," he would say when asked how he got to California, and that was all he would say. The Irish laid a lot of track, going east to west, as the Chinese did from west to east. Unskilled labor, such as a mill worker, was about all that was available to him in a society that discretely placed signs in its windows: No Irish Need Apply. "Sometimes I was called a white niggra," he told me once, and the confusion still welled up in his pale-blue eyes. Yes, the comparison offended him, but also he was outraged that men, African or Celt, should be put into such an equation at all. In San Francisco he enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry at the Presidium: five years' service would give him citizenship, at least on paper, and these were to be "the happiest days of my life." He was assigned to the Yellowstone, whose trout-packed streams and the clean air reminded him of Connemara, and where he witnessed the American Indian’s harmony with nature. Their way of life would become a lifelong paradigm.
So I admit to a certain lack of control of this material, and merely to put the different parts of my life and my grandfather’s life, and Pittsburgh, into a pretty cohesion will only be my arbitrary arrangement of the bits and pieces. The particles themselves will remain unaltered and unexplained and the inquiry unoccasioned: an idle amusement and nothing more.
However, two years after my first passage through Pittsburgh, I came through once again but this time by plane. My grandfather gave me a round-trip ticket to join my parents via a Trans World Airlines DC-3 which stopped to refuel in Chicago and Pittsburgh. The flight took over six hours, about the same time it took Tom Coyne to go from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and I mention this commonplace only to recall his exultation when I became part of this proof of modernity, this demonstration of human invention. My grandmother was more of a traditionalist and apprehensive of all gadgets, especially those that lifted a person several thousand feet into the air. "I can see his little legs dangling through the clouds," she said worriedly. I enjoyed the trip, pampered by the stewardess with extra helpings of chocolate cake and chewing gum, but the time spent on the ground in Pittsburgh draws a blank. Unlike that other early morning passage, I can call up from memory no views of the steel mills, no clouds of fire and smoke, nor even a trace of the rivers’ fork. Moreover, we landed far outside of town at the old airport. The plane’s altitude and flight path separated me from these citymarks so my memory is left holding an empty contour, but I was distanced from more than a place. Back on the ground of this Pittsburgh where I live, a similar separation from place, from a past meant to nourish the present, has been happening here and in all American cities the last half of this century. It goes by such names as Urban Renewal and Cultural Renaissance, and it is a process born of the suburban mentality that has always lived outside a city’s limits and is uncomfortable within the rough edges of its neighborhoods. So bulldozers are called in to smooth the awkward edifices of the past, selected artifacts installed in museums to be viewed safely on weekends. My own neighborhood had been a part of Allegheny City, an independent urban entity across the Allegheny River from downtown Pittsburgh. Fifty years ago, the five hundred buildings of this commercial center were torn down and replaced by a mall--that vulgar pastoral of suburban zeal. Today this mall is all but empty, a derelict of corrupt planning because the local populace had been isolated by its very construction, separated from their natural thoroughfares and haunts. Most of these places have been obliterated and major streets truncated. To build the Civic Arena, home of the Pittsburgh Penguins, fifteen hundred black families were made refugees in their own city and neighborhood. Perhaps there is a connection between this displacement and a finding that puts this city at the top of the list for having the greatest number of impoverished African-American families. Cut off the circulation in a hand, and it becomes numb, useless, and it is the same with a neighborhood. Cut off the flow of its inborn traffic, and its citizenry are diminished. The place rots. Perhaps city people should be beware of suburbanites seeking, if not bearing, culture. Lately, a so-called Cultural District has been marked off in the center of the city and designed for attractions that will lure culture hounds from the glens of Fox Chapel and Sewickley. But how can culture be segregated, and is it wise to do so? Culture is diminished when set apart from the community that is supposed to inspire it, indeed, from which its own inspiration is drawn. This current undertaking is merely another mall that will market the national chains of entertainment enterprises: fuzzy reproductions of Broadway boilerplate and the weary appearances of celebrity artistes. It is more than a passing irony that the "renewed" area previously hosted the city’s prostitutes and porno dens, agents of another kind of veneration that was also set apart from the community. But vice has always been segregated--now, in Pittsburgh, it seems to be culture’s turn. At the same time, I would guess that in the neighborhood bars of Bloomfield, Homewood, and the South Side, more genuine, spontaneous culture (neighborhood myths and local heroes remembered) is celebrated on any night of the week than in a whole season of imported attractions in the glittering halls downtown.
Tom Coyne, in his quest for citizenship, wanted to join the power of Pittsburgh. He wanted to contribute his energy and invention to that power, but he had to move on because he found the power was exclusive, misdirected, and made harmful to the very people it was supposed to enhance, to amplify. My search for identity is neither as desperate nor as direct; after all, I am second generation, and I can afford to loaf a little on the banks of these three rivers. But I am no less mindful of the struggle for identity, for a place on river delta; so, in the temporal coincidence some call history, Tom Coyne and I are merely passing through.
"Passing Through Pittsburgh" by Hilary Masters, from Lessons in Persuasion: Creative Nonfiction/Pittsburgh Connections. Copyright © 2000 by Hilary Masters. Reprinted by permission of the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. TABLE OF CONTENTS | ABOUT THE PROJECT | EVENTS | CNF WEBSITE |
The Greater Pittsburgh phone directory lists 191 numbers under the family name of Coyne, and there must be other households of that name that are not listed or who may not have a telephone. Not exactly in the same league with the Joneses, but yet a sizable Irish colony, which may explain why my grandfather showed up here around 1875 at the age of fifteen, his first stop on a trek toward a citizenship that always seemed to elude him.
I raise the window blind and, still drugged with sleep, look out on a scene that Turner could have painted. Violent explosions of color, of whiteness. Billowing clouds of fire blossom from the dark to metastasize into orange and scarlet plumes. The sun is coming apart. I am terrified and fascinated all at once, as it is always awesome to look into the center of power. My mind’s camera was permanently marked with this image of the mills turning common ore into iron and steel, making something new out of the ordinary: an immense, catastrophic breakdown and integration.
But what looks smooth to me this morning on Monterey Street was actually a disjointed record. We make such narratives to iron out the discontinuity of our lives, give tumbled events a cause and effect--even a reason they may not have possessed, and the endeavor comforts us as it helps us believe that we were, in some way, in charge of the past when it was happening; a condescension as much as folly. This behavior, though, might explain the myopic affection we have for the past, worked into sweet nostalgia like a piece of leather until it is soft and supple to our self-appraisals. Worked on until past events come out right. We prefer unity in these revisions, everything under one roof, so to speak, and the piecemeal configurations of the original smoothed over. Card players illustrated by Norman Rockwell pleasure this nostalgia; the same game pictured by Cezanne scares the hell out of us.
