Tony Buba, the Bard of Braddock (PA), is the subject of a retrospective of his documentaries at the Anthology Film Archives in New York. The New York Times explains.
Braddock, for those of you who don’t know Pittsburgh, is a small, working class town just up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh proper. Â It’s the home of the Edgar Thomson Works (a giant steel mill), owned by US Steel and ground zero for the images and rhetoric of Rust Belt Renewal — now popularized and romanticized as “Rust Belt Chic” — courtesy of a Harvard-educated provocateur of a mayor, John Fetterman, and a place in a Levi’s ad campaign a couple of years ago. Rust Belt Chic shines in state-subsidized urban redevelopment plans that put hockey arenas and skyscrapers for law firms and banks in Downtown Pittsburgh, and it beams in Brooklyn-lite neighborhoods like Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville and East Liberty. Â If the Rust Belt is really going to be renewed, however, it needs to be renewed in the old mill towns. Â That’s Braddock.
Tony Buba, his films remind us, was talking about Braddock before talking about Braddock got cool.
I no longer update my blog about Pittsburgh, but reading about Braddock reminds me both why I find Pittsburgh so interesting.  When I spend so much time thinking and writing about IP law — law designed to encourage the production and distribution of new stuff — it’s important to consider why we should spend equal time thinking about when and how to save (and sometimes update) old stuff.