Musings on the Muses of Place
First published: September 16, 2024. Posted here for archival purposes.
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on. Once a week, usually on a Monday, I’ll have something new.
Today’s installment is about cities, and it’s about one city – Pittsburgh – where I live. I have lots to say and share about cities generally, past, present, and future; talking about cities in broad terms is the sort of thing that economists and urban planners and cultural theorists and institutional researchers (ahem) often do. But rather than starting with airy theories and then seeing whether they pan out on the ground (as I did, say, here), I start here with a view from below.
I have a list. It’s a list that I first assembled during the first Spring of the pandemic, in 2020, as a way to put boredom to productive use. It is an inelegantly formatted “Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Hall of Fame,” and you can find the whole thing right here. As I say right up front, “This is one Pittsburgh-based law professor‘s effort to document the best, most influential, and/or most entertaining and provocative forms of Pittsburgh-focused intellectual property — copyright-protected works of authorship; patented inventions; trademarks and service marks; and trade secrets and confidential information — of the last 100-plus years.”
There are songs. Novels. Plays. Photographs. Devices. Films and television shows. Logos and slogans. Special secret sauces that on closer inspection aren’t quite so special or so secret after all. These are products of the mind, materialized and documented in the different ways that formal intellectual property law demands. Click around; it’s a fun, mostly nostalgia-driven ride.
In most respects, the list is not just a list; it is merely a list, and only a list. I didn’t create the list in order to make an argument or to help someone else turn the list into something useful, or an object of study, or critique.
Inevitably, though, that very idea creeps in. Are there stories in the list, stories about the roles of arts and material culture in making a city what it is and what it is not, in documenting changes over time at different scales? Stories about inclusion and exclusion. Stories about loss and about celebration. Stories about heritage; stories about novelty. Stories about what came before and about what might come next. A list isn’t just a list after all. A list may be a way of gathering the elements of a local cosmos.
The premise that local art and science shape a city’s imagined identity – mythos and demos combined, perhaps – and that art and science are shaped in return, is not exactly novel. But is there something new here? A lot of commentary on cities and material culture focuses on buildings, and a lot of it on public art. Many cities have a song, or had a song: Paris, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Some have iconic, community-defining buildings, or public sculpture: the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Capitol in Washington, D.C., the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sydney Opera House. It’s not as common, I think, to tackle the sweep of a city’s culture as evidence of something interesting – perhaps about how people who live there or have affection for the place imagine their shared identities and purposes.
I call my list a “Hall of Fame” with tongue firmly in cheek, but I am serious at the same time. I do teach intellectual property law; I’ve been teaching it here in Pittsburgh for all of my 25 years here; and I’m pretty conversant with the flows and ebbs of inventiveness and creation over Pittsburgh’s most recent century. As a native Californian, with roots in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have been fascinated for many years by the many small and large differences between my original home and my adopted one. Looking backward, between my own casual cultural knowledge and some careful excavation, these are the key art works and inventions that came from Pittsburgh, or came from Pittsburghers, or came about as reflections on Pittsburgh.
The premise that local art and science shape a city’s imagined identity – mythos and demos combined, perhaps – and that art and science are shaped in return, is not exactly novel. A lot of commentary on that point focuses on buildings, and some of it on public art. A lot of cities have a song, or had a song: Paris, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Some have iconic, community-defining buildings, or public sculpture: the Eiffel Tower, the Statute of Liberty, the Capitol in Washington, D.C., the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sydney Opera House. It’s not as common, I think, to tackle the sweep of a city’s culture as evidence of something interesting and possibly important about how people who live there or have affection for the place imagine their shared identity.
My list doesn’t include buildings, mostly because buildings as such are not copyrightable works (or were not, until “architectural works” were added to the US Copyright Act in 1990), and partly because Pittsburgh doesn’t have a distinctive or iconic building as a reference point. Pittsburgh has its share of famous architecture, undoubtedly the most celebrated of which is Fallingwater, located roughly an hour outside of the city and which was built by the Kaufmann family, pillars of Pittsburgh Downtown retail. But no one could argue, not plausibly at least, that Fallingwater somehow communicates anything other than the idiosyncratic visions and values of its owners and its architect. Fallingwater is part of Pittsburgh’s history and culture, but if anything communicates “Pittsburgh” about the city’s or region’s architecture, it is the modesty of the rows of small, old houses that decorate the region’s hills combined with the aggressively “green” approaches to contemporary construction that we see in new Pittsburgh buildings of many sorts.
And while I have included the omnipresent Terrible Towel (the subject of a surprising number of trademark registrations and the calling card of Pittsburgh Steelers fans worldwide) – homage to the Terrible Towel is something of a requirement of Pittsburgh citizenship – I should point out the dissonance between widespread public association of Pittsburgh with the phrase “the Steel City,” on the one hand, and the fact that few of the entries in my “Hall of Fame” have much to do with steel. As a label describing what Pittsburgh “is,” the “Steel City” motto is now long out of date. “Steel City” today is a nod to the region’s early- and mid-20th century industrial power and to the thousands of steel retirees and families still living in Western Pennsylvania. “Steel City” really signals Pittsburgh’s past greatness. Now, the label is more myth than reality. Yet nothing has come along to displace it, as “Steel City” once displaced “Iron City.” In the 1970s, for a moment Pittsburgh was the “City of Champions,” recognizing a World Series title and four Super Bowl wins. Once in a while, usually when something goes wrong, Pittsburgh reminds the world that it might be known as the “City of Bridges.”
Occasional efforts to re-brand Pittsburgh have died the ignoble death owed to transparent efforts at urban propagandizing. During the 1940s and 1950s, local business and government elites rewrote the planning playbook in Pittsburgh in an effort to retain and attract new industrial investment. They branded their efforts the “Pittsburgh Renaissance,” and the phrase stuck; few today remember that the “Renaissance” – such a romantic, unthreatening name! – was primarily if not solely an effort to put profits over people. Pittsburghers won’t be fooled again. Local promoters seized on the Wall Street Journal’s christening Pittsburgh “Roboburgh” in 1999, owing to the strength of robotics research aligned with Carnegie Mellon University. In the community as a whole, that phrase never stuck.
If Pittsburgh and Pittsburghers are looking for a new identity or identities, ones that resonate historically as well as prospectively, perhaps the worlds of art and science tell different, authentic stories? Or different versions of the same stories? Perhaps some of both?
I’ll leave it to anyone who wants to pick up this idea on that note, either by weaving stories about Pittsburgh based on my lists, or extensions to my lists, or to borrow the list-becomes-myth theme that I’ve shared here and apply it to their own city or region.