Secret Pittsburgh

I have always been here. I am different and yet the same despite everything else constantly changing. I am three but we three became one and have watched as the world has changed and grown all this time. I am known by all, the people throughout this city speak my names every day. My names, the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela, have all been gifted to me by my people. Specifically, the first people to make a home with me. The first peoples who called this land home. Ohio was given to me from the Iroquois, meaning beautiful river. The Lenape people found me beautiful as well and translated Ohio into their own language, getting Allegheny. I was also given Monongahela by the Lenape which means falling banks. These early peoples gave me the identities that have grown into what I’m seen as today. But as I have grown and existed, these identifiers have resonated differently. Each one has fit me differently throughout time.

My people today are different too. And yet while I have changed, I also continue to be the same. They have all changed in ways that are irreversible. I am ever changing, my fluid body being both steady and rapid and yet I have stayed here. Today I stay a big symbol of the Pittsburghers. I am littered with bridges and am inseparable from the Pittsburgh that is known today. But they rarely think about what it truly means for me to have been such a central part of the city for so long. It is so quickly forgotten that I have been here before Pittsburgh was built up to be what it is today.

Before the Steel City became what, it is today, painted in Black and Gold and set apart from the rest of the world with its own culture that has been built up over time, I was here overseeing the first people to call the land their home. Tribes of indigenous people, like the Lenape and Iroquois and Adena, used this land as their own (Simon). I was given my first forms by these people, in receiving my names from their cultures. I saw these people live in harmony with nature (McGovern). They tended the ground and when they passed, they buried their dead in mounds of earth so the ground could tend to them (Toman). They lived in harmony with me. But as time marched forward all of this changed. The land became unrecognizable, while I did not. The land changed shape, now a city, not a landscape within nature. Buildings sprung up and changed everything, constantly adding more and more. I continued to watch all around me.

From where I sit the buildings stretch practically to the heavens. Nothing looks the same. This is when the land began its transformation into the city of Pittsburgh. And this was dependent on the factories. Hard labor put strain on both the people working and the environment. But money pressed progress forward. Pollution is pumped into me left and right, but the city gets its identity from this industry (McGovern). Steel and iron became synonymous with Pittsburgh and its success. The new people around me spent their lives in these factories, forced to work and spill sludge and waste into me. They disregarded all I’ve stood through and seen because they had no other choice. This period now left me with a new identity, the hardest working river this country had seen. The tagline became synonymous with my Lenape name Monongahela and became interchangeable with the hard work that lined my shores.

And still time goes on. I heal from the pollution, the air clears and my waters purify, but it is a slow process. Time once again pushes forward, and the city and its people are even more unrecognizable. I see these people today, in my present. All I have seen and lived through lead the city to what it is today. My past is so much an active part of my present. As time has gone on I have collected so many identities and memories as I have been shaped by all the people who have found home on my banks. I hear them today call my names out in all sorts of settings. Rediscovering my past brings Ohio and Monongahela to their lips, reflecting on both my past lives of nature and industry. But they also call out to me in moments of happiness and Pittsburgh pride. Throughout the city, on game days, the stadium rings with the sound of the “alleghenee, genec genec, genec”” to support the home team.

Throughout all of Pittsburgh history, from blank land to the well-known city of the present, I flowed. I have been a continuous figure with the privilege to meet people that played drastically different roles in the timeline of the city’s birth. I was lucky enough to exist at the intersection of all of these moments of Pittsburgh and am excited to see what is to come next, both good and bad.

 

Works Cited

Daniels, Jim, et al. From Milltown to Malltown: Poems. Marick Press, 2010.

McGovern, Charles. “#137: Lore of the Rivers of Pittsburgh.” Broadcast 137, WJAS, 17 March 1940, Pittsburgh, Radio Broadcast

Simon, Ed. An Alternative History of Pittsburgh. Belt Publishing, 2021.

Toman, Susie. Rivers of Steel Boat Tour, 2021