I don’t know if I was odd in some way or all children are super-sensitive to their environments; however, I was always made deeply curious by the small, not-to-be-explained gaps in the geography of Pittsburgh. All of the those sets of staircases which allowed people to climb up the hills to their homes; the area that Michael Chabon wrote about, describing the Lost Neighborhood which sat at the “bottom of Pittsburgh.” He was referring to the sudden, sharply steep ravine that cuts through Oakland, with its several tiny streets and bus stop.
Where we lived, in the extreme area of “south of Forbes,” we were almost a part of the next neighboring community. It was a long walk to Allderdice from there–I can attest to that. However, there existed a triangle of our own there, the streets–Ludwick, Shady Avenue Extention, and Landview Street–forming a roughly shaped triangle. This was my world.
One day, before I was in kindergarten, my mother put my baby sister into the stroller and we took a walk along Ludwick Street. We stopped and my mother showed me this narrow walkway that connected Ludwick with Saline Street. If you walked down there from Ludwick you would find a church made of stone; on the church grounds was a very small, gloomy cemetery. I was later to learn that this place was one of the earliest areas to be settled. You could access Brown’s Mill Road which led you straight to the Monongahela, a prime place for boats bringing badly needed supplies.
This narrow walkway intrigued me and soon I was obsessed by it, a condition in which I find myself quite often. Never, in all the years we lived there, did I see people in that place. You could look into peoples’ backyards but no people were in those yards, ever. This was the same thing as the church–it stood silent and stony. With my imagination working in over-drive I soon concluded that the place was haunted by ghosts. To intensify this, a strange flower grew in the narrow strip of earth along that path–it was called Bleeding Heart. My mother showed it to me and told me it was called that because a heavy red heart-shaped petal hung down from the plant. Haunted? For sure.
When I visited there as an adult I found that people had put a street sign there and I think they called the walkway “Federal Hill Street” or something like that. I was enraged. How dare strangers come to my private place and make up a fancy name for it?
Ah well. At least the tiny path still existed and it wasn’t torn up by a bulldozer. Upon reading this I’m getting “deja vue” because I may have posted this story sometime in the past. For that I apologize and also apologize for any misspelling of names and places. One last fact that I learned from reading about early Pittsburgh; the path was called Federal Hill Street because that whole area was once an estate belonging to one person. This estate was called Federal Hill.
lgmwriting 