A Paris, of an Appalachia (or How to Go to Hell)
On a hypnotherapist's couch in Pittsburgh:
Close your eyes. Maybe a jade owl asked already, but intone it again:
"Where are you from?"
Never mind the grammarian's lure, and move the question into the next register:
"D'où viens-tu ?"
The owl dings in assent. You've done it! You've asked Paris from Pittsburgh. It's a promenade down the one-way street of buttery caché. When you open your eyes, all your stinks will be cheese; all your street-dwelling poor, savant et sauvage; all your sour grapes, dry with legs. Now, keep your eyes closed.
Pittsburgh is hell with its eyes closed. I mean this two ways: when Pittsburgh refuses to see the world, the city becomes unbearably precious and self-congratulating; and when Pittsburgh refuses to see itself, it takes as truth each insult it has ever received. In the first case, everything about us is unique. You can’t find an unceremonious cellar toilet, the “Pittsburgh potty,” anywhere else—certainly not anywhere else with sodden mill workers and risks of flooding. Every word we ever utter is utterly unique—wholly unlike the speech of Baltimore, Cleveland, and Wheeling. We work so hard, and have overcome so much, unlike “rustbelt” cities from here to the Rockies. Why study the Silk Road when the true nexus of commerce and culture is located between our three rivers?
Then the hypnotist’s watch slips down the curve and up to the opposite apex. We’re an old beer can along a freeway, or an iPhone 3 charging cable. We’re used up and out-of-step with the world. Coal left us. Steel left us. There’s no culture, no transit, no food, no fashion, no nothing. We’re a town that just won’t, can’t get it together. In these moments, we beg large corporations to see us: Google, Duolingo, Amazon. Strained celebration or self-slander—it’s hell to fear your own forgetting, either way you go about being afraid.
Pittsburgh’s association with hell was established in 1866 when an Atlantic Monthly writer described the smog-drenched city as "hell with the lid taken off." In diner lingo, “Pittsburgh” is short-hand for a menu item that has been burnt or charred. Convention insists that I tell you about the sooty daylight hours of decades gone by, and all the work we’ve done to polish away the dirt. Breathable industry was our name, but we’ve undergone a change. Call us something else now. That’s not a trans reference. Trans transformations have an element of vitality to them, but branding can’t stand the risk vitality requires.
When it’s not Pittsburgh, it's the Steel City or Iron City. It's the City of Champions, based on a sports thing I refuse to know. It's also the Paris of Appalachia—a septuple of syllables that sort of hangs, unclear and burning in the air, when you hear it. What, after all, is Appalachia doing so close to Paris? Appalachia is a poorly-defined tract, with legally-set but oft-contested boundaries touching things from Nina Simone's goddamned Mississippi to the state of Nina Hagen's Lieblingsplatz: New York. Pittsburgh sits awkwardly along the Mason-Dixon line, spoons out of tune.
The first printed use of "Paris of Appalachia" dates to 1989. In an entry for The Wall Street Journal Book of Chief Executive Style, David Diamond writes, "When it comes to eating, no one has ever called this burgh the 'Paris of Appalachia.'" Diamond’s blurb focuses on the Duquesne Club—a private club in the city's downtown, and the only eating establishment Diamond found worth naming. The “Paris of” comparison is an old trick. In 1705, Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac suggested that Fort Pontchartrain—known nowadays as Detroit—might become the Paris of the New World. As a result, Detroit has been known at times as the Paris of the West or Midwest. Asheville markets itself as the Paris of the South, and San Francisco competes with Detroit to be Paris of the West.
Diamond’s visit to Pittsburgh was likely prompted four years earlier, when famed mapmaking company Rand McNally named Pittsburgh the most livable city in the United States. Rand McNally's scoring system weighed “good” qualities (symphonies, available housing stock, schools) against “bad” ones (crime, high taxes, pollution). As the rank writers explain, Pittsburgh's position in the listing was more the result of very favorable scores in the “bad” column, and less the result of favorable scores in the “good” column. Compared to other cities, Pittsburgh might not have as much to offer, but it was less likely to take it all away from you. The ranking started an onslaught of derisive responses from other cities—everything from remarks about the Pittsburgh's "savage" climate [1] to descriptions of Pittsburghers as "poor, benighted, soot-covered blighters." [2]
Some locals contested the title as well. Waning industry had left many Pittsburghers unemployed and struggling. In a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Press, Leonard J. McCreary wrote that the Rand McNally esteem was unfair because it sidestepped the immense suffering of those who were out-of-work or under-employed. [3] There was a cruelty, McCreary suggested, to calling Pittsburgh “most livable” while so many struggled to live at all. Things in the city were bad enough that documentarians had descended, and local filmmakers warned of possible poverty exploitation films. [4] When Diamond un-called this place the Paris of Appalachia, many—here and elsewhere—would have sided with him.
If any of the maybe-lachians of this "Paris" found the new appellation worth repeating through the 1990s, I can find no trace of it. The term “Paris of Appalachia” doesn't appear again in print until 2003, when local bluegrass radio host Bruce Mountjoy and now-retired Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Brian O'Neill began using the term on their platforms. O’Neill, whose 2009 monograph bears the name Paris of Appalachia, gives two attributions for the nickname: 1) he'd heard Mountjoy use it (and Mountjoy himself claims credit for inventing the term) [5]; 2) it was a snide, "coffee-shop put-down" he’d heard others use. In the second case, "Paris of Appalachia" is to be said in the way you might say "Oh! Look at all the diamonds!" upon entering Claire's or the Piercing Pagoda. Pittsburgh is a bit of a put-on. It's the fancy-pants, artsy-fartsy, la-di-da cousin you run into at family picnics, always trying to pretend he didn't grow up in a trailer park.
Where do I live now, you ask? Oh! J'habite Pittsburgh, comme on dit “Strasbourg.”
Beyond this continent, another cousin: Beirut, the Lebanese capital which has long been titled "Paris of the Middle East." Ala Tannir, who grew up in Beirut, says the term remains active in everyday parlance. Taxi drivers will drop "Paris of the Middle East" mid-ride and mid-rant as they tell you what's gone wrong in the country and how it should be fixed. In this mind-warping configuration, Beirut is a Paris past, and has no present, not as long as Paris is kept waiting. "Paris of the Middle East" is a carrot plucked from the mirepoix and dangled in front of Beirutis. Tannir, the inaugural Curatorial Fellow at the Heinz Architectural Center in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art, opines that Beirut’s image is one made by, sold by, and sold to Western interests. "Paris of the Middle East" isn't a compliment, but a quotidian reminder of colonialism's brutal endeavor to rename, reconceptualize, and reimage places against their inhabitants. Ghassan Moussawi writes that in depictions of Beirut—and Lebanon more generally—we find examples of "fractal Orientalism," a term that describes "nested dichotomies" which complicate a simple East/West/Other understanding of a place. Beirut is a Paris, but of the Middle East. It has no say in its Paris-ness, and its cultural caché is borrowed. And it is in the Middle East, but it is a Paris—Levantine but speaking French. All the “good” Arab qualities, with the “bad” qualities held in abeyance. It is denied the fullness of either image. Its goodness is a surprise and a limit. Beyond: desert and chaos. There is, after all, no “Beirut of Western Europe.”
The parallels between Pittsburgh and Beirut are few, particularly in this moment when Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and displacement of millions of Gazans, brings to mind bloody military conflicts between Israel and Lebanon. Still, we might glimpse, in these Parisian nicknames, ways each clarifies the other. Like Beirut, Pittsburgh is poised on the edge of less-densely populated areas. The old joke goes: “In Pennsylvania, there's Philly and Pittsburgh. In between? Alabama.” The implication is that Pittsburgh is an oasis of urban culture before you encounter wild people lost to time. (Troublingly, for those who would distinguish Pittsburgh from Alabama, our city used to be called the "Birmingham of the North.") Also like Beirut, Pittsburgh is a "Paris of" somewhere you don't expect to find a Paris. While Appalachia may not be subject to the Orientalism that troubles the Middle East, Appalachia lacks the tourist-marketing-fueled appeal of the American "Sunbelt," Southwest, or SoCal. It’s a place for losing your job and your teeth. "Paris of the Middle East" might be vicious in a way that "Paris of Appalachia" is not, but both refer to Parises of a place that shouldn't have a Paris. The Middle East is dangerous and Appalachia is poor, and vice-versa. The name is trying to fix us.
Appalachia, after all, needs fixed. In 1965, President Johnson signed the Appalachian Regional Development Act (ARDA), creating an interstate governmental body tasked with distributing funds to some of the nation’s poorest counties. Though the string of member states roughly follows the Appalachian mountains, inclusion in or exclusion from the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) zone was a political matter, not a geographic one. Northern Mississippi’s inclusion, for instance, is a tale of anti-Black racism and forgery. As Justin Randolph explains, white Mississippi politicos were aggravated by Office of Economic Opportunity funding made available to Black Mississippi communities—funding they could neither control nor easily co-opt. The same men, seeking ARC funding they could control, drew imaginary mountains on a map of Northern Mississippi counties. The map made its way to Washington and, even after the deceit was revealed, convinced members of Congress to make Mississippi Appalachian for the first time. A cooked-up map and an Old South greed combined to push Northern Mississippi uphill and into Appalachia, even as Black Mississippians opposed the move.
The ARC, as a solution for Appalachian poverty, functioned on the premise that Appalachia’s problem came from within, not without. Appalachian author Harry M. Caudill disagreed with this, and called the ARDA a “grim hoax.” According to Caudill, the money ARC directed towards new roads and hospitals distracted from the real problem: the region’s “wealth—and it is almost immeasurable—is in ‘foreign’ ownership,” with the “foreigners” being corporations in the American Northeast and Midwest. Industrial giants elsewhere held deeds to massive tracts of Appalachian land and mineral resources. Appalachians might work to extract and sell those resources, but the actual profits of sale ended up outside the region.
Caudill’s comments foreshadowed “internal colony theory”—the theory that Appalachia might be best understood as a colony within the boundaries of the imperial nation state. Resources are extracted for energy, industry, and trade, but the people who live along the coal mines and corporate scars are denied access to the resulting wealth. Mary Anglin writes that internal colony theory appeals because it shifts the blame for Appalachia’s troubles from Appalachians themselves (characterized as lazy, dim, and shifty) to external forces keeping Appalachia from its potential success. However, this shift is accompanied by a sort of “militant particularism” which takes a snapshot of these oppressive power relations and positions it as the story of Appalachia. The bearded white coal miner with a vaguely non-northern accent, living hand to mouth, body broken open like a coal seam, becomes Appalachia’s avatar. Necessarily, this setup renders illegible the stories of Black Appalachians—both a condition for the creation of the white Appalachian avatar, and a powerful result that makes “colony” sound incautious in this context. The term also risks obscuring the political insecurity and material deprivation to which “external” colonized territories, such as Puerto Rico, are treated. Anglin goes on to argue that, in economic terms, Appalachia isn’t all that unique. It’s “one space of poverty and disenfranchisement among many.” Recontextualizing Appalachia as a data point rather than a whole story, “in turn, fosters appreciation and curiosity about modes of solidarity that might traverse different social and geographic settings.” In other words, Appalachia is not a colony in the way that Lebanon was once a colony, but the commonalities between our experiences of Parisian exploitation are worth considering.
That sounds very just and politically prudent, but left unanswered is a crucial question: If Pittsburgh is the Paris of Appalachia, and Appalachia is a place of (not-quite colonial) exploitation, what does it mean to be the Paris of such a place? Put another way, what can the nickname “Paris of Appalachia” help us see about Pittsburgh and its relationship to the region?
Caudill’s early rejoinder against the ARC gives us a starting point for considering these questions. He cites the 1957 sale of eastern Kentucky land as an example of exploitation from elsewhere, a sale which profited Pittsburgh’s own Pittsburgh-Consolidation Coal Corporation nearly $12 million. Elsewhere in his essay, Caudill notes that “immense” tracts of Appalachian land (and subsequent mineral rights) were held by five other companies, two of which—United States Steel and Jones & Laughlin—were headquartered in Pittsburgh. He calls this the hidden “face of Appalachian affluence”—those very select few counties within the ARC who had, in the 1950s, successful manufacturing sectors and notable wealth. It’s unclear if Caudill saw Pittsburgh as one of those hidden Appalachian faces, or as an exploiter from elsewhere, but it’s undeniable that Pittsburgh benefitted from the problems of elsewhere Appalachia.
Pittsburgh’s place in the “Appalachian concept” is generally unclear. Prior to the signing of ARDA, Pennsylvania Democratic Senator Joseph S. Clark argued in 1964 that Pittsburgh simply didn’t need ARC funding. The city had more than enough in resources and funds. That same year, John L. Sweeney, then executive director of the Appalachian Regional Commission, visited Pittsburgh to convince residents that “we’re all in the same leaky canoe.” Pittsburgh was Appalachia and Appalachia had problems, Sweeney warned. In the coming decades, Pittsburgh was sometimes seen as part of the Appalachian dialect region, and at other times Pittsburgh sent Catholic youths to Appalachia on humanitarian missions. [6] Some have joked that Appalachian kids don’t get diplomas at graduation—they get road maps to places north or west or south, places like Pittsburgh. Less than ten years ago, New York Times writer Annie Lowrey described Appalachia as "the smudge of the country between New Orleans and Pittsburgh." We aren’t Appalachia, but its limit. Or are we? We are, aren’t we?
Asking if Pittsburgh is Appalachian never leads to a satisfying answer but, returns us to the meaning of the question. “Paris of Appalachia” implies the question’s irreducibility. Like “Paris of the Middle East,” it’s a term that points out two things at once: we’re not really Paris, and we’re not undeniably Appalachian. We’re stuck with memories of old success, and our politicians continually dangle the promise of renewed glory in front of us. Pittsburgh is exploited, but—and perhaps this can be said for any city—extracts with abandon from rural areas elsewhere, including Appalachia. Pittsburgh is where you go to get away from the dirt roads that Pittsburgh, in part, has kept unpaved. Within our city are those who keep the roads dirt, who dangle the carrot, and there are those whose families are still reeling from the end of industry. There are those with stories of homelessness and hunger, dispossessed by the same forces Caudhill describes.
“Paris of Appalachia” is a stacking of unsteady terms. And what is Paris, anyway? Surely the phrase is meant to place the city as a cultural capital of the world and its fashions—that thing Walter Benjamin said “prescribed the ritual by which the fetish Commodity wished to be worshipped” An appetite for novelty keeps the fetishes coming, and fashion tells us how to move along them. In the nineteenth century, Paris was the capital of this dance. Surely when Mountjoy, O’Neill and others call Pittsburgh the “Paris of Appalachia,” they’re thinking of this sort of pinnacle. They’re not thinking of a city where garbage collectors are sometimes on strike, or ISIL massacres visitors to the Bataclan. They’re not envisioning a Paris full of questions about the legacy of colonialism in North Africa, the visibility of religion in public spaces, or the relationships between linguistic conservationism and fascism. They’re envisioning a jewel—polished, new, and entirely imaginary. They’re dreaming up the Paris they hope to inhabit.
If Pittsburgh is a Paris, the Paris of Appalachia, then it’s a Paris in the way any city is: a big place extracting from a small place, collecting those for whom life has been made unlivable in small places. And then, it’s a Paris of Appalachia—a Paris that shouldn’t be because Pittsburgh, in comparison to New York or Los Angeles, is a “small place” where things have fallen apart and gone wrong. It’s a convergence of wealth and its spectacular wasting; of poverty and its deep hole-ridden pockets. It’s a good place to worship what’s new, on the horizon, not yet here, never to arrive. Waiting is hell.
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[1] “For Real? Pittsburgh?,” The Dispatch, March 1, 1985.
[2] Jeff Simon, “One of the Benefits of Living Here on the American Frontier Is That You Can Watch ‘Moonlighting’ without Missing ‘Remington Steele!,’” The Buffalo News, March 17, 1985.
[3] McCreary, Leonard J. “Letter to the Editor - Shadow on No. 1.” Pittsburgh Press, May 23, 1985.
[4] Hopey, Dan. “Plight of Unemployed in Pittsburgh Subject of Filmmakers Documentary.” The Vindicator, March 27, 1985.
[5] Personal correspondence.
[6] Washington Observer-Reporter. “Work, No Pay — Some Vacation!” August 13, 1983.