“Paris! Appalachia!” (or How to Live Where You Are)
I was never punk. I never had it in me to do the punk things. A safety pin in the ear and a wallet chain on the hip come to mind, but I don’t even know if those are punk things. And, despite what one drag queen in this city might tell you, I never spray-painted names across the walls of a gay bar bathroom. All my graffiti was done in liquid eyeliner. Waterproof.
Graffiti long precedes punk (unsure about liquid eyeliner). Humans have written messages of ire, attachment, malcontent, and sexual daring across walls since antiquity. Textual analyses of painted words could, perhaps, help us understand graffiti better but, in his 1973 essay on graffiti, psychiatrist Harvey D. Lomas redirects our attention to a long-ignored element: the wall. Why, given the broadened range of tools for inscribing and disseminating messages, do we keep chucking paint up on these vertical surfaces? What does the wall mean?
Lomas interprets walls as symbols of separation, alienation, and defense. A wall says “no,” much as a parent says “no.” A wall demarcates property owned, exclusive and exclusionary. Walls physicalize wished-for limits on who can move where, when, and how. The phrase “Build the Wall,” the Great Wall of China, and the West Bank Barrier all come to mind, their own ideological boundaries criss-crossing one another. Walls, too, are reminders of the systems of inside/outside, retention/expulsion which guide “appropriate” and “healthy” behavior in society. Don’t shit on the street; do take the money out of your wallet and pay the cashier. Walls are serious. “The use of a wall for drawing pictures or making jokes is to point out that the wall itself is no joke, and no art gallery, and no artistic creation, but rather a necessity to keep the inside in and the outside out,” Lomas writes. In other words, graffiti responds to an intolerable refusal already uttered. The wall says “no,” and we say, “fuck you.” And then maybe we say, “You’re not my real Paris!” Door slam.
The real Paris is elsewhere, maybe, and until it gets closer, we muddle through satellite locations, like Pittsburgh—the Paris of Appalachia. The nickname “Paris of Appalachia,” tells us many things about where we are, in language, geography, and time. For instance, “Paris of Appalachia” indicates Pittsburgh as a capital of extraction. Here, labor is extracted from local bodies and minerals are extracted from soils. From here, the order goes out to extract the same things from other, smaller, more undeniably Appalachian places. It’s a capital of accumulation, too: of surplus value generated through natural resources to the south, and of toxic chemicals in residents’ bodies. Here, taking and giving are ambiguous actions.
“Paris of Appalachia” additionally recalls Paris’ prestige as a hub of capitalist-consumerist newness, and the—at times violent—positioning of French as a lingua franca. In the first word of the phrase, there is a sonic measure of distance between Paris, rhyming with “berry,” and Paris, rhyming with “rare miss.” Pittsburgh is also distant from the Paris of the East, Beirut, struck by Israeli bombs with American approval. Just next door to Paris, Appalachia sounds off. Appalachia, by some reckoning, is a name that, if said just right, might finally represent the region correctly and solve longstanding socioeconomic issues. The vowels of Appalachia are tester circuits, indicating who’s a faulty speaker for the region, who can or cannot be the voice of this swath of land. The whole phrase functions like a pair of scissors, bringing sharp elements close, cutting into Pittsburgh with contradicting forces. “Paris of Appalachia” is the name for precisely where we aren’t, where no one is anymore, not yet. Then and now, separated by a wall.
By disconnecting then from now, loss can be seen as temporary and necessary, the pretext for future winnings. For Pittsburgh locals, this claim should seem neither insightful nor bold. Rick Sebak, incontrovertibly the city’s most beloved filmmaker, made a whole documentary about Pittsburgh’s love of loss: Things That Aren’t There Anymore. Things informally tours interviewees’ recollections about what made Pittsburgh great 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Public television stations across the country copied Things’ format soon after the film’s debut in 1990, testifying to schmaltzy longings’ general market appeal.
Sebak closes Things That Aren’t There Anymore with a journey, in hypothetical memory only, to Forbes Field—a long-gone baseball field in the city’s Oakland neighborhood. After six decades of use, the Field was demolished in 1971. What remains of Forbes Field is a strip of brick wall next to the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Business. Green ivy struggles along its masonry. This sort of wall no longer keeps ticket holders in or out, no longer marks when the fly of a ball becomes exceptional. Instead, it divides space into before and after. Before, there was a park here and this patch of brick was part of something larger. After, this patch of brick is the something larger. It’s a memorial to spectacle, physicality, and the populace. Sebak’s Things fantasy begins at this memorial wall and moves back in time: leaving the (mostly gone) ball park, walking to the (now gone) Isaly’s Dairy, and catching an (almost gone) streetcar home. “Town used to be different […] Pittsburgh’s not the city it used to be,” he says in voiceover. When one is a Parisian of Appalachia, looking to the past is a practice of forming local identity. Comedians joke that Pittsburghers give directions based on what used to be—demolished Pizza Huts, paved-over amusement parks. We’re useless to out-of-towners, in a way, with all our guidance encrypted by nostalgia, maybe melancholia.
There once was a Pittsburgh where Forbes Field was open, jobs were plentiful, and things were something called ‘good.’ The loss of all this, whether real or spectral, has been traumatic to the psyche of the city (if we may talk of such a thing). As writer Virginia Montanez puts it, “I always take it back to the steel mills, and the steel industry collapse. I think that’s why our culture is holding on to the past because it was just ripped away from us so quickly.”
‘Our culture is holding onto the past.’ Montanez’s words resemble those of Kim Ward, Pennsylvania’s current State Senate President Pro Tempore, who recently said, “This is Pittsburgh. We’re the Steelers. We make steel.” Montanez’s and Wards’ slogans are almost mimetic to that of Delia Lennon-Winstead, mayor of Braddock borough: “U.S. Steel is Braddock, and Braddock is U.S. Steel.” Lennon-Winstead is holding on to what’s being—maybe—ripped away again, as Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel becomes Tokyo-based Nippon Steel.
Pittsburgh’s most prosperous, illustrious days are gone. We breathe easier for it. The ongoing departure of steel may anguish the city, broadly speaking, but it has been undeniably good for local air quality. In 2023, U.S. Steel announced that it would be reducing activity at the nearby Clairton Coke Works. The reduced activity resulted in Pittsburgh’s air quality grade being raised from F to C. One plant, one partial closure, two grade points. Mayor Lennon-Winstead is perhaps right to say that U.S. Steel is Braddock and, by extension, the metropolitan area of Pittsburgh. U.S. Steel is the chromium, nickel, and lead they release; we are the chromium, nickel, and lead we accumulate in our bodies. If we are still steel, it is in the least desirable of ways. Pittsburgh has made its image, an image carved from coal, molded in glass, cast in iron, and especially formed from steel. It’s durable. It has endured. We endure it. The image of Pittsburgh as a steel town, as a Paris of industry and labor, is a memorial. A solidified memory. It is a point to which Pittsburghers return, nostalgic and melancholic (now, I’m sure), to remember who the city was and who they hope to be again someday.
Names chiseled into a wall form a memorial; spray painted, they form ‘tags.’ Taggers generally adopt pseudonyms for public inscription, according to psychotherapist Lindsey Othen-Price. These new names, she argues, are an experiment in idealized identity. For adolescents caught between identifying with their families, and forming individual selfhoods in wider society, identity anxiety is the feeling qu’il faut. Graffiti tags are an attempt to get the anxiety out, to imagine a version of themselves beyond pubescent tensions. On the page, I might be Dani, but on a wall I could be Witchhands, Several Jaw, Loud Amnesia.
“It is as if the parts of the self that cause anxiety can be split off and projected out, […] and only when they fit together and feel safe are they reintrojected.” If this all sounds a bit clinical, consider that Othen-Price is reframing “bad teens” as “teens doing their best at an impossible task”—becoming functional, social persons. For those of us who are pathologized for questioning, even moving against, this disciplining system, we know that the task can never be completed successfully, and whether we ought to become functional, social persons is an open question. Those sorts of question are of no use when you’re fifteen, though. At fifteen, you’re stuck in a miserable transition, for the first time, but maybe not for the last time, and no one can quite reach inside your experience, talk you through it. So you talk out, write out your name, your new name, just for you, across walls.
Memorial walls, like the one at the heart of Sebak’s fantasy, are always telling us what to do. War memorials do this by focusing on those who died, rather than directly questioning the warmongering politicians who brought on death. (How different might things be if war memorials depicted presidents burned alive by survivors of the slain?) The memorial wall asserts a version of memory: whose deaths can and cannot be mourned, which events were ‘glorious battles’ and which were massacres. Visitors run their fingers over inscriptions, take pencil rubbings of loved ones’ names. In the way that a memorial wall authorizes certain memories, so, too the memory of Pittsburgh’s losses (of steel, of population, of economic power) seem to authorize a particular way of remembering the city’s past. Pittsburgh was on its way to greatness until, as Montanez puts it, “it was just ripped away from us.” Here, the passive voice cushions the possibility that Pittsburgh, maybe, hates industry for having scrambled the city’s plans. It’s hard to hate someone you still need; someone who’s still leaving you.
“Paris of Appalachia” isn’t quite the name chiseled into this authorized memory but instead, I’m going to suggest, a tag spray painted on its surface. Borrowing from Othen-Price, the tag is not the everyday name of the writer, but something split-off, idealized. It’s an attempt at a new identity, a sort of superhero self, which is capable of resolving the conflicts of the present moment. These fantastical re-namings are attempts to conjure, from inside oneself, a necessary savior. The conflict at my present location is this: Pittsburgh is an ordinary city with memories of being something more: a capital of exploitation that was, itself, exploited. It’s a place that has every right to hate industry, to despise the neoliberal, globalized economy, but courts its presence all the same. In this context, read “Paris of Appalachia” as the name of an imagined, victorious Pittsburgh which has conquered the indeterminacy of a city long past its peak.
Pittsburgh struggles to let go of steel, mistakes that for still being in the grip of industry. Paris of Appalachia is so cool, though, so successful and self-assured. For her, steel is just a mourned memory. (I would forego the tradition of referring to cities as ‘her,’ but the best image I have of a ‘cool teen’ is Judy Funnie, from the 1990s cartoon Doug. She does wear a beret, after all.) If things become good again, if this becomes once again a Paris, there’s no reason to remember things that aren’t there anymore. The wall and all its authority, the weight of remembering Pittsburgh, of holding onto steel and streetcars and baseball fields and regional delis, will be obliterated. We will no longer ask self-injurious questions about what we did wrong, where we went wrong. The pain of being Appalachian, of being seen as out-of-time and exploitable, will become worth it once we’re Paris.
Like many adolescent idealizations, this fantasy borrows terms it doesn’t yet know are unstable. Grown-ups don’t get everything they want; Paris is also an ordinary city. By calling into comparison where Pittsburgh thinks it was, and where it is now, “Paris of Appalachia” re-wounds the city’s psyche, cuts back in. After all, doesn’t the teen, in fantasizing about getting beyond the parents, thereby stabilize them as benchmarks? “Paris of Appalachia” is a term created to mock an intolerable, but inescapable, memory. At the same time, I think the term admits the structuring power of that same oppressive memory, admits the external benchmarks of Paris and Appalachia.
As an idealization, “Paris of Appalachia” also fails to reckon with realities of this place. It cannot be ignored that the ‘glory days’ which haunt so many Pittsburghers were also decades of legally-enshrined anti-Black segregation. Jerry Dickinson, a Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh, describes this Paris as “American’s apartheid city.” While acknowledging that the discrete legal structures which characterized South African apartheid are not present in Pittsburgh law, Dickinson argues that the outcomes of anti-Black racism in the city are horrifically equivalent. Black children in Pittsburgh are statistically more likely to grow up in poverty, compared to their counterparts in similar cities. Poverty is a significant issue for a third of Black women in Pittsburgh. Health outcomes are also disproportionately negative for Black residents, which Dickinson describes as “a trademark of apartheid.”
Powerfully, Dickinson brings into question the glittering specificity to which the city lays claim: “It is the growth of extreme racial disparities existing within Pittsburgh’s segregated landscape that puts the city in a league of its own compared to other American cities.” What sets Pittsburgh apart, then, is not something it once lost, but something it ought to lose. “Paris” echoes again, but here as a capital of brutal colonial violence across every inhabited continent. Redressing the injustices Dickinson describes is an ethical necessity for Pittsburgh. Perhaps equally necessary, or part of the same, is the rejection of Paris, of exceptionalism, in the city’s conception of itself. Pittsburgh is an ordinary city with a peculiar positioning: ambivalently Appalachian, ambiguously Mid-Atlantic, suspiciously much more Midwestern than some might admit. I would argue that the pleasurable specificity which draws many to move here is the result of human difference and not a guaranteed quality of the place. That specificity is lost when pleasure in difference is replaced by unbalanced hatred and paranoid provincialism.
There is no Paris of Appalachia. There are no flights to that city, except in anxious daydreams. Instead, there is everyday Pittsburgh. Artists Ivette Spradlin and Lenore Thomas give us an example of what that city looks like, marked out across walls, in their ongoing collaboration, “Buff.” The pair create unique photographic prints centered on buffs—nondescript, vaguely geometrical patches of paint applied to cover up graffiti. Buffs are painted by property owners (or hired companies) to avoid government-imposed penalties for ‘permitting’ graffiti on their premises. Spradlin photographs the ‘buffed’ wall and Thomas screen prints on, sews into, or collages across the print. The resulting work plays formally with arrangement in space, the condensing and breaking of patterns, and the delicate interplay of urban color and texture. “Buff” finds its impulse along uncelebrated surfaces which, despite not being the aseptic and prepackaged face of a Milkshake Factory, are not particularly ‘in decay’—supermarket loading bays, for instance. This is not the ruin porn of every post-industrial city on the continent, with color-drained DSLR images of abandoned sanitariums, closed parochial schools, or boarded-up barber shops. The surfaces on which Spradlin and Thomas elaborate are maintained, and well-suited to what they do: store materials, receive shipments, provide employee parking. They’re simply not the street-facing facade.
“Buff” relies on a trained aptitude for improvising into the rhyme of a thing. This isn’t art which aims to speak to everyone all at once, bringing us all together into a big art family. The viewer is expected to bring a curiosity about, and perhaps an identification with, less-lionized quotidian sights. As Thomas puts it, “You have to have a space to want to understand.” Thomas and Spradlin don’t guarantee viewers will understand. The beauty they identify in this city is not the architectural grandeur funded by steel robber barons, or city-sanctioned ‘aerosol art,’ but the interplay of the wall and the graffiti; the law and rejection of the law; the memorial and the refusal to pay homage to a memory. Where Lomas asks after the wall, Spradlin and Thomas ask after color and texture. The property owner’s buff attempts to conceal a discontent (expressed by a tagger) and return the wall (and the law) back to a presupposed state. Spradlin and Thomas read and respond to this pattern of action, focusing on an unconscious visual patterning taking place where we’re not supposed to look—inside the failure to demarcate inside/outside, before/after. Stealing the word for themselves, the collaboration entitled “Buff” goes back to the graffitied wall, looks slowly and deeply, makes another kind of inscription that says not “Fuck you” or “Paris of Appalachia” but something else we’re still learning to see.
Some viewers buff over Thomas’ contributions, believing that the textures and colors she adds are part of the building photographed by Spradlin. (I would suggest that Spradlin is probably in a parallel situation, thanks to a pervasive belief that the camera ‘does the work.’) Such viewers inadvertently return authority to the wall and its anonymized assembler. This not only discounts the artists’ physical efforts, but their conversational investments as well. Both Spradlin and Thomas identify conversation, between them and through their disparate memories of place, as a central component of their shared process. Talking and laughing take up time that doesn’t efficiently pour into a final product.
In conversation with me, Spradlin gives Pittsburgh another moniker: City of Triangles. The landmass at the center of Pittsburgh’s three rivers is often depicted as a triangle, but here she’s referring to the odd conjunctures of building materials which characterize so many houses around the city. A Victorian wrap-around porch connected to an amalgamation of expensive and cheap 20th century building products. Hodge-podge housing. This is not unique to Pittsburgh, but occurs in any American city where people might be wealthy enough to own a home, to make occasional modifications, but never wealthy enough to renovate everything all at once. And perhaps, because it’s specific without being exceptional, the “City of Triangles” is a better nickname than the “Paris of Appalachia.” It pays no homage to the memorial wall, sidesteps its archival authority. “City of Triangles” describes rather than prescribes. It’s another pair of scissors, but the blades are different. They cut in, opening up something other than old memories. We involve ourselves in the triangular space of language, like Spradlin and Thomas respond to ordinary spaces. We involve ourselves in Pittsburgh of here and now, too. We leave Paris to the Parisians.