BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

Wow.

It makes me cringe to watch workers tear apart steel girder buildings without wearing any helmets or anything.

It has Vic Cianca (the dancing traffic cop) and everything!

http://lifeinwesternpa.org/vic.asp

There is some really cool footage of him and Jennifer Beale in Flashdance. I know it's on Youtube somewhere, but I'm not gonna sit through 2 hours of dreck (with about 90 seconds of excellent "biking in Pittsburgh" shots) to find it.

Oh! Here it is. From 8:50 to the end of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq9iySqEiU0

Mick

wow... well, at least we got point state park out of the deal?

at least we got point state park out of the deal

This is true. And a nice place it is too.

Still, I find it funny when the guy says that people realized that the "plans had a force behind them and weren't just paper". Yeah, that force is called eminent domain.

Cool to see the old video.

Thankfully many parts of the city still have the original street grid.

i like this line "you park your car yourself, and you pick it up yourself going home. and you go home, going out of town along the new expressway"

I wish I had that guys voice, and the guts to narrate life around me aloud.

"going out of town along the new expressway..." We can mark that as the beginning of the end. I love how they show how successful the expressway is. Fail.

Thanks for finding this!

I love how loudly his chair squeaks when he sits down.

Really profound. "we had traffic jams, so we put in a bigger road and a parking garage"

"it was like rearranging a nightmare"

that vic cianca thing was funny. those streetcars looked so great too. the paint jobs are amazing

Some note on the 50's projects.

1) It wasn't just eminent domain. They had the support of a long list of extremely ruthless, wealthy people and organizations behind them.

Eminent domain is what they are using for, say, the expressway from town up the Mon valley.

2) One of the stated aims at the time was to eliminate some of the racially mixed neighborhoods.

3)They did clear up the air with various county regulations about coal. The air was still pretty dirty, but nothing like it had been before.

4) I'm skeptical about much of what Forester claims, but he says this about being an engineer in the 50's:

"On occasion, I cycled to work, either for fun or to make some social arrangement more convenient. I came to recognize that once I had done so, I was no longer considered fit for promotion."

He was in radically progressive California when he wrote that. In conservative Pittsburgh, if you were not very close to a college campus, an adult on a bicycle would have been viewed, not just as very weird, but probably as actually insane.

Mick