Today, in easier times than those of the explorers on a religious mission and timber men in search of their fortunes, the Pere Marquette is spoken of in hushed tones by those who pursue fly-fishing for sport and amusement, rather than a necessary search for food.
And so, it dawned on me - Pittsburgh is a city of very hard stops.
The 70s were tough for Cleveland. And they were especially tough for the Indians.
To Hughes, America has never achieved its potential. Never reached the supposed promises enumerated in the nation’s founding documents.
As craft beer and other artisan food and beverage industries reckon with their lack of diversity and seek to court new demographics, this posture of reciprocal learning and the empathy and curiosity that go with it can serve as an invitation.
I get sentimental about places, especially forgotten ones like Monarch Park. They’re a bit of a bummer, a bit sobering, a bit sad. But I think it’s a good kind of sadness.
The untamed energy of the show woke something in me. Carmy’s life in Chicago was real. Authentic. Social. I knew that restaurant and those people. How many times had I eaten at a joint like that?
We would laugh so hard in a place not meant for laughter, feel family in a place not meant for home. We had built a brotherhood in a place meant only to be punitive.
She came from a dying Rust Belt town in southeast Ohio, and I came from a famously dying Rust Belt town an hour north of Detroit. We were both oldest children, with the same letter leading our first and last name. Our birthdays were one day apart. And, we both loved Fleetwood Mac.
Why were these guys alive and my dad dead? My dad’s long game wasn’t good.
By now I should understand that when every choice starts to feel like a miscalculation, a mistake, I’m up against forces bigger than myself. Yet I was secretly, irrationally angry at them for succumbing too willingly to death without any burning or raving or raging. If they’d just tried hard enough, I sometimes thought.
Experiencing Danielle Mužina’s paintings at MadKat beside the river and the train tracks in Elizabeth was one of the first times I felt women were the subject of the sentence.