Bridges

Michael Chabon, writing in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

And there is grace in the fierce survival, down into this time of homogeneity and gentrification, of the Pittsburgh I remember, with its secret language and wildly manifest accent, its hill-and-hollow, mom-and-pop, ethnic crazy-quilt neighborhoods. As much as any other place in the country, Pittsburgh -- Polish, Italian, African, Jewish, Ukrainian, Scots-Irish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbian and, more recently, Indian and Chinese, among others -- embodies and, more importantly, preserves, the spirit of "Out of many, one." The neighborhoods are still there, separated from each other by chasms and ridges and rivers; still linked, stitched up, bound together by 446 bridges.

It's in those bridges that the hope and the greatness of Pittsburgh lie. Though they were built to serve the needs of commerce and industry, other fundamental human needs -- for communication, for connection, for free passage through the world -- also drove their construction. As with courage, a beautifully engineered bridge such as Pittsburgh's Smithfield Street Bridge can be defined as grace under pressure, reconciling distances and bearing heavy loads with elegance and steel. Pittsburghers live in their neighborhoods, but they rely on the bridges they have built to teach them how to live together in their city, through a transfer of shared humanity, a mutual reaching toward the opposite shore.