Sacred Ground

Three years ago I went to Pittsburgh to help move my sister out of her apartment. It was a very hot Memorial Day weekend. But as she finally had some relative leisure time after cramming for a one year masters, we indulged in touristy excursions between packing up boxes and awaiting her fiancé with the U-Haul. We both like history so we spent a good part of an afternoon in the air-conditioned galleries learning about the centuries of Pittsburgh’s life.

A lot to cram into one afternoon, sure. But I was struck by the exhibits on immigration… and how they were the workers… and essential component to the main steel industry. My memory is a little rusty on the coordination of the displays, but eventually we walked from pictures of ethnic families into descriptions of the mills and factories. And unions.

I have to admit the subject of unions makes my brain go fuzzy. It was a part of American History I never really understood. That it was this chance for the poor, poor, poor working class to speak up and fight for… rights. Things we take for granted. Eight hour work days. Child labor laws. Lunch breaks. But it was also corrupt and … as dastardly evil as the powers against which they fought. Except then I remember seeing an exhibit about one strike in particular. A strike I vaguely recollect having to memorize in class. Where people died. Lots of people died. The army came in… and it was just God awful. The details are still rusty now … maybe it’s because, it was just so… sad. The Homestead Strike. Yes, I had to remind myself with a Google search.

Anyway, the next day we filled up that U-Haul. And it was hot. And the apartment was empty. So we decided to go out to dinner and sit in a movie theater to keep cool. We drove to some crazy shopping plaza outside the city. Every franchise restaurant and uber super chain store seemed to nest in the expanse of parking lot. Decorated with these HUGE smokestacks. I thought it was both awesome and garish the way they lit up against the night sky.

Turns out the smokestacks are a memorial to that strike. Like I said there was an awesomeness to it… and yet… a really twisted irony that everything else was a commercial interest that utilized minimum wage labor to sell products manufactured outside of the US by underpaid workers. Good to know the martyrdom of those strikers resonates in the present. That the sacred ground on which those people died for a fair wage is celebrated with brick chimneys and Walmart.

But, one could argue the total inverse of that. That it is a tribute by employing so many people of Pittsburgh and its surrounding towns. That the shopping plaza supplies the population with an income and utilizes all those coffee breaks and guaranteed wages for which the union gave their lives. Maybe those people who died would have liked having a Cheesecake Factory where they once toiled in a soot-ridden steel factory. I don’t know.

And… I can’t speak for them. I can’t, much though I think Walmart is the devil, decide that a 20something mill worker would have thought it a betrayal to his ideals that people buy cheap sneakers made in China where he died. I can’t claim myself morally superior because I snivel my nose at the giant horses of P.F. Changs where blood stained the ground a century before.

I suppose it is better for that spot to thrive, to have people leave a movie theater happy, cooled down from a day of moving furniture down three flights of stairs, and content to be in one another’s company than for it to be a ghostly wreckage of brick, rotting as the brown grass tangles through the cracks in the pavement. Something that brings people together and doesn’t drive them apart.

And trivial as it seems with Old Navy staring at them, those smokestacks are a pretty obvious reminder to the fact that it isn’t just a shopping mall. And… if it wasn’t for the movie theater, I wouldn’t have ever seen them. Or made myself think about those who died there. And why.