Around the city in 11 hours
If you saw yesterday's page 2 Walkabout column, you met the 90 Neighborhoods Gang, six people, the oldest age 31, who spent 11 hours on a tour that included stops in every city neighborhood on Sunday.
Alex Pazuchanics, 22, came up with the idea and got his parents’ Saturn Vue and five friends — Jennifer Grab, Lauren Stoner, Matt Barron, Adam Shuck and Nathan Mallory — to go along.
Now you can see what they saw. Here’s the link to Matt Barron’s photo chronicle of this urban odyssey. Read descriptions of the tour on Jennifer's blog. And the Twitter hashtag is #PGH90.
It’s a unique one-stop link that provides a total picture of our fair city, with its weeds and graffiti, its dormers and porches, its lonely places, quirky niches and beautiful views.
I was hanging clothes, combing my hound of her undercoat and doing other Sunday things during their tour. Now I wish I had gone with them instead.
When I met up with them in my ‘hood, they had been to 40 and had 50 to go, arriving Downtown, the last stop, at 7.30p. They asked me if I had been to every neighborhood and I was able to honestly say yes, but of a few of them it was kind of like saying you’d been to London when all you did was land and take off from Heathrow Airport.
Some neighborhoods have never summoned me with news. I’ve been through Bon Air, East Carnegie, Chartiers City, Esplen, Banksville and New Homestead but usually it’s been a pass-through, and I didn’t know when I had crossed into a few of them.
To all the other neighborhoods I have gone with purpose.
It’s the happening neighborhoods that make the news, but they all have people who lvoe them. As Alex said when I interviewed him before the trip, just because a place like Fineview doesn’t have a business district doesn’t mean it isn’t worth visiting.
If you live in a relatively obscure or underknown ‘hood, I’d like to know what you think makes it worth visiting. It’s a pain to register to comment, I know, but please indulge me.
And if any of you are planning your own 90 Neighborhoods Tour and have room for one more, I’d like to go along.
