Well, look what the cat dragged in!
What have I been up to since last we chatted in January? Do you ever get so overwhelmed with the amount of things you have to do and the very little time you have to do them that instead of doing them you just go into your living room to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling, marinating in your panic like a fatty pot roast, and your brain is like, “Girl, this isn’t helping matters, in fact, this is exactly wh—,” to which you say out loud, “Bitch, shut up,” and then your confused dogs look at you and then at each other like, “I know this bitch didn’t just call us bitches,” and then after 15 minutes you finally go back into your office to work until the next round of panic comes?
That was basically me from January until two weeks ago. I went into the idea of teaching the Pittsburgh History course at Pitt-Osher thinking the time commitment wouldn’t be too disruptive to my already stupid schedule. What I failed to take into account is just how very extra I am.
I really need a pillow with, “Reminder: You are very extra” embroidered on it as a daily reminder that nothing I do is ever done without excessive amounts of EXTRA.
In my head, I was like, “Girl, you are gonna start on January 3 in preparation for this class. You will spend ten days preparing each of the five two-hour classes. This will be plenty of time to have the entire class planned out before the semester begins.” Neat story. Instead I spent nearly every day, seven days a week from 7:30 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. engaged in mostly class research and prep interrupted by the daily detours to grad school, column research and writing, book club visits, meetings, single motherhood etc. On the first day of class I only had the first class fully ready to go and most of the second. I was far far behind and the panic was setting in even more.
Not only was I engaged in intense research to ensure I was teaching accurate Pittsburgh history, I discovered I teach visually. Therefore, for each class I created a presentation with about 70 or so slides that made the history I was teaching come alive with visuals/graphs/photos/ documents/primary sources, etc.
For instance, one of my favorites was this photo taken at the National Guard encampment on the hill above Homestead after the strike battle in 1892, showing the condemnation of Greene County guardsman William Iams after he was heard celebrating the attempted assassination of H.C. Frick. He was hung by his thumbs as punishment for refusing to apologize, which is evident in his defiant stance here:
Strong “do your worst to my thumbs” energy.
Another favorite was a whole series of slides that illustrated how Andrew Carnegie’s words were often contradicted by actions. Here is just one:
Long story not at all short: I managed to get the work done, tracing the history of Pittsburgh from the days of the Lenape, Shawnee and Iroquois right up until the start of World War II. Now, as I write this, I am no longer in a panic on my living room floor and I feel like myself again after a long long time of having … not.
So let’s get back into things here and see how my time shakes out each week to get my newsletter back into some kind of regular schedule.
1. An arm, a leg, and toss a kidney in while you’re at it
If in your head regular Kennywood tickets cost $36, you haven’t been paying attention. This time last year, they were $70. This year? $75.
Pittsburghers everywhere are screaming at their screens right now, IT COST FIVE DOLLARS FOR A WHOLE BOOK OF TICKETS BACK IN THE 80s AMERICA IS SO BROKEN!
When faced with outcry over their rising ticket prices, Kennywood is always quick to point out that those willing and able to do the work to find discounted tickets from schools and groups will pay much less than $75, plus they regularly have sales; therefore, anyone entering Kennywood having paid $75 for their ticket should be judged as harshly as those unfortunate idiots who ever entered Bed, Bath & Beyond without a $10 coupon, or who enter Kohl’s without a 30% off plus bonus Kohl’s Cash offer tucked in their pocket.*
Now, I’m all for Kennywood making their money and if they think this is the way to do it, fine. Make the people jump through the hoops and do the research to find affordable tickets. And if some are willing to pay $75, well, let the market bear what the market will bear. I personally will not spend more than $40 for a Kennywood ticket because that’s what it is worth to me. For $75, I’d rather buy one and a half pies at a Lawrenceville bakery. Hey-oh!
I kid. I’d never spend that much on a pie either unless the pie was going to be spoon-fed to me by Jaromir Jagr while he handed me cash.
At any rate, I got curious about the history of the standard non-discounted Kennywood all-day ticket price, often called the Funday Pass. I wondered if people were upset over mere inflation, and me being extra, I spent way too much time hunting down the prices for the last 20 years. Here’s a graph I made based on what I found:
What this graph shows is pretty self-explanatory, but a few notes: the green dot is when Kennywood was sold. The blue dot is when Kennywood largely moved to variable pricing which made it much harder for people to know how much a regular ticket was because the papers no longer printed ticket prices and would instead just tell readers to visit the Kennywood website. I was able to figure out the regular prices for those post-blue-dot years thanks to people whining about it on Twitter each year. Thank you, whiners! Of which I am one.
The red dot? That’s when the complaints really started coming in about the state of Kennywood, how dirty it was, how often the rides were broken and how understaffed it was leading to irregular hours and sporadically closed games, food stands, and rides. Then there’s a pandemic gap and after that we shoot for the moon and here we are, sometimes paying $75 just to get in the park to ride, with our food, drinks and souvenirs being extra.
If my math is correct, and let’s be honest, I’m not good at math because it isn’t real, this chart represents a 159% price increase during a time when the cumulative inflation rose about 70%. Had the prices kept with inflation, it would be around a $50 ticket today. So yeah, you’re not crazy. Prices did jump drastically and the reason it snuck up on you is because of the switch to variable pricing which made it much harder to know just how much a ticket was on the regular. You wouldn’t have realilzed it unless you needed to buy a ticket, couldn’t find a discount one, and went to the website to purchase them only to suddenly turn into an actual slow-motion WTF meme.
You there, about to email me, of course I know Kennywood is trying to push more people to purchasing season tickets. Of course I know they’ve made improvements. They added Thomas Town and the whole Steelers section, plus their 4-D experience or whatever. Like I said, the market will bear what the market will bear. And what the market has borne is that we will do the work to try to find affordable tickets in lieu of Kennywood just making their ticket pricing system a bit less chaotic with huge pricing ranges that mean on any one day a random rider could have spent $0 or $20 or $36 or $75 on one ticket.
So that’s point one: tickets to Kennywood got real real pricy over the last four years, probably to pay for the new stuff. Problem is, so much of the new stuff just. doesn’t. work. I mean, the Black Widow died for like a decade, I think? Then that Sky Coaster or whatever it’s called near the entrance broke for a thousand years. Then Thomas kept jumping his tracks or some shit until the tracks were rebuilt (“Cinders and ashes, Sir Topham Hatt is gonna burn this place down!”). And now?
Well, days before opening for the first time this season, Kennywood had a big announcement. The Steel Curtain, the newest coaster in the park, will be closed for the entire year as it undergoes an overhaul to make it not die dramatically every third trip just because a passing bird looked at it funny.
Fixing a drama-prone temperamental major ride? Good. Announcing its full-season closure days before park opening? Bad for those who already shelled out for season tickets expecting the ride would be functional. And thus, a class action lawsuit has been filed against Kennywood for this very thing.
The lawsuit claims the park withheld the information about the coaster closure intentionally, stating in part:
“It is believed, and therefore averred, that the Defendant knew well in advance... that it would shut down the Steel Curtain for the 2024 season, and withheld this information from season pass purchasers as to not lose season pass customers, or, in the alternative, as not to offer a discount on season passes due to the unavailability of the Steel Curtain.”
The suit accuses the defendants of unjust enrichment and committing several violations under the Pennsylvania Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Law.
I am normally not a litigious person, but I have to say that there is validity to this lawsuit. There’s no way Kennywood didn’t know months ago that the Steel Curtain wouldn’t open this season. They should have announced it when they knew and then also announced what they would do re: ticket prices or perks to atone.
Instead they handled it this way and it’s just very sketchy. Hopefully from here on out they will start making better decisions not just about how they communicate but also in how they structure their pricing strategy compared to places like Cedar Point and Disney while keeping in mind they are neither of those places.
Also, while researching this, I stumbled upon this classified ad from 2007:
I see you your wedding ring and I raise you the time my hearing aid flew out of my ear on the Thunderbolt. At least you could still hear after you lost the literal physical representation of your love.
*Listen, I bought something at Kohl’s once without a coupon and the cashier looked at me like my face was melting off Ark of the Covenant-style right there in front of her.
2. In which I piss off a bunch of you. You’ll live. Don’t email me. I mean it. God.
The Christopher Columbus statue in Schenley is back in the news! As you know, we’ve been dealing with the fate of this Frank Vittor-designed and sculpted statue for years now. It’s coming down! It’s staying! It’s defaced! It’s covered in a tarp! The tarp blew away because tarps aren’t permanent and we’ve been stuck in this legal quagmire for years!
The last news was that a judge ruled the statue could come down. But now, that’s on hold thanks to another ruling that says the case against its removal can move forward.
Personally, my opinion is take it down and move it somewhere it can be viewed in its proper historical context. Leaving it in Schenley is sure to invite repeated vandalism or attempts to topple it, and before you know it, Wendy Bell is rolling up in her minivan waving a sawed-off shotgun out the window all, “THIS IS AMERICA! I WILL SHOOT YOU IF YOU VANDALIZE THAT STATUE OF A MAN WHO NEVER SET FOOT IN AMERICA! GOD BLESS THE USA! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
I’m sharing this news with you just so I can share two particular quotes. The first from the president of the Italian Sons and Daughters of America:
"Christopher Columbus is very symbolic of all of the sacrifices and contributions that Italian-Americans have made, both to the city of Pittsburgh, to the state of Pennsylvania, and to our country. We want that part of our history respected and preserved, just as we respect the history of every other group and the contributions that they have made to this country."
You’re going to be so mad at me, some of you, but knowing what I know as a historian about Columbus’ life and journey, one could replace “Christopher Columbus” with “Robert E. Lee” and “Italian-Americans” with “Confederates” and you basically have the same argument people make about not tearing down Lee statues. At least in Columbus’ case we have a major turning point for Western civilization, but still, drawing a link all the way from his actions over 500 years ago to modern-day Pittsburgh-based Italian-Americans is a bit of a stretch, even if it is symbolic. Hell, his ties to Italy are incredibly loose, considering Italy as a modern nation didn’t exist until 1861, and considering he worked and sailed out of Portugal, and considering he sailed for and died in Spain, and considering historians continue to debate whether or not he was actually from Genoa or if he was perhaps really Portuguese. Don’t email me. I said what I said. Read a book.
The second quote comes from Mayor Gainey after he was asked if his administration would continue the fight Peduto started to have the statue removed from that spot. His response:
"We'll be talking about that this week, and we'll have some answers for you next week. I'm not going to be premature to speak about it right now. I'll sit down with my team and discover exactly what we want to do and how we're going to do it. So that is something that is still coming. We just got the decision, we're massaging the decision. We will meet with that. We will meet with the correct personnel and come up with an answer that best benefits the city."
Would sir like some vinaigrette for sir’s word salad? “Massaging the decision” is a Mad Lib if I’ve ever heard one. I mean … [-ing verb] the [noun], right?
Anyway, remove the statue already. Or since it is the work of a historically famous Pittsburgh artist, maybe we can compromise and have etched along the base of the statue in huge letters, “This is a ridiculously oversized statue of a deeply flawed but hella brave man who might have been born in the area of today’s Italy. In the process of getting lost on a long voyage, he did some truly terrible and murderous shit in the name of God while on his way to accidentally changing the course of world history. If you vandalize this statue, Wendy Bell will come screeching out of hell, or Point Breeze, with a gun and she will shoot you on sight.”
Who can argue with that compromise?? I oughta be mayor.
3. Pictures of the Pittsburgh wedding of the century found!
Oh my God. Historygasm.
Okay, longtime readers (first-time-callers), do you remember when I wrote about the 1927 Pittsburgh wedding of Sarah Cordelia Mellon and Alan Magee Scaife (parents of deceased Trib publisher Richard Scaife and eccentric xenophobic philanthropist Cordelia Mellon Scaife)? When I shared the newspaper accounts that described some INSANE details that would make today’s wedding-themed Pinterest boards explode? Like a two-floor wedding reception tent built on the grounds of the 65-room R.B. Mellon mansion in Shadyside (currently Mellon Park)? Like rooms of gifts? Like gold bird cages with live birds? Remember how upset I was that there were no photographs of this madness? I FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS! I stumbled on these within the University of Pittsburgh Library System’s digital archives. They have the entire wedding album digitized and look!
Here’s the temporary “pavilion” (right) built next to the mansion (left):
How does a mansion with 65 rooms not have enough room for a wedding reception?? I will never understand it. Here’s an unfinished proof of the wedding party:
I’m obsessed with literally everything in this photograph including the fact that it appears smiling was illegal. Looking into the pavilion before the tables were placed:
You must go see all the pictures of the reception and the gifts, including a picture of a truly bonkers wedding party table with enough flowers and candles to make even Kim Kardashian go, “Khloe, it’s a bit muchhhhh.” Your mission, find the picture that shows the birdcages.
I’m so happy. Let’s hug.
4. Random n’at!
Short and sometimes sweet but always short and never an ad:
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have developed an FDA-approved bedside concussion blood test that requires neither lab nor centrifuge to deliver results. Big!
The child who caught Andrew McCutchen’s 300th home run ball is a leukemia patient who is set to finish his treatment in February of 2025. Love this for him!
Andy Warhol designed textiles and I did not know. They are on display in Scotland currently. Very cool.
My TEDxPittsburgh talk is on YouTube now! Go watch because I refuse to!
I’ll be moderating the Pittsburgh History panel at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books on May 11 with two of my favorite local writers, Ed Simon of Rust magazine and author of several books, and Zachary Brodt, archivist and author of a book about Pittsburgh’s involvement in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. You can attend for free if you register here. Fun!
My latest column for Pittsburgh Magazine (for which I’ve been nominated for a Golden Quill award!) is about the Pittsburgh heiress who jilted an Italian count to marry a regular Pittsburgher, her childhood friend. I cover the media circus that ensued, how she lived counter to gender norms, and how her life was full of devastating losses. I love Elizabeth Howe. Just look at this badass golfer:
Go read about her! A snippet:
As Pittsburgh’s richest eligible woman, Elizabeth seemed in no hurry to settle down, instead remaining devoted to the cause of increasing the popularity of outdoor recreation in the city. Thus in September 1904, when her engagement to Count Carlo de Cini of Rome — a grandnephew of Pope Leo XIII — was announced, a “thrill of excitement” rippled through Pittsburgh. One particular headline might actually be a Hallmark movie title: “To Wed a Count.”
5. That’s all!
That’s it for this first edition back after my hiatus. We will see what next week brings! For now, be kind! Don’t litter! Go read peer-reviewed history about Christopher Columbus! And be sure to get out there and enjoy our city now that the weather is turning. You can also check out my new band, [Verb] the [Noun]. We are HEAVY on the audience participation. “GIVE ME A GERUND, A NOUN AND A CONJUNCTION AND LET’S ROCK!”
