I visited my wife’s maternal grandmother and aunt this weekend, in icy and miserably arranged Pittsburgh. For those lucky enough never to have braved its roads, the city and the surrounding areas are a cruel joke played on cars; built on hills, marked by blind turns and potholes larger than your backseat, and maintained by a seemingly indifferent public works crew, the passages aren’t so much a means of getting from A to B as a test of how badly you really want to get there

          Luckily, Pittsburgh is one of those old decaying cities that actually contains quite a few destinations worthy of the life-changing/ending rides.* If you want to know what a mixture of greed, desire for immortality and just the slightest hint of guilt at a rapacious nature that knows no bounds looks like, go to the Steel City and see the marvels built by Carnegie, Mellon, Frick and their brethren. Fantastic museums, grand public libraries and expansive parks still breathtaking nearly a century later dot the landscape and beckon you across the frozen tundra that is 376, 279, and every other godforsaken road in and around that city.

          My wife’s grandmother lives in one of the more historic areas of Pittsburgh, depending on how one likes to remember history, or geography for that matter. Homestead, Pennsylvania may not be within the city limits of Pittsburgh, which seem largely like suggestions carved out of giant stone hills rather than sensible distinctions, but the landmasses containing Homestead and Pittsburgh are separated by a minor bridge named after a guy who is, at best, the second most famous person with his not-so-common last name,** so I count them as one. More importantly, Homestead was home to one of the more infamous acts in this country’s long and tortured history with organized labor.

          In 1892, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick announced that skilled workers in the steel and coke plants that dominated Homestead would need to take pay reductions. This didn’t go over so well with the union and the workers refused to sign the new contract. For whatever reason, Frick decided it was probably time to call in the Pinkertons and hired hundreds of what history books always refer to as “armed toughs.” I like that they steer clear of the word “thugs,” “goons,” or “John Chaney’s last guy on the bench.” It gives the books a sense of evenhandedness.

          Anyway, the Pinkertons hired to break the worker’s strike did just that, coming up in barges and engaging the locals and workers in an armed battle right there on the banks of the Monongahela, which killed about a dozen and injured many more. As a result of this “Battle of Homestead”, unions in the steel plants were broken throughout most of the country, and organized labor (on whose modern form the author is relatively agnostic, in case you were wondering) was set back a few decades.

          So Homestead does not have the happiest of pasts, and the lower part of the town speaks to its rather depressing present. Street after street of previously bustling businesses lies dormant, outlining a ghost town without the tumbling tumbleweeds but making up for that with more than its fair share of town drunks. The population reached 20,000 in the ‘20s, and was still in double digit thousands as of WWII when the government ramped up the steel operations to aid in the war effort. By the time of the 2000 census, the population was just over 3,500. If ever there was a study in city death, it was Homestead.

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          However, when you look at the big picture, you tend to miss the smaller one, and there were countless great stories to come out of Homestead. And it’s appropriate that one of the best stories to come from the past presents a literal bridge to the future.

          Bridges seem to dominate the Pittsburgh-area experience (as one might expect of a city built on three separate rivers) and Homestead is no different. Connected at various points to the “mainland,” the center of the ‘Stead is serviced by a bridge named after what has come to be Homestead’s fondest memory: The Homestead Grays.**** Having come together from a previous sandlot team on the verge of breaking up, the Grays became Homestead’s team in 1912, and entertained the community (white and black alike) almost ceaselessly until 1950. From 1935, when they joined the Negro National League, until 1948 when the league folded, the Grays won ten National League pennants (including nine in a row from ’37-’45) and three Negro League World Series.

          Some of the most recognizable names in black baseball history starred for the Grays, from Buck Leonard, Ray Brown and Cool Papa Bell during their Negro League stint, to Oscar Charleston, Martin Dihigo and Smokey Joe Williams in the years before the League was established and the Grays joined. Of course, the most famous name associated with the Grays is Josh Gibson, who along with Leonard formed the Ruth-Gehrig of the Negro Leagues, with the Yankees-like success to match. Sure, these Grays played in Pittsburgh-proper, and scheduled a very large number of their “home” matches in Washington, D.C., but at heart and over their heart, they were Homestead’s team. When times were getting tough around the mills, the locals could at least count on a winning home team to temporarily lift their spirits.*****

          They were a constant high in a place where the only other constants were rising unemployment, population flight and tensions between labor and management. There is something to be said for that, and said again and again. That quality is what makes sports worthwhile, and just a little bit magical.

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          The bridge named after the Grays has a few offshoots on its way to the city. One leads off to the relatively new Waterfront, a regular smorgasbord of big box stores and chain restaurants where the myth of suburban beauty went to die. Whatever its aesthetics, the commercial center has brought life back to Homestead and the population has begun to rebound. There are a few reminders of Homestead’s past, as various smokestacks were left behind, and the roads are still scarred by railroad tracks that used to service three separate lines carrying supplies to and steel away from the mills. Trains still pass this way, though far less often and with only the significance given them by the holiday shoppers as a hundred-car train passes through and stops traffic cold. The world has moved on, and Homestead and Pittsburgh are trying to catch up. As they did for so many years in the middle of the past century, the Grays are doing their best to help.

* Compare, for instance, my “hometown” of Baltimore. A city on the same life cycle as Pittsburgh (an industrial city in a post-industrial world), there are very few bits of culture worth going out of your way for. Luckily, the streets are orthogonal, flat with few hills, and kept clean on what seems at least a semi-regular basis. Thus, it’s easy to get from second-rate tourist trap to second-rate tourist trap. Or to Camden Yards, still beautiful after all these years. 

** Jeannette Rankin was our country’s first congresswoman, and the only person to vote against World War II.*** George Rankin, Jr., is, as best as I can tell, a Scot who came to Pennsylvania and served as a State Senator for 4 years during the Great Depression. For this, and hopefully something else I have overlooked and our loyal readership can provide, he has a bridge named after him.

*** She was a pacifist and had also voted against World War I (at GREAT cost to herself and her reputation, no less), so it’s not like she was some sort of Nazi-loving fascist, ok?

**** That is, if the person telling you which bridge to take doesn’t refer to it as the “Homestead High-Level Bridge” because they’ve lived in the area forever, and the name change in 2002 hasn’t yet registered in their upper chillbox.

***** It’s Christmastime, so gift suggestions abound. Mine: Buy a book, ANY book, about the Negro Leagues or its players, and read it. There are countless lists out there, suggesting anything from the classics (Only the Ball Was White) to the recent brilliance (The Soul of the Game), but I’ve found that almost any book about the League will be more than worth your time.