Quote Originally Posted by Possegal View Post
I never cease to meet people who have never been to my hometown and yet are certain it is a dirty, ugly steel town. MYTH

TRUTH - Pittsburgh PA is a gorgeous city and a wonderful place to live!! I miss it and wish I could move back there. Also wish I had the legs I had then - legs that could run and bike up all those Pittsburgh hills.
Seriously the mills were all either shut down or had scrubbers installed around the time when my parents were kids. I lived there until I went to college and by the time I left everything was getting to be very nice - we even had problems in the summer with algae bloom in the drinking water because the rivers were finally clean enough for algae to bloom....... (it wasn't harmful, it just tasted a bit nasty until they figured out how to filter it out) As far as I can ever remember the air was always clean in my lifetime. By the time I moved away there was only one working mill left - I think it was a wireworks, if I'm remembering properly. I've heard that most of the sites have been built over with high tech?

It was a great place to grow up. I can't speak for now, but then pretty much no crime beyond the petty stuff (stealing the radio out of your car kind of thing). I even remember laughing my head off watching "COPS" Pittsburgh and the big events of the night were some teenagers trespassing at an abandoned funeral home, some guys shooting craps on a corner and a female cop talking a drunk guy she knew down from a bridge (she had a beautiful south side accent too).

I love Seattle - and in many respects it is actually similar to Pittsburgh, but there are some things that I do miss. Even though Seattle is rather neighborhoody, the areas don't quite have the feeling of little towns the way they do back there. People aren't as openly friendly out here either, which I think is a big contributor to that feeling. I also miss the age of things..... sounds strange, but everything is so new here and not much store is put on preserving the older things we have (buildings especially). I miss the uniqueness a lot - things here are a bit too uniform and modern architecture is so bland. I'll take a a bit shabby and interesting over blah any day.