Bellevue Train Museum

We were driving around on our way to the caverns, which took us miraculously through Downtown Bellevue. Anytime I head west, I end up in Bellevue. It is a magnet to the secret rural desires of my martini stained soul. We found the church that was on sale last year for 70,000. It was a haunted house the first time I saw it. It's a daycare now. But it's still next to the Mad River & NKP Railroad Museum. I haven't been inside the museum yet. Instead we pulled over and I wandered around the empty railway cars. It was a rainy Sunday, and no one was around, though there was a muted light coming from inside one of the offices. Inside was probably some middle aged volunteer, playing Bejeweled and drinking Diet Coke, waiting for anyone in rustbelt Ohio who might still be interested in the trains that have crisscrossed their towns for a hundred years.

In an alternate world, I would have bought that church, and lived in it, with the engines and cabooses in my backyard.

I have no bent to engineering or mechanics. I have no idea how these things work. But I love the sounds they make, and I love the motion of them. If it is big and metal and moves, I want to be around it. Remember Richard Scarry's Cars, Trucks, and Things That Go? And the pickle truck accident? Remember seeing the impossible giant tankers waiting on the Cuyahoga river, filling up with salt and gravel and mountains of unknown rock? Remember the engine they have at COSI, which moves back and forth on a track in a room, while kids (you, me) sit in the engine room full of power?



One day when I was very young, pre-teen, I took the train from my grandmother's house in Philadelphia to New York. And I took it back. It was the best part of the day, rocking back and forth on the dirty beige upholstery, watching generic landscape swish by. It's best to move very fast, wherever you are going. Its best to be sealed up in steel, careening through air, untouchable.



Remember The Boxcar children?


I'm in a funny kind of mood. I want to be safe wherever I am, and the only things that make me feel that way these days are monoliths of rock, brick, metal, wood. I want to be in structured large spaces, alone. It's like autumn starts to sniff around and the bear in me starts looking for a flat cold floor to stretch out on, where the weather becomes only a muted noise banging on the walls. Old things that have proven their stamina already. It's hard to be lonely in places like that, for me anyway.

Once upon a time people and children and farm animals and clothing and coal and liquor and tin cans and guns and tractors and radios and vegetables and letters traveled in these boxes across the plains and mountains, on slick steel rails, bouncing back and forth and up and down. And they came to Ohio, where they stopped. Then someone stuck them in a park, where local kids could love them when they were little and throw rocks at them when they grew up.

More trains here.

Pittsburgh potatoes are better than Cleveland potatoes

Even though I went to New York the weekend before, I was so antsy by the time Friday came around, I could barely sleep. I had to go somewhere, anywhere, there not here, but I was also broke and couldn't take time off work again. My bank account was mocking me, my car was just as nervously anxious (I could tell by the way the wheels shook), and I faced the prospect of having to actually clean my house. So I took off to that closest of all Midwest destinations, Pittsburgh.

Oh Pittsburgh, hated sister city of Cleveland! How we've mocked you, even as we watched you suffer the same ravages and economic pitfalls as us, as we watched steel plant it's heel in your (our) faces and grind it into the curb, and your city devolve into a dirty swath of unemployed citizens and dive bars....oh wait, you got tech? Like, tech as in jobs? And successful riverfront development? Screw you Pittsburgh.

For some reason, all of my pictures of Pittsburgh came out crooked, leaning precariously to the left or the right. Maybe because I was always on a hill? When I was little, my family used to drive to Latrobe all the time to visit Grandma, through Pittsburgh. I loved those Pennsylvania hills. I still look at them and see sleeping dinosaur giants. When you finally come up on Pittsburgh from the highway, it's like emerging into the Emerald City, or Xanadu. You know, hidden, secreted away from prying eyes. Only with concrete and asphalt. I love the row houses up and down the valley, and the churches! Pittsburgh has some of the best churches. Good old school Catholic sentries, sitting like confused monoliths in their little tight neighborhood corners.

Pittsburgh wins, Cleveland. Sorry, but the whole city is cleaner and nicer now. There's more people walking around. Their bridges are painted pretty colors, and that riverfront development, while full of obnoxious places I would never go, is vibrant and busy and obviously making money.

For breakfast on Sunday I ended up in the Strip District, which is a neighborhood of repurposed warehouses, restaurants, and specialty shops. Which, for the record, is like Tremont, Coventry, and Downtown combined. I recognize there are probably Pittsburghians that hate this place. But it's exactly what we should have done with the Flats. Commercial instead of residential. I went to Pamela's, stood in line for the appropriate amount of time, and ran across the street for a moment after mass let out to look at this gorgeous church interior. Which does not, by the way, belong to the church above. There are so many great churches! Then I ran back, got my table, and nearly died eating Lyonnaise Hash Browns. Like, of ecstasy. The best hash browns I have ever had, bar none.

Later, a trip to the Andy Warhol museum. Just to, you know, cement my hatred of Warhol, Basquiat, and everyone else associated with that hipster jerk fest. Alright, I like the Velvet Underground a lot. And I like the room where I just sit on a couch listening to them and watching dumb movies. And I loved the room of floating silver balloons. But I realized that I just wish Warhol had been less about other people and more about his own craziness, something that came to me while staring at the long run of Elvis prints. I mean, here was an ugly little boy who idolized Hollywood and grew up screenprinting faces of dead stars over and over again. I like him when he focuses only on his own craziness and less on impressing other douchebags. Also, the taxidermy thing is disturbing. I am simultaneously incredibly jealous and incredibly angry at someone who would keep a stuffed lion and a stuffed Great Dane.


Later, my aimless drive around turned into an impromptu Pittsburgh cemetery tour. I ended up in like 5 of them. The biggest was Allegheny, better named "My obelisk is bigger than your obelisk" town.

And then there was this creepy steeple thing in the middle of another cemetery that turned out to be an ill disguised cell phone tower. I kid you not. Verizon, what the hell is with the cross on top?
Finally, before starting that miraculously short drive home, I went searching for the Pittsburgh ghetto. Something that didn't seem like it should be so elusive. But though I found some small areas in the hills that were run down, I couldn't quite seem to get to the real bad parts. Some guy told me to go to Homewood, which for sure had lots of boarded up houses and abandoned lots. But it just didn't seem like the "bad" neighborhood. I don't know. Maybe I don't believe in bad neighborhoods anymore.


I definitely believe in pink dinosaur piggy banks. Definitely.

My favorite part of Pittsburgh is and always will be the tunnels. I love that they have them at all. I love that traffic gets super slow right before them, like drivers are afraid to go through them, and then completely clears inside the tunnel. I love that its always nighttime in there. Maybe the sole reason Cleveland is losing the Midwest Jewel competition is our lack of mountains. On the other hand, we do have an inland sea. It should count for something. Maybe we should work on a tunnel to Canada through the salt mines.