Domestic Left #74: Made all in a row

The iconic Pittsburgh dwelling is the row house. Usually made of brick, three stories high, with peaked roofs, they are deep and narrow, with their side walls flush against their neighbors. Not quite as narrow as a New Orleans shotgun house, but not much wider either. They stair-step up the South Side Slopes, rise slowly along the gentle inclines of Bloomfield, and crown the ridge of Troy Hill, looking down on the Allegheny River.

And when they are torn down, they leave a distinct pattern of vacancies, like missing teeth. In more gentrified neighborhoods, like the Mexican War Streets just northwest of where I currently live, the empty lots have mostly been appropriated by neighboring homeowners as gardens or garages, but head a bit further north along Brighton Avenue and they become receptacles for empty bottles and discarded drug paraphernalia. In some neighborhoods, and in the formerly industrial boros outside of the city like East Pittsburgh, it is not unusual to see a single row house standing alone on a hillside, the traces of its former neighbors visible on its flanks but nowhere else, often surrounded by thick vegetation eager to reclaim what once was forest.

From 2017 until 2020, I lived in the Bloomfield neighborhood, which was historically Italian. Bloomfield’s row houses are mostly intact, some still in the hands of old Italian-American working-class retirees, many now sold to younger professionals new to the area. My co-worker K and her husband owned one for several years; like many Pittsburgh homes, it had a primitive bathroom in the basement, next to a bulkhead entrance, so a steelworker could remove his work clothes and shower without stepping into the house proper.

Across Penn Avenue, Bloomfield’s northern border, is Garfield, which is historically African-American and, well, not so intact. Shortly after moving in, I discovered an amazing mural on the block of Penn Avenue between Graham Street and Fairmount Street, on the north (Garfield) side of the street.

Painted in 1995 on the side of a three-story commercial building, “The Bride of Penn Ave.” depicts the two row houses immediately to its right, once-handsome three-story structures of dark-red brick with dark green trim, as they were when they were still inhabited. (When I moved into the neighborhood in 2017, both were completely abandoned.)

The colors in the mural are bright, depicting perhaps the rays of a midday summer sun lightening the houses’ somber hues and reflecting off the panes of glass that once filled the windows, now boarded up. A young Black woman in a bridal dress ascends the stairs to the porch of the row house on the right, perhaps betrothed to a steelworker. (Although Black workers were for the most part relegated to the worst and lowest-paid jobs in the steel industry, during the industry’s heyday even those jobs paid enough to give Pittsburgh one of the highest rates in the country of Black families in which the wife/mother did not work.)

Unsurprisingly, Black steelworkers suffered the worst during the collapse of the steel industry. By the end of the 1980s, Pittsburgh had lost something like 20 percent of its Black population; its working-class Black neighborhoods are still full of abandoned, boarded-up houses and vacant lots where houses used to be. The California-Kirkbride neighborhood, once so densely packed with row houses that it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the Old Allegheny Rows Historic District, lost so many that the remaining few now stand out like rows of tombstones in a cemetery.

The Garfield mural is neither accusatory nor nostalgic; its artist simply, brilliantly placed this reminder of what used to be next to what is. But now, the bride-to-be appears even more ghostly. By 2018, the house on the left showed signs of being rehabbed, presumably by the same kind of younger professionals drawn to Pittsburgh’s new “eds and meds” economy — certainly by someone who could afford to buy two houses and rehab one. By 2020, when I left the neighborhood, the house on the right, the one whose steps the bride ascends full of anticipation, had been razed to the ground.

The mural and its subjects in 2018.

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On Wednesday, the online magazine Convergence posted a piece originally written for the 2020 election by the Puerto Rican feminist writer Aurora Levins Morales, now republished with a new preface. In “Midnight In the Latrines, Again,” Levins Morales makes what I think is the strongest case I have seen for voting for Kamala Harris even if one is appalled by her corporate centrism and weak position on Gaza. As Levins Morales learned from her mother, for those serious about changing the world, voting is not about finding a candidate who aligns with your values, but “about navigating the terrain of the long-term fight and keeping people alive to fight it.”

I recently subscribed to

Colin Meloy

’s Substack Colin Meloy’s Machine Shop. (Meloy is the lead singer and principal songwriter of the Decemberists, one of my favorite bands). I was charmed by his account last week of a new book just published by his creative and romantic partner, Carson Ellis. Meloy has some interesting things to say about memory (the book is, essentially, a newly-illustrated version of a diary Ellis kept for a week in her mid-20s), which reminded me of this New Yorker article from May (which I read fairly recently — I, um, often fall behind on my New Yorker reading). The article is a review of a new book on memory by a neuropsychologist, who claims that “we have the wrong expectations for what memory is for in the first place. The mechanisms of memory were not cobbled together to help us remember the name of that guy we met at that thing.”

Finally, the most recent issue of The Drift has a fantastic piece about dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), which, as a dialectical materialist who has faced some mental health challenges, I have often been curious about. It turns out that DBT is, well, not so much therapy for people who understand the world dialectically (essentially, that the world is full of contradictions and that the relationship between seemingly opposed things is more important than some essential nature of those things), but a set of acronym-heavy life-improvement skills. Um, no thanks.

Turns out, the inventor of DBT, Marsha Linehan, ‘learned the term “dialectic” from an assistant whose husband was a Marxist philosopher,’ and realized that she could use it to articulate a contradiction she was encountering as a practitioner of the somewhat more amorphous (but still skills-based) “cognitive behavioral therapy”:

If you pushed clients to change too aggressively, she found, they lashed out. If you affirmed your clients’ feelings, however, they stayed just as miserable. You had to somehow convince clients they were good, relatable people who nonetheless needed to fix their behavior immediately.

This is a real contradiction, and understanding it as a dialectic is of course helpful — but DBT doesn’t seem to recognize any other contradictions in the world outside of our internal emotional life. The author of the article, Lily Scherlis (who, it turns out, is a member of Local 1103 of the union I work for), does a great job of exploring the broader contradictions around DBT and other skills-based therapeutic practices. Ultimately, she concludes,

We can add this dialectic to our list: your pain is your responsibility; your pain is not your fault. You are good; you need to change. Fight the terms of capitalism and ableism; capitulate to them when you need to. DBT is a palliative that makes people into docile workers and uses a corporate vocabulary to remodel their behavior; DBT is one way to make the world survivable.