Singing the City : The Bonds of Home in an Industrial Landscape - Hardcover

"There is value in industrial landscapes," writes Graham of her adopted Pittsburgh, "and it is important for us to know what it is." Arguing that there is as much to learn in cities as in wilderness about humankind's relationship with the natural environment, Graham offers an affectionate natural history of the river city, tracing its growth from little more than a wharf to a succession of farm and trading communities until Pittsburgh evolved, in the late 1960s, into a byword for chemical and industrial pollution. The city is far cleaner now, she writes, because residents banded together to make it a more livable place--not an easy task, but, it turns out, an essential and successful one. "What people can do," Graham marvels, adding, with "the engagement of mind and body implicit in hard work." Graham's invitation for city dwellers to reinhabit their urban spaces is welcome and inviting, and her prose is a pleasure. --Gregory McNamee

Singing the City is a celebration of a landscape - not a wilderness landscape as might be expected, nor a rural one, but one that through most of its history has been unabashedly industrial. Laurie Graham returned to Pittsburgh in the fall of 1990 after two decades of near cataclysmic decline in the city's steel and other heavy industries. Recognizing the city as her home, she felt grieved at the loss suffered by the area's working-class communities and distressed that, as a nation, we let our industrial places go with such equanimity.

Convinced that industrial landscapes are too little understood and appreciated, Graham set out to investigate the city's landscape, past and present, and to learn the lessons she sensed were there about living a good life. The result, told in both her voice and the distinctive voices of the people she meets, is a powerful contribution to the literature of place.

Graham begins by showing the city as an outgrowth of its geography and its geology - the factors that led to its becoming an industrial place. She describes the human investment in the area: the floods of immigrants who came to work in the mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their struggles with the domains of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. She evokes the superhuman aura of making steel by taking the reader to still functioning mills and uncovers for us a richness of tradition in ethnic neighborhoods that survives to this day. Her account of the eventual loss of the mills helps bring into focus the attachment workers felt not only to their jobs but to the furnaces themselves, to rolling mills and other industrial artifacts. And most important, she shows us how family history, tradition, and the engagement inherent in hard physical work have translated into a profound engagement with the industrial landscape and a sense of home.

Singing the City is an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America, using Pittsburgh as a lens. Graham is not blind to the damage industry has done - both to people and to the environment. But she shows us that there is also a rich human story that has gone largely untold, one that reveals, in all its ambiguities, the place of the industrial landscape in the heart.