LITMIR.BIZ

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      The parkway parallels the Monongahela River. Below us, across the water, on the South Side are some of the steel mills that gave Pittsburgh its claim to fame. The smokestacks of Jones & Laughlin and United States Steel. People say better steel is manufactured now across the ocean in Japan and Scandinavia. Better steel produced more efficiently by modern, computerized mills. I don’t doubt it. J & L’s huge blast furnaces appear antique. Old, rusty guts that the ghost of Fred Willis, the junkman, will rip off one night and cart away. From the colonial period onward, steel determined the economic health of Pittsburgh and it continues to color the city’s image of itself. Steeltown, U.S.A. Home of the Iron Dukes and NFL Champion Steelers. Home of Iron City Beer. But for decades Pittsburgh’s steel industry has been suffering from foreign competition. Miles of deserted sheds, part of J & L’s original mill stretch below the highway. Too many layoffs and cutbacks and strikes. Too much greed and too little imagination in the managerial class, too much alienation among workers. Almost any adult male in Pittsburgh, black or white, can tell you a story about how these hulking, rusty skeletons lining the riverfront haunted his working life.

      To get to the North Side of the city from the parkway, I exit at Fort Duquesne Bridge. After the bridge the car winds around Three Rivers Stadium. It’s a dumb way to go but I don’t get lost. Inside the concrete bowl tiers of orange, blue, and gold seats are visible. Danny and Jake always have something to say here. Danny is a diehard Steelers fan and Jake roots for the team closest to home, the Denver Broncos. One brother will remind the other of a play, a game in the series between the two AFC rivals. Then it’s put down and shout down till one silences the other or an adult short-circuits impending mayhem and silences both. I still live and die with the Steelers but I stay out of the bickering, unless they need a fact confirmed, which they need me for less and less each year as their grasp of stats and personalities begins to exceed mine. Even if I’m not consulted (and it hurts a little when I’m not), I welcome the diversion. I listen to them squabble and I pick my way through confusing signs and detours and blind turns that, if I’m lucky, get us off the merry-go-round ramps circling Three Rivers and down onto Ohio River Boulevard.

      Again we parallel a river, this time the brown Ohio. To an outsider Pittsburgh must seem all bridges, tunnels, rivers, and hills. If you’re not climbing into the sky or burrowing into the bowels of the earth, you’re suspended, crossing water or looking down on a hodgepodge scramble of houses strewn up and down the sides of a ravine. You’d wonder how people live clinging to terraced hillsides. Why they trust ancient, doddering bridges to ferry them over the void. Why they truck along at seventy miles an hour on a narrow shelf chiseled in the stone shoulders of a mountain. A funicular railway erected in 1875 inches up Mount Washington, connecting the lower South Side to Duquesne Heights. Pittsburghers call it the Incline. Ride the rickety cars up the mountain’s sheer face for fun now, since tunnels and expressways and bridges have made the Incline’s service obsolete.

      After Fort Duquesne Bridge and the Stadium, we’re on the North Side, an adjoining city called Allegheny until it was incorporated into Pittsburgh proper in 1907. Urban renewal has destroyed nearly all the original residential buildings. We skirt the high rises, low rises, condos, malls, the shopping centers, singles bars, and discos that replaced the stolid, foursquare architecture of Old Allegheny. Twin relics, two ugly, ornate, boxish buildings squat deserted on Ohio River Boulevard. When I see these unusual structures, I know I’ve lucked out, that I’ve negotiated the maze of dead ends, one-ways, and anonymous streets and all that’s left is a straight shot out the boulevard to the prison.

      *

      Western Penitentiary sprouts like a giant wart from the bare, flat stretches of concrete surrounding it. The prison should be dark and forbidding, but either its stone walls have been sandblasted or they’ve somehow escaped the decades of industrial soot raining from the sky.

      Western is a direct descendant of the world’s first penitentiary, Philadelphia’s Quaker-inspired Walnut Street Jail, chartered in 1773. The good intentions built into the Walnut Street Jail—the attempt to substitute an enforced regime of solitary confinement, labor, and moral rehabilitation, for the whipping post, pillory, fines, and executions of the British penal code—did not exempt that humane experiment from the ills that beset all societies of caged men. Walnut Street Jail became a cesspool, overcrowded, impossible to maintain, wracked by violence, disease, and corruption. By the second decade of the nineteenth century it was clear that the reforms instituted in the jail had not procured the results its zealous supporters had envisioned, and two new prisons, one for the east, one for the western half of the state, were mandated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. From the ashes of the Walnut Street experiment rose the first Western penitentiary. The architect, a William Strickland known for revivals of classic Greek models and his engineering skill, created a classic of a different sort on a plain just west of Allegheny City. With massive, forbidding bulwarks, crenellated parapets, watchtowers buttressing the corners of the walls, his notion of a prison recapitulated the forms of medieval fear and paranoia.

      The immediate successor of Strickland’s Norman castle was constructed sporadically over a period of seventeen years. This new Western, grandson of the world’s first penitentiary, received its first contingent of prisoners in 1886, and predictably black men made up a disproportionate percentage of these pioneers, who were marched in singing. Today, nearly a hundred years later, having survived floods, riots, scandals, fires, and blue-ribboned panels of inquiry, Western remains in working order.

      Approaching the prison from Ohio River Boulevard, you can see coils of barbed wire and armed guards atop the ramparts. The steepled towers that, like dunce caps, once graced its forty-foot walls have been lopped off. There’s a visitors’ parking lot below the wall facing the boulevard. I ignore it and pull into the fenced lot beside the river, the one marked Official Business Only. I save everybody a quarter-mile walk by parking in the inner lot. Whether it’s summer or winter, that last quarter mile can be brutal. Sun blazing down on your head or icy wind off the river, or snow or rain or damp fog creeping off the water, and nothing but one high, gritty wall that you don’t want to hug no matter how much protection it might afford. I drive through the tall gate into the official business lot because even if the weather’s summery pleasant, I want to start the visit with a small victory, be one up on the keepers. Because that’s the name of the game and chances are I won’t score again. I’ll be playing on their turf, with their ball and their rules, which are nothing if not one-sided, capricious, cruel, and corrupting. What’s written says one thing. But that’s not really the way things are. Always a catch. Always an angle so the published rules don’t literally apply. What counts are the unwritten rules. The now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t-sleight-of-hand rules whose function is to humiliate visitors and preserve the absolute, arbitrary power of the keepers.

      Onto whose lot we trespass. Pulling as close to the visitors’ building as possible. Not too close because the guard on duty in the kiosk adjacent to the stairs of the visitors’ annex might feel compelled to turn us back if we break into the narrow compass of his alertness. Close but far enough away so he’d have to poke out his head and shout to get our attention.

      I find a space and the kids scoot out of their seats. Tish’s girls are with us so we used the way back of the station wagon. For safety the rear hatch unlocks only from outside, so I insert the key and lift the lid and Danny and Jake and Tameka scramble out to join the others.

      “We’re in a parking lot, so watch for cars!” I shout after them as they race down the broad center lane of the parking area. What else can I say? Cramped in the car for the past half hour, they’re doing now what they need to do. Long-legged, snake-hipped, brown children. They had tried to walk in an orderly fashion, smallest one grabbing largest one’s hand, lock step, slowly, circumspectly, progressing in that fashion for approximately three steps before one tore away and another followed and they’re all skipping and scampering now, polished by the sun. Nobody sprints toward the prison full tilt, they know better than that, but they get loose, flinging limbs and noise every which way. They crunch over a patch of gravel. Shorts and T-shirts make their bodies appear vulnerable, older and younger at the same time. Their high-pitched cries bounce off the looming wall. I keep my eyes on them as I lock the car. No real danger here but lessons, lessons everywhere, all the time. Every step and the way

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