Greater Pittsburgh's Industrial Communities in Transition

摘要

December 25, 1985.1 was driving up East Carson Street in Pittsburgh's South Side neighborhood on my way to my grandmother's home, a route I had taken for all of my 25 years. Although my grandmother had passed away in 1970, her home was still in the family, and was the traditional gathering place at Christmas for my mother and her eight brothers and sisters along with their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Such traditions run deep in Pittsburgh's ethnic communities, rooted in the customs and practices of immigrant populations that settled the region more than 100 years ago. They came in waves to work the mines and the mills. Scots-Irish and Germans came first, followed by Eastern and Southern Europeans in the early 1900s. As I drove up East Carson Street that evening, more than 100 years after the arrival of those early immigrants, not much had changed.