Pittsburgh Ghosts
Revisiting Art, Museums, the City Andy Warhol Left – For Us
Writing and Photos
Copyright Julie M. Moran, 2002

Ghosts are the stuff of silly stereotypes. In our collective imagination they give off tremendous variety of look and feel – figments of cartoonists, novelists, tour promoters and the eternally bored. But we think of them as personalities, or maybe of people we've known.

We know who they are. We know the immortal stories and events. We remember what happened.

I've just arrived from a few days in Pittsburgh, in Western Pennsylvania. Other than a day-long reunion in 1989, reminiscing with coworkers of my former employer and now corporate-takeover relic, Koppers Company, I hadn't been back since. It reminded me, that when you think of ghosts you envision something ex-corporeal. In the streets around Pittsburgh, I felt something in the wind.

Speaking of Pittsburgh the city, the smokestack ill fame no longer endures. It's a trick to even find a Pittsburgh smokestack these days, which my present companion was startled to find. True, we didn't venture into the inner-city bottom lands of Homestead, Braddock, Neville Island, Millvale, the rustbelt. We were just super busy having lots of fun -- hitting the highlights.

Not surprisingly, she was limned to find the uplifting reality of today's Pittsburgh leaving its old dark reputation far behind. Of course, Pittsburgh people know this fresh new impression – and newcomers' renewed impressions – with a knowing smile.

Then again, we were there to appreciate art. Andy Warhol art, in particular.

We came to Pittsburgh to visit museums, to rediscover spectacular possibilities of the visual medium ... to explore the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Pittsburgh Center For the Arts, the new Mattress Factory on the gritty, slowly gentrifying North Side (and James Turrell's glowing "objects" of light art "on display" against walls and in corners of pitch black rooms). And, of course, the Warhol Museum.

Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928 and left the city about his 21st birthday -- in one sense leaving for precisely the same reason we arrived. Graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he went to live in Manhattan to begin his fabulous life as a wealthy successful artist and famous gay socialite. He never returned. But through Pittsburgh's Warhol Museum, opened in 1994, much of Mr. Warhol's work and the story of his life and the genre of his Pop Art time, is best understood.

Andy Warhol left this life in early 1987, not long before I myself left Pittsburgh for good, not even two years later. I can still remember seeing these big black billboards announcing his passing -- perched as nearly every Pittsburgh landmark does -- clinging to a hilltop heading out of the city.

Mr. Warhol was buried in Pittsburgh simply because that's where his hardscrabble parents wound up, traveling here from faraway Eastern Europe, near Transylvania. Everyone in the family but Andy lived very ordinary, mundane lives. While his flashy, lightning life seemed to end just as quickly, the other original Warhola family members live on even today to tell the earliest stories -- weighted equally of grit and grime, struggle and simplicity.

Then again, Andy Warhol thought it just as well that there were the fabulously rich and the tragically lost and everyone in-between. His role and pleasure were merely to look. Life was fun to watch -- celebrity, ordinary, monotony -- and record with the media techniques of the day, mechanized texture and brightly colored presumed optimism. If the rich and famous occupied his diaries more, it's most relevant that these were the more profitable people he told himself to hang out with -- the exact opposite of, you might say, Vincent Van Gogh. This life was a life of money and fame. But to be more accurate -- and fair -- the Warhol optimism came first.

Does Andy Warhol have a ghost? I don't think so – but it's possible he might have tried to create one. No artist sought to create a more enduring record of a life, these oddities of Mr. Warhol's eccentricities ...

– "Time capsule" cardboard boxes holding collections of daily desk crossings, fan letters, business dealings, shards of clippings and advertisements;

– Tape recordings of meetings and conversations, the dalliances of trifle daily phone calls, meetings and goofy events;

– Odd, scratchy, rather boring, black-and-white movies of his epigones brooding through commoner, underprivileged, inner-city daily lives ... amidst the strange "Factory" Manhattan art world Andy Warhol created for creativity's sake.

In this way the pop artist's palate is a social petri dish, leaving a spectacularly colorful and diverse record of these ever moving lives and times.

Andy Warhol really wanted us to remember him ... his life and notoriety. We would like to know, "How can we get in on the action?"

Well, Andy promised that, most assuredly, we all can expect our own 15 minutes of fame to savor. But some might feel envious, or wistful maybe, that they can't have more. Perhaps others donate their 15 minutes to the needy and are content moving through the mundane.

And in this latter way, Pittsburgh is much different from Manhattan. These are the unembellished, unadorned, unostentatious, unpretentious. Here are the friendliness and joy of families, the workers, the sports fans, the business people, the college students, the kids -- the "Alter-Pop Art" world. To them this more ordinary and elegantly simple city -- a secret they share. Always simple, always joyous.

What a contrast.

Here is a downtown cradled by surrounding hilltops, an unpreposessed palatial bouquet of river bottom buildings, today freshly adorned with spectacular sprays and fresh sprinkles of lights and colors ... a city of fabled vistas and inclines, trapeze bridges and spooky tunnels. Beyond that are the quaint boroughs loosely tied together arc-on-node by wiggly roads wending through narrow hollows. Homes respectably sit stately and foursquare; others, sloped narrow, sharp, rowed repetitively.

This is a panoply of ruddy ethnic color, rust and history, the ghosts of the working stiff grimy smile at us with disheveled yet interesting teeth, like the industrial phantoms of Pittsburgh ex-industrial air. The rag pickers are long gone now. And – Andy would be surprised to know – these folks look clean and respectable in their well-pressed Steeler black and orange. A celebration of happiness and excitement in Pittsburgh is always coming up.

Rusted industrial roots do remain ... though Andy Warhol did not.

My friend and I visited the Warhol grave site, on an any-place hillside. Those many years ago, I had passed by this hillside a hundred times without knowing its significance, on my way to anywhere, or nowhere.

Every grave here in the small cemetary was simple, marked by standard issue grave stones and American flags (many of the deceased were WWII veterans), and soiled, bent-over pink-and-mauve plastic markers spelling "DAD" and "MOM."

The Warhol museum, on the exciting, sports-minded North Side, was a spectacular remembrance of a lambent life; Andy Warhol the grave site was spectacularly mundane, like the people and the place he so eagerly sought to escape.

My camera and I tried to snap the fleeting, white-hot energy of art's modern state (photography was allowed in much of the Warhol museum). A grave photo would only find a grave. Andy Warhol looked at our Pop Art life, if accurately, irreverently and indifferently. Time looks on now, shamelessly.

Ghosts, no. But the misty light of a hopeful tomorrow -- the real light of a Pittsburgh November morning -- remain ... this sky of drab grays but soft, milky, hopeful cremes.

I had my own ghosts. Down the up-down bumpy streets, the long rows of aged brick houses, the cold, winter wind held secrets, holding tight in it all those memories. It always will. Looking at my fomer city, in my own way, I felt the sadness of a lifetime's worth of friends and acquaintances now vanished.

Now, I'm back home where, I know, these ghosts do remain still, special in my heart.