Ed Simon ’06 grew up in Pittsburgh’s East End before coming to W&J to pursue an English major and has always strongly identified with the city. His recently released book, "An Alternative History of Pittsburgh," is a nonfiction look at select anecdotes that capture the spirit and history of Pittsburgh from 300 million BCE to the present day. The book is receiving national attention from outlets such as "Newsweek," "Publishers Weekly," and "The Los Angeles Review of Books," as well as from local Pittsburgh media.
How did you get into writing books?
When I was at W&J, I was an English major and had the dreams of writerly glory that all undergraduates who major in English have, but I didn’t start writing nonfiction in earnest until about 10 years ago. While teaching, I wrote a little and was published in very small places here and there and did some academic and scholarly writing. I started doing book reviews in 2012, and it built up into a more regular kind of gig, writing essays for more widely places. Over time, that translated into writing books.
"An Alternative History of Pittsburgh" is my fifth book that’s come out. I have a collection coming out in June, "The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters"; another book coming out in October 2021 called "Pandemonium: The Illustrated History of Demonology"; and the eighth book will be out in a year, which is a collection of my previous writings.
How did the idea for "An Alternative History of Pittsburgh" come about?
When I got to W&J, I thought of myself as the Pittsburgh guy who knew everything about the city. It was very intrinsic to my identity. I do visit Pittsburgh in my writing a lot, even when writing about other subjects. I knew that I always was interested in doing something on Pittsburgh. It’s funny, while I was at W&J I was writing a novel about Pittsburgh the whole time I was there, just hammering away at it for four years. I think there’s like one copy that’s printed out, but now I’m older and better at what I do.
I worked with Belt Publishing before, the people who put the book out, based out of Cleveland. They started with Belt Magazine, a sort of New Yorker for the Rust Belt. They wanted to question some of the narratives that exist in the wider press and push back on people who don’t know Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Cincinnati and may have a stereotype with which they write about these areas. I started freelancing for the website in 2014. They branched out a couple years ago into publishing books, having a lot of national success with titles that are niche and found that there’s a market for their work. I sent them a proposal in the summer of 2019 for a book on Pittsburgh, and they were interested.
How did you come up with the structure for the book, and how did you choose which anecdotes from the city’s history made it in?
I’m a staff writer for The Millions, a literary book review site, and they are amazingly tolerant of me writing weird stuff. I do a series called fragment essays where I take a broad, abstract subject, like the color black, and have different short essays tied together so that the relationship to one another tells a story, almost like a mixtape. It’s a way that I like writing, it’s not the only way that I write, but it’s something that I enjoy. I thought for the Pittsburgh book that might be a nice kaleidoscopic way of looking at the city.
I’m very cognizant that this is not a formal history of Pittsburgh; there’s a lot that’s left out. It’s an idiosyncratic and personal take on the city, so I thought the format would make sense to how I experience Pittsburgh and what I’m interested in.
In terms of the subjects that I chose, I knew that there would be some that you absolutely had to have: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Steelers. I wanted to combine those with some more unusual things that people might be less familiar with and could stand in for certain subjects. When I write about Joe Magarac, that chapter talks about the steel industry and Eastern European immigration and becomes a broader way to think about something through a particular anecdote. I had my themes that I wanted to engage with and was looking for interesting stories that would illustrate those.
What stories were based on what you knew from living in the city, and what did you find out during your research?
A lot of it was information you absorb by osmosis growing up in Pittsburgh. I’m also one of those people who reads the blue Pennsylvania state historical marker signs everywhere I go. The information about Czechoslovakia being formed in Pittsburgh I learned from a historical marker in a parking lot downtown across from Heinz Hall. I’d be going to work when I taught at Point Park University and used to read that sign every day when I was waiting for the bus.
Other things I found out in the process of doing research. I found out about the first movie theater being in Pittsburgh while looking into another story.
I didn’t want the book to be overly 20th century. In graduate school, I studied early American literature so some of those pieces I knew about independently.
Why did you start the book in 300 million years BCE?
That seems to be everyone’s favorite chapter, the dinosaur chapter.
I didn’t know any of that before, but I like pop science, and my dad was a scientist. I especially enjoy natural history, and as a kid, I was always at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History looking at things.
The great thing is that so much of that connects to the later history because that’s why the terrain is the way it is and the coal deposits are there. It was cool to have a question that I didn’t know the answer to and spend my time figuring that out.
What do you think is something people overlook about Pittsburgh?
There’s maybe an exact way in which we understand of our history: there was steel, steel was great, then steel left, and now we’ve reinvented ourselves. It’s not necessarily a wrong history, but it’s perhaps a reduced or simplified way of looking at it.
It’s a fractious place and a radical place. In the book things are always on fire. During the 1877 railroad strike, the entire Strip District was basically burned down in this civil insurrection, and I think a lot of people have no idea about that at all. People were scared there was going to be a revolution starting in Pittsburgh. It was a much bigger event in a lot of ways than the Homestead Steel Strike which is also very important but is more iconic. I think sometimes we don’t have an awareness of how multifaceted that kind of history is.
There are also the ways in which Pittsburgh plays a role in a bigger sense in the country. I make this argument that Pittsburgh is representative of the whole country and intrinsically important in a way that other places aren’t. I think there’s no understanding the United States without Pittsburgh.
What do you like to do when you come back to the city?
Pittsburgh is a weird place in a great way. It’s kind of ruined me for other places. There’s a lack of whimsy that gets to me, like the giant dinosaur statue on Forbes Avenue in front of the Carnegie Museum that’s always wearing hats and scarves.
There’s a way of being in the world that I think Pittsburghers have, there’s a loyalty to Pittsburgh, and an endearing love of place that other cities don’t necessarily apply to themselves.
When I go home, I just like the rhythm and pace of the city in a lot of ways. When I was in high school, we used to call it going “upstreet,” meaning going to Forbes and Murray in Squirrel Hill. I can just walk around there for hours. There’s neighborhood eccentrics and interesting characters and everybody knows somebody who knows somebody. It’s big but not that big, so everything is interconnected. Just being present in that way is something I absolutely miss.
What sets Pittsburgh apart from other cities?
A lot of other cities look the same: you’ve come in, you’ve got some sprawl, stadiums, and a downtown. Pittsburgh’s topography is so different. Nobody else has a Fort Pitt tunnel, a front door to your city. That makes a difference. It’s not just that it’s pretty, but it alters how people think about where they are. It adds to the idiosyncratic, unique aspect of Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh was huge. For most of its history, Pittsburgh was among the top 10 largest cities in the country, up until the 1950s. The city just shows up at important points in history. The history of the region is so interesting, demographically, how it was founded, the multiculturalism of the area very early on. Its central importance and just how far back that goes is something that can be easy to forget.
Simon earned his masters at Carnegie Mellon University and his Ph.D. at Lehigh University. He currently lives in the Washington, D.C., area with his family.