Moleskine Zombie Prep page [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Crossposted to skine.art

UP...C? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) made the US Steel Tower (the worlds tallest triangular-floor-plan building) its headquarters a few months ago. They got permission to put their logo at the top of the building.

I just took a picture of that logo today. The M is missing- did it fall? I called the building's lobby and was told that no, it is simply a larger letter, and its installation was saved for last.

Macrotypographers, beware?

I want to make a kerning joke, but I sans serif.

The Zombiemobile and Eve, of the Pittsburgh Department of Zombie Disposal [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Since time before time (and by that I mean the early 1970s), Pittsburgh has been a town of zombies. More recently, one can see a beat up red little car around town, upon whose sides is stenciled the seal of the City of Pittsburgh, and the words "PITTSBURGH DEPARTMENT OF ZOMBIE DISPOSAL"

I recently interviewed Eve, the owner of the vehicle, at her place of employment, Heads Together, Squirrel Hill's last independent video rental store.

"Part of its just to entertain people in traffic," she thinks. "Like there's a suburban mom who's really frustrated and she sees my car with the zombie in the back and goes 'Oh, thats lovely!' "

Eve was born in Pittsburgh, and has lived here her whole life. She's known about zombies for just as long. She attributes her interest in zombies to George Romero's many zombie films, especially Dawn of the Dead, filmed locally at the Monroeville Mall. All of Romero's zombie films were filmed in and around Pittsburgh, and the most recent one (Land of the Dead) took explicit advantage of Pittsburgh's geography in its plot- the Golden Triangle has returned to being a fort- its rivers serve as barriers against the zombie threat.

Eve gave me a brief history of zombie lore in America and Hollywood.

"My friend Greg who works over at the Warhol was in Haiti in the peace corps for a couple of years. He was in this small village, and people were dead serious, they told him not to go near this one guy because he was a zombie. He was just this slow lumbering kind of guy in the village. There's a whole thing in the Hattian religion where you get turned into a zombie when a Bokor (sorcerer or shaman) blows pufferfish powder on you. You go into a coma, get a fair amount of brain damage, and he digs you up, and then you have to go work on his farm the rest of your life.

"That was pretty much how the zombie thing started out, a small piece of the Vodou religion, but then when Hollywood got a hold of it they started having magic zombies, and atomic zombies, and biological zombies. No going through the whole vodou or loa thing, we'll just have some guy cut up a chicken and then the zombies will come. If you watch "I Eat Your Skin", they almost get it right, but then it gets silly.

"Zombies didn't really start eating people until then. Before that, if you saw "White Zombie" with Bela Lugosi he's just kind of sad, and maybe he strangled people. But zombies didn't start eating people until the 60s or 70s.

I asked her about more recent films where biological viruses change humans and make them scary and zombie-like. Do the dark-seekers in I Am Legend count? Or the virus-ridden humans in the 28 Days Later series. Her answer was a clear no. "They are rage-infected humans, they aren't zombies. Zombies have to be dead and come back to life to qualify, however unlikely the circumstances that lead up to that."

She got a bit into the motifs and themes zombies might represent in movies. More recent ones cast them as the human output of a biological or chemical attack, but earlier films were more classist.

"There might be" Eve says, "a blue-collar connection, or maybe they are representative of slacker ner-do-wells. Zombies represent the masses- they're blue collar- they just keep going. It's like working on a fab-line. Mindless, repetitive action. I think anyone in the customer service industry can appreciate the zombie mentality."

These undead were the impetus for a group Halloween costume she and her friends put together a few years ago. They bought cheap jumpsuits and stenciled "Pittsburgh Department of Zombie Disposal" on the back of them. Add improvised weapons to the mix (The crowbar is Eve's favorite) and the PDZD was born. "I think," she says "that if the PDZD were real they would be a cross between garbagemen and animal control."

A few weeks later, Eve took it upon herself to further stencil her car with the logo. At the time, it was a hunter blue geo prism. This "ZombieMobile Mark 1" was destroyed when it was rear-ended over on Schenley Hill. Mark 2 is the new red one, which she purchased from her mechanic.

Her car is part of a growing trend.

"I think that anyone in the know knows that Pittsburgh is the zombie city. I think right now there is a huge ressurgance in zombies- its a weird culture catching on. All the goths wanted to be vampires, but now they are okay with being less pretentious and emotional."

The big event every year is the zombie walk in the Monroeville Mall. Both this year and last year it made the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest zombie shuffle.

That walk and others are put on by local group The It's Alive! Show. Thousands of people show up in zombie costume, although the most creative zombie Eve has ever seen was one of the zombie bunnies her friend Beth has knit over the years.

When we spoke about the reaction of other municipal departments in Pittsburgh ("Ambulance drivers seem to get a chuckle. Garbage men get a kick out of it too!") the conversation shifted to how Pittsburgh's topography.

The post-industrial landscape makes a huge impact on the genre- most zombie/plague films have been set in Pittsburgh or post-industrial Scotland, a similar landscape.

"Pittsburgh and Scotland share a weird connection- apparently we both have the same slang. Metal industries and the Carnegie connection. Maybe he started it. "I've imported some bog mummies to work in the factories!" and then they busted loose."

She talked about other strange things in our city as well, including the Ogua- giant catfish that date back from Indian times in the three rivers.

"I used to boat around on the river, and I've seen some pretty big catfish. Like, you smack one with a paddle, and they start trying to rock the boat. There are also a lot of weird religious shrines in Pittsburgh: There used to be a huge Indian burial mound downtown, near the Blvd. of the Allies; to Hindu people the Point is hugely auspicious.

"But there's also the parkway Virgin Mary shrine, which is really nice. It seems like every culture that came here brought a lot with them. And then they got into competition- you'll go to a neighborhood and there will be 80 churches. St. Anthony's on Troy Hill has over 5000 relics and reliquaries.

"Taking three lefts here is never the same as taking one right. You end up four neighborhoods over right next to another church.

"Over at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh they are actually doing research on dogs right now where they pump all their fluids out and stop their hearts and then start them again. It was a Russian experiment in the 1940s, and they are trying it again."

Finally, I asked Eve how the PDZD disposes of the zombies it is called in to take away.

""If it's not too aggressive we might use a have-a-heart trap. We'd bait it with some head cheese. Then of course we would release the zombie into the wild of Monroeville, it's natural habitat behind the mall, where it can live free with its own kind. The zombies haven't been a big problem since the 70s. Its very rare that we have to put a zombie down. Decapitation is always a winner, but my preferred method is a crowbar to the cranial fissure there. And remember children, if you see a zombie, TELL AN ADULT!"

Harding Way, Polish Hill [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

Harding Way climbs Polish Hill.

When I say that, I mean it- Harding way starts at the base of Polish Hill, where Herron Ave comes south off of Liberty. It starts as a set of steps that continue Herron's southern direction even as the road swings wildly east. Herron makes a steep U-turn to south, and then further up the hill turns west. Meanwhile, Harding way, at this point a flight of steps, meets the east-west street Dobson. Between Dobson and its southern parallel Fleetwood Way, Harding Way is a small, steep street. Then it becomes steps again, rising from Fleetwood Way up to Herron Avenue, which by this point has turned west. At Herron, again, it becomes a steep alleyway up the hill, past Bethoven Street. It ends abruptly at a wall, along whose side steps rise. At the top of these steps one is on the sidewalk of Bigelow Blvd.

Harding Way continues on the far side of Bigelow- it is a flight of steps to the poorly spelled Ridgway Street, and then slopes down the far side of Polish Hill, the Hill District, alternating again between roadway and steps every few blocks.

According to the Survey Maps of 1937, Harding Street was, well, a Street. It has right-of-way the size of a street, although even on the 1937 map it is staircase between Herron and Dobson, and between Herron and Bigelow. Apparently just at the North end of it a short way called Japan Way was planned- about three houses could be squeezed in to the space made by Herron Ave's hairpin turns. That street does not exist today- it's nothing but steep lot.
Betwen Herron and Bigelow, another short Way, Quarry Way, is on the map, but does not exist today. In its stead is a garage owned by a Pens fan.

BLDGBLOG: Ancient Roads [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

BLDGBLOG has a new post up about "landscape hermeneutics" - the study and interpretation of urban landscapes- the discovery and reclamation of old roads.

Sounds right up our alley, so to speak.

Various Lots, Mostly Steep, Ostensibly Greenfield [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

A hit and a miss on tonight's expedition. We took the car to Haworth Street, parked it, and ventured down the hill in search of remnants of the structures that were marked as there in 1939. Having made the trip before, we found it a pretty easy jaunt, and this time brought both light and camera.

We looked first for Lot 190, the house that would have been in Andoe Street's curve, had the street ever existed. After tramping through much spiny underbrush, we found, where it might have been, a long, flat clearing halfway down the hill. The soil was wet from recent rain, and a path seemed the path seemed to stop at the clearing and not continue further down. There were not a few broken beer bottles. Considering the view of the city from the clearing, this was not unnatural.

(Note: night is a bad time to take short-exposure digital pictures)

Below the clearing the hill fell straight off down towards Ivondale Street. How city planners might have projected putting three new streets up the side of that hill we could not conceive. We attempted to move south towards the other potential structure, but the underbrush hindered us bodily and did stab at us most dreadfully with its thorns. Rebuffed again we turned uphill and retraced our steps. But this time, by the light of our flashlight, we found a flight of steps, railings nonexistent, nearly covered by the hillside, suggesting that indeed there was at one point some kind of habitation on what might be called Andoe Street. Alternatively, if there was once more direct access to the Lost House above Ivondale, to the west, these steps might have been part of that system- perhaps it moved north down the hill along the theoretical Andoe, but switched back west at an appropriate elevation.

Then again, it may have served that last theoretical structure mentioned in our previous post, the structure on lot 183, east of Alexis. Looking southward from the half-sunken steps we could see a flat piece of ground down the hill, covered in water and reflecting the moonlight. The underbrush and bluff proved too great, however, and we dared not risk getting closer to it.

On our way back up towards the car we kept shining the flashlight downhill, looking for any sign of structure, but all we saw were trees and brush.

A few nights ago we found a house where one really shouldn't be, and tonight we found nothing where old sources said there was something. C'est la vie dans la bassin.

What is a paper street? [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

In addition to being a story title, we have used the term "paper street" on more than a few occasions without actually defining it. A quick googling brings mostly references to Fight Club's Paper Street Soap Co, but no actual definitions. So here goes:

A paper street is a street, roadway, boulevard, path, etc. which only exists on maps or lists, in planning, development, or governmental offices, and not at all in real life.

In places that are not Pittsburgh, these streets are typically the result of a planned development of which only a few phases were implemented. The streets still exist legally as rights-of-way that cannot be built upon, but they are otherwise useless if one wishes to walk, bike, or drive them.

In Pittsburgh the definition gets a bit more complicated because the maps of real streets tend to themselves have errors or oddities without even bringing legal-construct-only streets into the mix. That is to say, so much of the city is built on hills and in valleys that maps might show two streets connecting when in fact one is a bridge sixty feet above the other; or they might show a street that seems to be a thoroughfare but is actually undrivable public steps for a few blocks before becoming pavement again. Something might be called a street, when it should be more accurately called a flight, or a span.

There are many paper streets in this town.

More metaphorically, Paper Street, capital P capital S, is that strange street which you turned on to once late at night and ended up two neighborhoods away without understanding how, or which took you up a hill and showed you downtown from an angle you thought impossible. It is the physical instantiation of everything weird about this town's geography. In the story of same name, the narrator encounters such a street, with disastrous consequences.

Finally, a street with a similar name, Paper Way, does exist in Pittsburgh, just north of Friendship Park. Expect a report from

Your obedient servant in the field,
James