A Holiday Bagatelle [parenthetically speaking]

A press release announcing development of a small [less than 100 room] boutique hotel is cause for about as much news play as was actually generated by the recent announcement for the Ace Hotel in East Liberty.  This is not a 1,000 room convention center behemoth generating hundreds of jobs.  But it is an indication of Pittsburgh’s evolution to [returning to] a more important economic and social center.

Ace Hotels are usually [too often] referred to in the media as “hip”.  OK, my personal caveat here: once something/someone/someplace is called “hip” [or “cool”] it’s not [or no longer is].  I picked up that viewpoint from something Miles Davis is reported to have said.  And in my worldview, Miles is the definition of cool.  Also beware: declaring oneself hip or cool immediately negates any prospect of it.  Hip can only be bestowed as well as unspoken; it can never be assumed or declared.

Underlining the City’s inherent integrity, Pittsburgh never has and I suspect never will self-define as hip or cool.  And it should always be so.  But I’ve digressed.

So Pittsburgh is getting another gift of [currently defined] hip.  Pittsburgh is already hip in so many authentic ways.  A singular example is the continuance of the Carnegie International, the world’s first and longest running biennial art celebration.  Rock on Steel City!  But layers of hip must be added and the Ace Hotel is another one.  After all, something had to replace the ol’ Holiday House supper club on Route 51 in Pleasant Hills which in its heyday regularly hosted members of the Rat Pack [who along with Las Vegas’ demolished Desert Inn also defined hip].

There’s not much to comment on here other than boo-yah for the ‘Burgh and to note Ace’s other locations: London, Los Angeles, New York, Palm Springs [more Rat Pack references], Panama City [Panama, not Florida and if you’ve not been there or noticed, PC is becoming the Dubai of Central America], and the self-referentially hip [meaning no longer hip] Portland, OR.  What I believe will yield needed buzz for Pittsburgh is the list of media outlets that consistently cover Ace hotels.  Go to the Ace Hotel Web site and view the link to “Press”.  These are the media outlets that Pittsburgh wants to add to its portfolio of “buzz” and “mentions” [or as they say in Washington, DC, “gets”].  Pittsburgh wants to get press in “Asiana” Airlines magazine, “Elle Décor” [both European and US editions], “L’Officiel Voyage” [France] and “Blonde” [Germany]; style and lifestyle books all.

Finally, speaking of building layers, there’s a segue here to building economic layers [of success].  It’s rarely reported but known in certain quarters that Ace hotels are favored by the technorati [such as Google employees].  Any doubt that Google’s growing presence in East Liberty influenced Ace’s decision to look for an opportunity in Pittsburgh, targeting that particular neighborhood?  There should be no doubt.  But that’s how success gets built, layer upon hard won layer.  Rock on.

An Open Letter to Dr. Subra Suresh, CMU’s newly named President

Dr. Suresh:

 

Allow me to add an enthusiastic welcome to Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh on the eve of your formal installment as University President.  By accounts from both CMU press announcements and Pittsburgh media, the University and the City are honored that you’ve chosen to accept this position.  Your work at Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the National Science Foundation speaks volumes for what you’ll accomplish in Pittsburgh.

CMU and Pittsburgh need more citizens of your experience as stakeholders in our urban ecosystem.  While I have little doubt that the University and its Board of Trustees are excited about your history of establishing programs and identifying requisite funding sources to realize those programs’ success, I am especially heartened by your work at MIT.  While at that school you were instrumental in establishing the Center for Computational Engineering.  Endeavors along those lines are specifically what Pittsburgh needs.

In a recent talk before the Pittsburgh Venture Capital Association, you highlighted how a relatively small initial investment from a governmental program such as the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps can be leveraged into very large investments from the venture capital community ultimately producing large numbers of start-ups and hopefully longer term enterprises.  Please bring more of that to Pittsburgh.  Lack of capital is often cited as the number one reason Pittsburgh conspicuously lags other cities that have not much more in the way of intellectual resources.  I applaud your introductory emphasis on capital investment, no matter its source.

Capital is the key here: both human and financial.  CMU already has the human capital.  Such an oversupply in fact that it exports most of it to other places willing to award more financially to CMU’s best thinkers.  Financial capital, money, has been the element lacking in this latest incarnation of Pittsburgh economic development.  The late 19^th and early 20^th centuries had Andrew Mellon and his cohorts.  Pittsburgh blossomed, not unlike California’s Bay Area has done in the late 20^th century.  I urge you to make financial capital acquisition a top, perhaps the number one, priority.

You’ve spent much time in Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT.  Walking down Massachusetts Avenue, I noted that two of the largest and most impressive structures carried names of their benefactors: Eli and Edythe Broad on the Broad Institute, and David H. Koch of the eponymous Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.  Using these two examples it must be noted what impressive achievements their investment in MIT given that the Broads call Los Angeles home and David Koch is basically a Texan, among his many residences, though also an MIT alumnus.

The parallels between work being done at these two institutes and work happening at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute is striking.  Both MIT affiliated institutes were founded within the last 10 years which is also the time frame for UPCI’s founding.  It’s acknowledged that UPCI also partners with many faculty members from CMU, but I believe CMU can add significant fund raising muscle to their efforts.  The hard truth is that biotechnology has yet to produce the financial rewards that computer technology has.  UPMC, Pitt’s Medical School, and UPCI all are loaded with talented, creative individuals and alumni.  But my suspicion is that currently, the alumni list at CMU has a larger number of individuals with access to financial capital; individuals who understand cutting-edge research and its requirements.  These are the people that you, Dr. Subresh, can personally tap for help in CMU’s and Pittsburgh’s technology efforts.

 

Allow me to insert a personal story that illustrates the excitement I’m hoping you will bring to CMU, the Oakland neighborhood, Pittsburgh and the tri-state region.  While competing at last year’s Head of the Charles Regatta, I was walking with friends past both the Broad and Koch Institutes.  The window displays in both buildings are impressive to say the least.  Watching the genome of a rabbit being mapped before your eyes, or the molecular structure of a cancer cell being explained in mind-blowing full color is an engaging experience for the passer-by.  To that end, I was walking with friends from Austin, TX who were so impressed with what they saw that they dropped the usual chauvinistic central Texas viewpoint to comment that “We have multi-colored guitar sculptures on our streets, and here they show some of the world’s scientific breakthroughs.  Wow!”  That summed it up, and that’s what I want for Pittsburgh.  You can help bring that to CMU and the City.

Getting It Done

This past week I was part of my rowing club’s trailer loading brigade in advance of the Head of the Hooch in Chattanooga, TN.  For those of you not familiar with rowing protocols and various aspects of the sport, trailers are the means of transporting rowing shells [boats] and as such must be loaded with care resulting in a long, cumbersome and tiresome assignment for the men and women of the participating crews.

 

This week’s trailer loading involved more boats than our club has ever loaded onto a single trailer so it was particularly difficult.  What started out at 6PM with over 50 participants helping,  slowly but inexorably dwindled in numbers as the sun set and the evening wore on.  By 9PM there were less than a dozen of us and many boats still to go.  All this was made more time consuming because the best light we had was from the landscape lighting at the Four Seasons Hotel next door.  At that point I knew this loading was going well toward midnight.

 

As is common at that late hour during any such “all nighter”, or close to it, we started the “ol’ gallows humor” going.  The stories told are those of one’s youth, college and high school mostly.  And a lot of “when I rowed in college….”.  Ya, ya, you rowed uphill, in the snow, both ways.  Right.  But what became apparent at 10:30PM, with only 8 people left to load and another couple hours ahead of us, was that here in a side alley in Austin, Texas three of us were from Pittsburgh.  And we were the loudest, should I say most enthusiastic, of the group and definitely kept things lively.

 

So there you have it.  When the job needs to get done, it takes Pittsburghers to do it.  No fuss, little complaining [OK, at least a little], pitch in, make it work, get it done.  Go home with a smile on your face and an attitude of at least it could have been worse.  Yep.  I hope and believe that sort of attitude can translate into more jobs and a rising standard of living for all Pittsburghers as the city and region move forward.

Blue Collar, Schmue Collar

A quick rant regarding recent comments in the media on Pittsburgh that's related to coverage of the Pirates. Allow me use Michael Keaton's blog for ESPN.com as the foremost example, although what I’m complaining about permeates the media when referring to Pittsburgh in any context. 

Keaton is a great fan of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh’s sports franchises so I criticize with affection as I would to a family member.  But he almost never fails to make reference to Pittsburgh's "blue collar" attitudes, in this particular case those attitudes being a key to the Pirates’ success.  C’mon people!  How many times?  Years?  Decades?  does Pittsburgh have to labor under that old saw?  I mean really, it's the fallback explanation used by every second rate reporter in sports, business, or arts reporting.

And Mr. Keaton: blue collar work ethic, huh? Like NYC doesn't have a blue collar side? Houston? Dallas? London? Shanghai? I won’t get wonky on this one: a rant is supposed to make liberal use of grand assumptions and platitudes. But look at the most recent statistics that tell us Pittsburgh is less blue collar that most of its cohort cities in the US.

Great cities run on a diverse mix and that refers to job and economic mixes as well. And do only blue collar types work hard? I worked on Wall Street and I'll put up my 12 hour days, 8 days a week as a "slave of New York" next to any time card punching dude. Success is hard work anywhere, period. Stop the back-handed compliments from people who do not or no longer live in Pittsburgh.

Finally, if you’re using the term “blue collar” as a proxy of a close knit, well functioning community, then why don’t you just use that description?  Pittsburgh’s always been a great city, when it was dominated by heavy industry and even now when it’s largely a knowledge based economy.  Communicating the facts in an interesting way is difficult.  It would be great if more folks who love Pittsburgh did it.

Rising Standards

No need to list the now constant stream of media mentions on Pittsburgh’s rebirth, re-growth, renaissance, and re-emergence as a “place to be”.  These things take time and to come to this point it has taken two generations, over 40 years really, since the initial collapse of steelmaking as the region’s economic cornerstone.  While I believe rising economic development is not inevitable, the momentum is certainly there in Pittsburgh’s favor.

I believe Pittsburgh is further fortunate in that it does not get ahead of itself when it comes to civic self image.  Success does not distract Pittsburghers from their life paths.  This isn’t LA or Dallas or Miami, thank goodness.  Driving through the city and surrounds you won’t find a lot of faux-French chateaus being constructed in the hills.

But as with general economic growth in the US over the last 20 years, and similar to what we’re seeing worldwide, the benefits of growth are spread unevenly.  Perhaps more unevenly than any time in the last 100 years, since the Gilded Age.  So it’s appropriate to be thinking about how to mitigate the natural and normal inequalities of growth, as much because we want a solid economic base as because it’s simply better for all the area’s residents.

A rising tide does indeed float all ships.  But let’s make sure the tidal flow touches all and provides them the opportunity to rise.  Everyone who is a thought leader, an opinion maker, a mover and shaker so to speak, has got to be talking about development in all parts of Pittsburgh and the surrounding region.  No community, whether geographically or demographically defined, should be left behind or even allowed simply to lag.

OK, this is one of my blog pieces where I can offer no “solutions” or even opinions of such.  As mainly a free market capitalist, I believe the situation will eventually right itself.  However let’s not sit around and hope for the best.  If any city in the US is an example of what involved citizens can do, Pittsburgh with its generally recognized public-private partnership that produced the City’s first renaissance is the argument for some direct involvement.

Progress most likely will happen on the margins, both geographically and socially.  The worst blighted neighborhoods in Homewood or the Hill District, parts of the Mon Valley or outlying counties, for example, will probably not see incomes increase immediately.  But I believe measurable economic progress can penetrate those communities, among others, in reasonable amounts of time; measured in months and years, not decades.

As I mentioned above, Pittsburgh thought-leaders, in the media, academia, government, and business must acknowledge and give voice to this issue of raising the economic bar for the entire city and region.  Only by seeking solutions to this issue, one that Pittsburgh is certainly not alone among cities in facing, can progress me made.  Acknowledge, think and then act.  I have no other prescription at this time.

This Has Got to Stop

Along with the news today that HJ Heinz is laying off 350 staff members at Pittsburgh headquarters is a less noted item about the purchase by Facebook of a local high tech startup, Mobile Technologies.  Mobile Technologies developed a product called Jibbigo that is a translation service application which can be used on your smartphone.  I don’t need to go into details of why this could be a very important piece of technology for any large social media platform, like Facebook.

 

My problem is the statement by Mobile Technologies founders who spun out of Carnegie Mellon: “once the deal has closed, many of us will be joining the company at their headquarters in Menlo Park, California.”  You can rest assured that given the size of Mobile Technologies, all of their current staff will transfer to Menlo Park.  So why can’t Facebook, like Google, establish a Pittsburgh engineering office?  This “brain drain” of sorts, which has happened time and again over a generation in Pittsburgh, has got to stop.

 

I fully comprehend that high tech must be fluid and respond to opportunities as they present themselves.  That ability lays the groundwork, the very ecosystem, for future success and innovations.  But especially for those enterprises coming out of CMU there has been too much of a history of innovative companies grown on their campus only to be removed to more “glamorous” locations as soon as the dollars beckon.  This has got to stop.

 

I don’t have an answer for this and in all reality there is no “answer” for the cycle of job creation and flow.  It’s a sign of a healthy environment when an area like Pittsburgh repeatedly produces innovative ideas and enterprises.  And it’s only natural that the best and the brightest, be they people or ideas or companies, migrate to where they’re most appreciated: that is, where the capital to foster growth is located.  However, I would like to see more leadership from “the top”, by which I mean the top of the particular organization in Pittsburgh where these creative enterprises are formed.  In this particular case, as in so many recent others, that top is the leadership at Carnegie Mellon University.  What is CMU doing to foster Pittsburgh’s future growth besides taking in tuition payments and spitting out high value employees for Boston, Seattle and the Silicon Valley?

 

Look for me to follow up this piece with something addressed to CMU’s incoming President.

Staying Relevant

On a recent Saturday morning I lounged in bed as the sun came up through the windows.  A rare treat even for a weekend morning.  The lounging part, not the sunshine.  I hit the clock radio button and listened to a few minutes of NPR’s “Weekend Edition – Saturday” program.  But in those 30 or so minutes, I heard three separate pieces where “Pittsburgh” was mentioned.  We can question the relevance of radio news in general, and NPR in particular, within this ever evolving information age but aside from that I have to observe that this is another example of Pittsburgh getting back to “relevant”.

Two years ago I had a discussion over coffee at Taza d’Oro [a true gem - keep pedaling folks] with a prominent local magazine publisher. We were concerned that Pittsburgh had lost “relevancy” in the evolving American economic and social landscape.  I remember while growing up that Pittsburgh would judge itself against New York and Chicago and San Francisco.  But then a few years back Pittsburgh was absent from being noted anywhere in the then breathless pieces on the boom towns of Atlanta, Dallas and Phoenix.  Worse, it wasn’t even garnering negative notice like Cleveland, Detroit or Newark.  Pittsburgh risked irrelevance.

But recently Pittsburgh has pulled itself back into the national, if not quite international, conversation.  Years of commitment and hard work from a broad range of citizens helped make this happen and hopefully this will continue to expand.  But my unscientific listen to NPR provided a continuing sign of hope.

By the way, the three pieces started with a discussion of Detroit’s bankruptcy woes where the head of the Detroit Chamber of Commerce noted that “great American cities like New York, Pittsburgh have gone through some form of receivership” and now “those cities are vibrant urban centers.”  Next up was Howard Bryant of ESPN talking second half of season baseball and “the story I like best is the Pittsburgh Pirates”.  And immediately following was WESA’s Larkin Page-Jacobs piece on the “outing” of Robert Galbraith as JK Rowling by Duquesne University “in Pittsburgh” Professor Patrick Juola resulting from his computer modeling techniques.

None of this is curing cancer or stopping world hunger, but it all adds to a perception that in Pittsburgh stuff is happening, brains are being used, and Pittsburgh placing with the best urban centers.