Editor's note: I started this post sometime in late January, but as winter endures, its truths still resonate.* * *
My learning curve is a flat line, apparently.
Now let's get this out of the way first--I'm not sure why they call the area the Waterfront. Technically, yes, it is near the banks of the Mon, but any sort of frontage or view or even a stench of stagnate water in summer is effectively blocked by condos, railroad tracks, and an industrial wasteland, which, as best as I can figure, was the lifeblood of Pittsburgh's economy up until 1985 or so.
But Waterfront it is so dubbed, and it has, to my great fortune (or, more accurately, my credit card company's), a Filene's Basement, a Macy's, a P.F. Chang's, a Barnes & Noble, at least one really exceptional shoe store, and my favorite-named store--Dick's!--so I can forgive the lack of orientation to the local geography for some decent retailing that doesn't require me to drive 25 miles from my home or take on a seek-and-destroy mission for parking in Squirrel Hill, Oakland, or Shadyside.
It is, however, essentially a strip center wedged in between the river and the railroads, just a more attractively laid out one than, say, the entirety of Monroeville or Robinson. I don't pretend that it is the best shopping district in the region--it is lacking an H&M, a Nordstrom's, a World Market (apparently unknown in Pennsylvania altogether), a Wegman's, a Restoration Hardware, and a Pottery Barn to make it a little piece of American suburban consumerist heaven. But it's still highly acceptable, at least by my increasingly loose standards of urban cachet.
Oh, to think that when I lived in Washington, D.C., years ago, I felt as though I was slumming it at a mass-market, big-box retail strip center when I went to the Neiman Marcus at Mazza Gallerie . . . .
Given that Waterfront is a strip center, it is generally lacking in mass quantities of mass transit. There is a bus stop near the Target I frequent, always filled to overflowing this time of year with the coldest looking people in America. But that's about it. To me, frustrated urban and regional planner that I am (it was my major for a brief semester in college; I gave it up when for one class we spent half the semester trying to define a region by a mathematical formula), this place begs for one of those fake trolley buses, something to go up and down the strip and drop off people and packages at the most convenient location to their cars.It is, however, essentially a strip center wedged in between the river and the railroads, just a more attractively laid out one than, say, the entirety of Monroeville or Robinson. I don't pretend that it is the best shopping district in the region--it is lacking an H&M, a Nordstrom's, a World Market (apparently unknown in Pennsylvania altogether), a Wegman's, a Restoration Hardware, and a Pottery Barn to make it a little piece of American suburban consumerist heaven. But it's still highly acceptable, at least by my increasingly loose standards of urban cachet.
Oh, to think that when I lived in Washington, D.C., years ago, I felt as though I was slumming it at a mass-market, big-box retail strip center when I went to the Neiman Marcus at Mazza Gallerie . . . .
While I don't think those lumbering aesthetic bastardizations convey the charm they intend, such a system would be convenient and helpful. And it would prevent (or at least limit) the amount of parking and re-parking that everyone seems to do, especially during the holidays. The strip must be at least 2 miles long from end to end. Thus, if you have a lot of packages or a lot of shopping to do, you end up moving your car from place to place in order to get a spot close to where you're feeding your retail fix.
Or you could do like I try to do, which is leave my car in one place, ideally centrally located, and walk to all the stores to shop. I am such a good greenie I can hardly stand myself most days.
* * *
This staying-put-instead-of-reparking routine only works so well, though, and, as in most of life, no good intention goes unpunished--or at least un-laughed-at.
First of all, it's a personal injury lawyer's dream, the white-knuckle experience of trying to walk through that Nullarbor Plain of a parking lot and not be maimed under the wheels of some crazed Chevy Suburbanite who thinks that the little lines indicating parking spaces and driving lanes are some sort of unintelligible heiroglyphic whose secret message does not pertain to, nor particularly interest, him or her.
But more puzzling to me, at least heretofore, is the poor quality of the shopping carts, especially those I've wheeled out of Target and attempted to push to my car at the far end of the lot--or worse, to the neighboring lot in front of Filene's or Dick's or Michael's or any other self-referentially named department store in the complex. I can't tell you the number of times--OK, I can; it's been three or four--that I've pushed the cart out into the lot, only to have the wheels jam at the farthest end of the lot, as far away as possible from the store, the shopping cart storage, or even a convenient median or berm upon which to abandon the cart.
So more than once I've found myself stuck in the middle of the asphalt ocean with a lame, rudderless shopping trolley and no easy way to get it back to port. I shove it, I heave it, I drag it, and I even try to do this weird sort of roll-twist-turn with it across the lot, like it's an ungainly piece of furniture that needs to move from one end of the room to the other (which it is). Cursing all the way. Of course. It's one of my talents.
At first, I chalked it all up to cheap or overused carts. Wheels get rattly, the steering goes wonky, the cart quits under stress and overuse and locks itself in place, refusing to make one more trip across the asphalt. And whose fault is that?
Then, as the first snows fell in winter (which at this point feels like it began last July) and the lots became thickly crusted with a layer of salt that the rim of a margarita glass would envy, I figured, oh well, a combination of winter road salts, gravel, and dirt must be gunking up the wheelworks. This shopping trolley lockjaw continued through the Christmas shopping season, then into January, and now into late February--but so has winter. So I thought my argument had a certain perfect, scientific reasoning about it, even if the evidence upon which my scientific reasoning was based was still massively pissing me off.
Here's where my learning curve flatlines with not a defibrillator in sight. This evening, I was visiting Waterfront once again, this time eyeing iPods and smaller-sized jeans, when, while attempting to push my cart to my car, I spotted this sign.
You see this picture? Can you read the sign well enough to understand its message? Let me transcribe it for you so that you receive the full import of its meaning:
"Attention shoppers!
Our shopping carts will lock if taken beyond the parking lot perimeter. While distinctive yellow lines mark normal exits, the entire lot perimeter is protected."
Then the text is repeated in Spanish for Pittsburgh's, I dunno, Bolivian community. All two of 'em.
(Editor's note: Really, I'm not trying to be a racist jerk here. Pittsburgh must be the only major city in America that has no visible Latino population, no Spanish-language channels as part of its cable line-up, and--please let me stress the cruel reality of this fact--no decent Mex-Mex food, at least as far as I can discern [although it does have good Cal-Mex in the form of Mad Mex, I'll grant you that]. But Harrisburg and Gettysburg--they have good Mexican food. There is just so little justice in this world.)
So what a fool I've been, caring about environmental and automotive damage, straining flagging muscles under the weight of a disabled steel cage on wheels. Why if I'd only paid attention to the small, awkwardly worded print of one nondescript sign on a median near the edge of the "perimeter" and the beginning of Dick's own parking lot, as well as to those "distinctive yellow lines," I would have known that I could not take the precious cart fifty paces (oh, you bet I counted) beyond the Target entrance. Silly, ridiculous me!
The sign, however, would not have told me that no amount of pulling and dragging the trolley back across the line would seem to have any effect on releasing the locked wheels, that once locked they appear to stay locked until some Target official says the magic word, waves the enchanted wand, calls in the girls from Charmed to wear tarty clothes and recite an incantation, something, to put the wheels in motion once again. Golly, I am such a dope for not understanding this somewhat unique method of shopping cart organization.
It's not that I'm unsympathetic to store management's plight. People steal steel carts (although Target's appear to be chiefly plastic in nature with a steel underwire bra of support, making them somehow both unattractive and heavy)--the carts cost a lot of money and can probably be dismantled and melted down or kept intact and relabeled for a pretty profit. Nonetheless, this lock-and-don't-load-on-the- back-of-a-truck approach to cart organization is frustrating for me, the wannabe greenie, and for anyone who has to dodge the stalled trolleys in the very busy parking lot. And, trust me, the lot is littered with carts--not to mention the dashed hopes and crushed vertebrae of many a Pittsburgher who attempted (and grandly failed) to return a trolley to its Target.
Again, the clandestine urban planner kicks in--I start thinking thoughts like these: What about instead of a "yellow bike" program like some cities have adopted, we created a Waterfront "red cart" system, where all the stores shared the same type of cart? It wouldn't matter to which store the trolleys were returned because everyone would have the same carts. You could still use the yellow Maginot Line of cart control, but you'd have a wider area in which to use the trolleys. Thus, maybe you'd encourage a greener approach to shopping at Waterfront, as well as a safer, less obstacle course-oriented parking lot. An added bene to corporate beancounter types would be that you might share the cost of the carts with shopping center management, instead of footing the bill all on your corporate lonesome.
But then I go too far. I start thinking thoughts like these: What if we did away with the corporate branding altogether, except maybe a little sign to indicate that the carts belong to Waterfront and if found, say in Reykjavik, Iceland, or Bangui, Central African Republic, please return to Pittsburgh, postage paid, no questions asked? And what if we moved the big buses away from the stores and onto the street where they belong--or better still, got back to building Pittsburgh's "T" with stops to more locations all over town, not just one line to the South Hills?
Add in those fake trolleys for good measure, keep the cars away from the pedestrian crossing zones in front of the stores, put some trees in the parking lot, make the pavement more porous, and voilà! You've got yourself a little exemplar of semi-socialist planning in the steel-and-stone heart of a late capitalist landscape!
Yes, too much, definitely too much, especially for a minor issue like cart control, especially in a country where using a word like "socialism" in a public forum is liable to make you the roasted meat and veg kabob that gets skewered and devoured by the ilks of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
But it's this plan or my other--silently, passive-aggressively boycotting all the big-box retailers that tick me off (in person, not necessarily online) until they fold, one by one, close up shop, tear down their buildings, rip up their parking lots, and return the environment to its natural state. Whatever that might be--given Pittsburgh's recent heavy-industry past, it could just as easily be a Superfund site.
Nonetheless, one way or another, I will bring capitalism to its knees.
As soon as I'm done shopping.
This staying-put-instead-of-reparking routine only works so well, though, and, as in most of life, no good intention goes unpunished--or at least un-laughed-at.
First of all, it's a personal injury lawyer's dream, the white-knuckle experience of trying to walk through that Nullarbor Plain of a parking lot and not be maimed under the wheels of some crazed Chevy Suburbanite who thinks that the little lines indicating parking spaces and driving lanes are some sort of unintelligible heiroglyphic whose secret message does not pertain to, nor particularly interest, him or her.
But more puzzling to me, at least heretofore, is the poor quality of the shopping carts, especially those I've wheeled out of Target and attempted to push to my car at the far end of the lot--or worse, to the neighboring lot in front of Filene's or Dick's or Michael's or any other self-referentially named department store in the complex. I can't tell you the number of times--OK, I can; it's been three or four--that I've pushed the cart out into the lot, only to have the wheels jam at the farthest end of the lot, as far away as possible from the store, the shopping cart storage, or even a convenient median or berm upon which to abandon the cart.
So more than once I've found myself stuck in the middle of the asphalt ocean with a lame, rudderless shopping trolley and no easy way to get it back to port. I shove it, I heave it, I drag it, and I even try to do this weird sort of roll-twist-turn with it across the lot, like it's an ungainly piece of furniture that needs to move from one end of the room to the other (which it is). Cursing all the way. Of course. It's one of my talents.
At first, I chalked it all up to cheap or overused carts. Wheels get rattly, the steering goes wonky, the cart quits under stress and overuse and locks itself in place, refusing to make one more trip across the asphalt. And whose fault is that?
Then, as the first snows fell in winter (which at this point feels like it began last July) and the lots became thickly crusted with a layer of salt that the rim of a margarita glass would envy, I figured, oh well, a combination of winter road salts, gravel, and dirt must be gunking up the wheelworks. This shopping trolley lockjaw continued through the Christmas shopping season, then into January, and now into late February--but so has winter. So I thought my argument had a certain perfect, scientific reasoning about it, even if the evidence upon which my scientific reasoning was based was still massively pissing me off.
Here's where my learning curve flatlines with not a defibrillator in sight. This evening, I was visiting Waterfront once again, this time eyeing iPods and smaller-sized jeans, when, while attempting to push my cart to my car, I spotted this sign.You see this picture? Can you read the sign well enough to understand its message? Let me transcribe it for you so that you receive the full import of its meaning:
"Attention shoppers!
Our shopping carts will lock if taken beyond the parking lot perimeter. While distinctive yellow lines mark normal exits, the entire lot perimeter is protected."
Then the text is repeated in Spanish for Pittsburgh's, I dunno, Bolivian community. All two of 'em.
(Editor's note: Really, I'm not trying to be a racist jerk here. Pittsburgh must be the only major city in America that has no visible Latino population, no Spanish-language channels as part of its cable line-up, and--please let me stress the cruel reality of this fact--no decent Mex-Mex food, at least as far as I can discern [although it does have good Cal-Mex in the form of Mad Mex, I'll grant you that]. But Harrisburg and Gettysburg--they have good Mexican food. There is just so little justice in this world.)
So what a fool I've been, caring about environmental and automotive damage, straining flagging muscles under the weight of a disabled steel cage on wheels. Why if I'd only paid attention to the small, awkwardly worded print of one nondescript sign on a median near the edge of the "perimeter" and the beginning of Dick's own parking lot, as well as to those "distinctive yellow lines," I would have known that I could not take the precious cart fifty paces (oh, you bet I counted) beyond the Target entrance. Silly, ridiculous me!
The sign, however, would not have told me that no amount of pulling and dragging the trolley back across the line would seem to have any effect on releasing the locked wheels, that once locked they appear to stay locked until some Target official says the magic word, waves the enchanted wand, calls in the girls from Charmed to wear tarty clothes and recite an incantation, something, to put the wheels in motion once again. Golly, I am such a dope for not understanding this somewhat unique method of shopping cart organization.
It's not that I'm unsympathetic to store management's plight. People steal steel carts (although Target's appear to be chiefly plastic in nature with a steel underwire bra of support, making them somehow both unattractive and heavy)--the carts cost a lot of money and can probably be dismantled and melted down or kept intact and relabeled for a pretty profit. Nonetheless, this lock-and-don't-load-on-the- back-of-a-truck approach to cart organization is frustrating for me, the wannabe greenie, and for anyone who has to dodge the stalled trolleys in the very busy parking lot. And, trust me, the lot is littered with carts--not to mention the dashed hopes and crushed vertebrae of many a Pittsburgher who attempted (and grandly failed) to return a trolley to its Target.Again, the clandestine urban planner kicks in--I start thinking thoughts like these: What about instead of a "yellow bike" program like some cities have adopted, we created a Waterfront "red cart" system, where all the stores shared the same type of cart? It wouldn't matter to which store the trolleys were returned because everyone would have the same carts. You could still use the yellow Maginot Line of cart control, but you'd have a wider area in which to use the trolleys. Thus, maybe you'd encourage a greener approach to shopping at Waterfront, as well as a safer, less obstacle course-oriented parking lot. An added bene to corporate beancounter types would be that you might share the cost of the carts with shopping center management, instead of footing the bill all on your corporate lonesome.
But then I go too far. I start thinking thoughts like these: What if we did away with the corporate branding altogether, except maybe a little sign to indicate that the carts belong to Waterfront and if found, say in Reykjavik, Iceland, or Bangui, Central African Republic, please return to Pittsburgh, postage paid, no questions asked? And what if we moved the big buses away from the stores and onto the street where they belong--or better still, got back to building Pittsburgh's "T" with stops to more locations all over town, not just one line to the South Hills?
Add in those fake trolleys for good measure, keep the cars away from the pedestrian crossing zones in front of the stores, put some trees in the parking lot, make the pavement more porous, and voilà! You've got yourself a little exemplar of semi-socialist planning in the steel-and-stone heart of a late capitalist landscape!
Yes, too much, definitely too much, especially for a minor issue like cart control, especially in a country where using a word like "socialism" in a public forum is liable to make you the roasted meat and veg kabob that gets skewered and devoured by the ilks of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
But it's this plan or my other--silently, passive-aggressively boycotting all the big-box retailers that tick me off (in person, not necessarily online) until they fold, one by one, close up shop, tear down their buildings, rip up their parking lots, and return the environment to its natural state. Whatever that might be--given Pittsburgh's recent heavy-industry past, it could just as easily be a Superfund site.
Nonetheless, one way or another, I will bring capitalism to its knees.
As soon as I'm done shopping.
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