This is Home Street in Homeville, one hill from Kennywood Park, at the end of Ravine Street, off the new Waterfront. Andrew Carnegie built this valley, the American worker made it his own. These past sixteen months have been interesting watching the real estate where steel and labor began and ended take on the feel, flavor, and twinkly lights of a steel theme park.
   On September 12, my Ravine Street neighbors lynched a Cabbage Patch Doll on a telephone line and stapled a hand-lettered sign reading "Kill Bin Laden" to a pole. Across the street they hung a big American flag. Lower Manhattan was rubble, and we had all seen things only people braver than we are should ever have to see. Driving into work underneath it and around it every day since, the Bin Laden effigy has been weirdly comforting: Pittsburgh is seriously safe. Whatever in the soul of this city that made it so tough could—if we only let it—protect the rest of the world, too.
   The police eventually came and cut the dead doll down but the flag still flies. It makes you want to sing patriotic songs and just let the Red Cross have all that money.
   The real estate where all the steel in the world used to come from until that defining moment in the Eighties when Japanese imports butted heads with American labor and it all fell apart is only two miles, end to end. Nobody, nothing, is ever making steel here ever again. Most mornings I drive through it, fast, across the Amity Street tracks onto the High-Level Bridge, up Browns Hill Road, and onto whatever route traffic takes into Oakland. One Tuesday morning in December, I drove, fast, through Schenley Park until I hit a long slow lane of cars crawling down the Boulevard of the Allies on my right. Fortunately, somebody saw my turning signal and let me cut into traffic.
   The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center maintains parking garages at the very top of Darragh Street. As I clamored out of my car, a middle-aged female voice behind me caught me short.
   I am such a girl that I seriously thought the woman was going to tell me she liked my skirt, or that it was stuck in my pantyhose. Instead, she let me have it.
   She wanted, she said, to tell me how rude I was, and what a terrible driver, too. She had followed me since the Boulevard—almost a mile, uphill—and she'd seen that little maneuver in traffic, and, well, she wasn't impressed. I thought, middle-aged road rage is so not pretty. I said, "Well, lady, I'm glad you got that off your chest." I tried to walk away. She would have none of that.
   "What did you say to me?" she demanded.
   I said nothing.
   "You're a foreigner," she accused me, peering sharply, knowingly, into the 100-year-old Italian genes hidden deeply behind my glasses, behind my eyes.
   "Pittsburghers are not rude," she said. "Where were you born? You couldn't have been born here."
   As opposed to where?
   Something about the woman had me more ticked off than afraid. I brandished my social security card and threw my taxes onto the table.
   "And you're...jingoistic!" I said. Tetrasyllabic put-downs hit low, don't you think?
   If I were rude, I would have suggested she swap that bag over her head for a burqa. But not only had the woman needed to tell me the defects of my character, she had followed me—a mile, uphill—knew my face, where I worked, the make and color of my car, and my license plate. If she weren't laughable, she'd be scary.
   I am about as Western Pennsylvanian as they come. It's a mystery to me why my grandparents fled sunny, southern Italy, but they often reminded me that they liked it here better. Their goal was assimilation: they filed for citizenship, fought in two world wars, joined unions, went to college. They were American, they made sure to tell me. That, and don't shame them.
   That afternoon I wanted a human shield to walk with me to my car. Our Asian-American secretary volunteered. The chief resident, an Indian-American with an Alabama accent, looked at me with sad, baffled, eyes.
   Another friend suggested that when I see the woman in the parking garage again—like you could guarantee I would—I go crazy on her, jabber in fake Arabic, and scream Run! Run! I've got a gun!
   I love the fantasy of doing that far more than the reality. And the woman in the parking garage troubles me more for what she represents than what she is. There, she is truly scary.

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