I decided as a third grader at Greenfield Elementary School that when I grew up, I wanted to be the editor of The Pittsburgh Press.
It didn’t quite work out that way. For starters, the newspaper no longer exists. And for that matter, neither does the city where I was raised.
Sure, some parts are still there. Primanti's still piles French fries onto its sandwiches, Gene Collier still writes columns at the Post-Gazette, and the Steelers running game still depends on a guy named Harris. But so much has changed.
Same for me. I grew up in Pittsburgh, went to college in Pittsburgh, started my career in Pittsburgh, and began raising my family in Pittsburgh. Fate intervened – a strike in 1992 swept The Press off the map, along with my childhood dream. It turned out my experience working at the Press and Post-Gazette played well elsewhere, and I went on to jobs at the Detroit Free Press, The New York Times and Time magazine before starting my own design firm. Today, I live outside of New York City and work with companies like Google, Amazon, AT&T and American Express to help them tell better stories about their products and services.
But part of me never left, just like Gene Collier's white hair. And so next month begins a life experiment nearly 30 years in the making: What would it be like to move back to Pittsburgh?
We're returning for a month, staying in Shadyside and renting an office at nearby Bakery Square. Nearby, as in everything in Pittsburgh, is nearby. It remains a city that is remarkably compact, with rarely more than 10 minutes separating one destination from another. That said, my GPS is woefully out of date. I'm still hankering for an O dog and a stop at Honus Wagner for a Steelers jersey. During our last visit we stayed in a Lawrenceville hotel that was once a vocational school all Pittsburgh school children were required to attend, myself included, to acquire the skills they'd need to build a life in our working-class city.
As it turns out, many Allderdice classmates stayed here. Some drive buses, some run venture capital funds. Others moved on to become CEOs, rodeo cowboys, football stars, editors and television personalities. I've tried to come back every year — for a Steelers game, to visit with my brother and his family in Squirrel Hill, and a stop at Mineo's before heading back to the airport or turnpike. Those visits have been brief, too short to unravel the rail trails that allow bicyclists to traverse Pittsburgh in entirely new ways, to work and play in spaces left for dead when the steel industry vanished, and to spend time with the visionaries who are transforming the city of my youth to a city of the future.
For the month of July, the world headquarters of Joe Zeff Design moves to a building shared with Google, with a koi pond out front and oversized windows overlooking bike paths and historic architecture.
In Pittsburgh.
Who would have thunk it?
Certainly not that third-grader.
See yinz around tahn.
Joe Zeff is president of Joe Zeff Design Inc.