McKees Rocks: An Onion-Domed Diamond...in the Rough

HELLO. The below article was written in 2013, and it has elicited more comments than any other article ever published on this obscure blog.  The editorial board here at Snow and Jaggers regrets any offense that it has caused to many folks who know and love the community of McKees Rocks.  We really do!  And yet, we leave it here on the blog because to take it down would mean eliminating all of the comments that people have made here about their beloved community.  When the article was written, the author was not fully aware of the complicated feelings (memories, hopes, losses, dreams...) that surround all communities where people try to make their lives--especially those communities that have fallen on hard times.  The author was also less than sensitive to the struggles of ethnic and racial minorities in McKees Rocks.  If it helps at all, the writer has since been fired.  The last anyone heard, that author was writing speeches for Ted Cruz.  😕  (Not really.)

        McKees Rocks is to Pittsburgh what Jersey City is to New York: a disreputable younger brother across the river whose name you know, but you're not sure why.  Like an overshadowed sibling, it has its own charms and worthwhile traits, but most people never discover them.  Wikipedia doesn't mention this, but it was here that Pierre Chartiers--a half-Shawnee, half-French fur-trader--had his trading post in the 1750s.

           In local shorthand, this place is called "The Rocks."  It's interesting that Pittsburgh is placed between two towns named after the McKee Family, and both of those towns are located at confluences where large tributaries join up with one of the Burgh's three great rivers.

           McKeesport, of course, is to the southeast of the city at the spot where the Youghiogheny (or Yawk) joins the Monongahela.  McKees Rocks is northwest of the city at the juncture of Chartiers Creek with the Ohio.  (I've made the argument many times that Chartiers Creek would be called "a river" next door in the Buckeye State...)

           I'm sure people make jokes about The Rocks being "on the rocks," but I found the place pleasant enough.  Like many satellite cities in the Pittsburgh region, it is plenty gritty and struggling with a loss of identity and sustainable industry.  And yet, it's a hilly town with beautiful churches and public buildings, steep brick streets, and access to two rivers.

          Here again, it would be a misnomer to call this place a "suburb" of Pittsburgh.  It's a satellite city with its own unique identity and feel.  Consider the ethnic makeup.  The churches in the Onion Domed neighborhood--a part of town known even to my iPhone as "The Bottoms"--are Ukrainian Orthodox, Byzantine Catholic, and Orthodox Church in America--which is largely Russian.  So this place is "The Rocks Bottoms"?  

           The problem with urban ghost towning is that there's always someone watching you when you try to slip into an abandoned building.  And, of course, you're more likely to come across a drug addict or mentally ill homeless person once you get inside.  Here in The Bottoms, a guy started to follow me around, assuming that I was up to no good.  I managed to lose him in an alley, but honestly, I think I could have taken him.

         And he was right anyway: I was up to no good.  Slinking around, admiring the decay, wondering about the lives of those 19th century Slavs and Serbs who made their way to this place, banded together, tried like hell to keep their mother tongues alive, along with their cuisine, and their customs.  They erected onion dome churches to stand on the skyline of this old river town, reminiscent of the domes that preside over the far-off steppes and tundras of their native countryside.  But fields and forests were off limits to them in this new land; around here, the landowners were all of Western European descent.  So they huddled with their own kind in dense urban neighborhoods.  They dug their vegetable gardens in the tiny backyards: beets, and potatoes, and cabbages, and all the cold-tolerant greens of the East.  Then--having spent years dreaming about a new way of life in this place--they set about dreaming of the old way of life in the place they left behind.  Here and now, their greatest urgency was to keep alive the traditions of the old country, clinging to a fading identity.

          Here's the Pittsburgh skyline as seen from McKees Rocks with the Ohio River in the middle ground.  I'll come back with my kayak when the weather is better.