Following a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I am ready to leap higher than Jennifer Beals in a sweat-stained unitard to express my newfound love for the steel city. Flashdance, filmed in the early 1980’s, portrayed a rough and tumble town where a girl could dance at night only if she knew how to weld during the day. The rules have sinced changed, however, since yours truly can’t weld to save his life and spent the day gallery hopping and dining on Thai food rather than melting bronze pipes in a factory. My hands are almost too nimble for chopsticks, so I can’t imagine how they might handle a blowtorch.

To say that I am breaking the story on Pittsburgh renaissance might obfuscate the recently published piece in the NY Times highlighting the resurgence of Pittsburgh as a bright spot on the confluence of three rivers: http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/travel/06hours.html?incamp=article_popular_5. This fluvial fun fact as my only background on Pittsburgh prior to embarking on the trip, I shoved off with the Times article in tow set on investigating their finds and doing some trailblazing of my own.

The most striking part about arriving in Pittsburgh is adjusting to the barrage of geographical features that emerge as you drive west into the city. In the sprawling Cleveland environs, any slight increase in elevation gets labeled a “mount,” and dense, lush forests have long been bulldozed over by suburban wasteland. At the foot of the Allegheny mountains, Pittsburgh meshes urban and rural and industrial and pastoral all at once. Staring across the city skyline, lofty skyscrapers mesh with forests and factories, and the pesky red stain of the Heinz corporation marks prominent streets, buildings, and ballparks in every conceivable direction.

The only name proliferating more than Heinz in this riverside town is that of Andy Warhol, Pittsburgh’s most fashionable native son, second perhaps only next to Orrin Hatch, that is. Despite drug abuse, sodomy, and even his spiteful claim, “I am from nowhere,” no other city has best memorialized the 20th century’s most commercially successful artist. Warhol’s name not only lines the doors to a 7 story museum dedicated to his collection, but also to the bridge that gets you there. Having to pay one dollar for every minute of fame Warhol conjectured I’d have in the future just to enter this establishment initially made me frown like a technicolor Mao, but the price of admission mattered little once I made my way through the opening exhibit of the museum. Inspired by Warhol’s affinity for the industrial, the exhibits themselves are housed primarily in concrete loft spaces, which lends to the approachability of the subject matter. A stuffy Louvre it is not. Here children play with the interactive installation art and elephant wallpaper, while adults gawk jealously at the dated celebrity photographs of Jodie Foster, Jerry Hall, and an infant Mel Gibson.

More than simply showcasing Warhol’s celebrity, the museum celebrates the artist and the principles by which he lived through its loud, bizarre, and playful exhibits. Most noble, perhaps, is the simple fact that there is a gigantic structure financed by the Carnegie Institute to honor a drug using eccentric gay man steps from the Pittsburgh Pirates stadium. It is, in fact, the largest museum in the world dedicated to one person. Though Andy moved on from Pittsburgh and found a home in New York, his work undoubtedly emerged from a Pittsburgh past where he witnessed mass production and the kind of commercial America he invoked in so much of his pop art.

A city that has long celebrated production in every arena, Pittsburgh’s art scene shows no signs of cutbacks anytime soon. The Warhol Museum, while formidable, is not the only place to see experimental pieces, as nearby the Mattress Factory houses a variety of extraordinary installation pieces. The museum is dedicated to installation art and allows artists to build site specific works. All of this lends to an air of something often missing from museums: fun. The installations at the Mattress Factory were inventive, interactive, and frequently terrifying. Though certainly more cerebral than a theme park, the Mattress Factory spiked more adrenaline than I had anticipated.

Our tour began in the basement of the museum, where Yumi Kori’s piece, “kamata,” started our journey on a bit of a terrifying note. Kamata, which means, “in the distance,” in Japanese, is a pitch black room with a bright, rectangular light at one end, beckoning viewers. Perhaps it was just my guilty conscience, but I felt like I was walking into hell. White noise clouds your thinking and the dizzying darkness increases your paranoia. Luckily, hidden handrails guide the journey.

Elsewhere in the museum, other exhibits play with darkness and the reactions of visitors to this darkness. In the permanent collection a series of installations by James Turell confront viewers with two visions: what they see and what they think they see. Traveling in the darkest room in which I have ever been, I open and close my eyes several times to see if I can tell the difference between the two. Open, shadowy figures dance, floating in space. Closed, my dizziness stops, but the shadows remain, forcing me to wonder what I imagine and what is out there. Adding to my puzzlement are the other visitors, none of whom I see but only hear, smell, and feel, as my size 14 shoes crunch on those beneath me.

Light shines elsewhere in the museum, most brilliantly perhaps in Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Dots Mirrored Room” pictured below.

Part Studio 54, part McDonald’s PlayPlace, this exhibit invites viewers to dance, pose, and groom themselves among the bevy of mirrors that cover the space. Again, visual wizardy makes the room appear much larger than it is, though the laughter and frivolity of the space is no trick.

After climbing through installations, some of which cut through the floorboards and jutted out the windows, I explored the neighborhood that houses such funky displays. Understandably, this north side spot is artsy and chock full of homosexuals. I’m not sure what it is about old Victorian homes and middle aged gay men, but for this neighborhood, dubbed the Mexican War Streets district, it was like moths to a flame. Everywhere I turned there was a gorgeous home mid-refurbishment, much like the gorgeous Inn on Mexican War Streets, shown below:

In a nearby coffee shop, I asked how much rent was around the neighborhood. The chatty barista mentioned casually that she and her roommate pay a total of $700 a month for a 2.5 bedroom home on two floors. Were I not enjoying so much a vacation from work, I might have quit my job and moved at that very moment. Though extraordinarily comfortable among the Victorians, the gays, and the cheap rents, I was determined to see the real steel city and use my streetwise sensibilities to get to know the gritty underbelly of this industrial giant.

I began this quest at an upscale Asian-fusion restaurant called Soba, in the trendy district of Shadyside. What the area lacked in grit it made up for in boutique cupcake shops and patio dining. The restaurant was on the elegant side, with a never-ending waterfall and inventive cocktails, like my martini with shaved almonds, coconut milk, gold sake, and amaretto. Over the course of the rather luxurious meal, I devoured savory rare grilled Ahi tuna, peach-infused pork fried rice, calamari with lime and chile, and a dessert of fresh peaches, almond ice cream, and vanilla chantilly: a typical steelworker’s dinner, no doubt!

Though my ability to sleuth out the city of 1980’s films may have faltered, my sense of direction had great assistance from a new addition to the car: a GPS system.

Sleek, silver, and eerily prophetic, the GPS system knows exactly where you are and exactly where you want to go. All you need to do is type in your destination address, and it navigates you there, even accounting for detours and traffic. When you’ve made a mistake, it gentle proclaims, “recalculating,” and sets you on a new course. Letting this Jesus take the wheel, I arrived at Brillobox, a bar and concert venue named, of course, for Warhol’s ever-proliferating pieces.

The bar is meticulously designed with bright, red vinyl benches, a glowing jukebox, and kitschy flair adorning the bottles of liquor and tables. Second only to the advantage of sipping on inexpensive beer is the freedom to smoke inside. Though I don’t smoke, I revel in the bar smoke, this perhaps getting me as close to the Pittsburgh of old as I’ve been all day. Brillobox, however, is a bar distinctly of the present. Its young clientele, wearing everything from biker shorts to the latest in American Apparel t-shirt dresses, suggest anything but an archaic city. I wonder constantly what makes Pittsburgh outshine Cleveland, making my city by the lake look more like the dark installations I’d seen earlier that day and Pittsburgh the mirrored room with sexy young people and bright lights.

Sipping on my bottled Framboise, the lights of Brillobox start to blur and I realize that it’s been a day good old Andy might have enjoyed himself. Too tired to dance like a maniac, I return to my hotel to rest up for tomorrow and clean the non-existent grit from underneath my fingernails.