please excuse any mistakes or fabrications.
About an hour after you pass through the bustling heart of Pittsburgh, going north on Route 8, you come to Butler– a former steel-processing town in the hills of western Pennsylvania. The town was named after Maj. Gen. Richard Butler, who was killed in the Battle of the Wabash (a.k.a: St. Clair’s Defeat) in Ohio in the year 1791. By 1802, the majority of the town’s residents were of Scottish, Irish, or German decent– many of whom were spreading westward from Connecticut.
Butler was once home to many who worked long, tiring days at the ARMCO steel factory. These men and women would spend hour after hour sending giant sheets of metal through cutting and shaping machines, which, if not operated with caution, could claim a finger, a hand, or a life. After this factory– which was one of the main sources of employment in town– was bought out by some faceless company, many turned a quick and helpless eye to any paying job that could be found. With the more recent arrival of Wal-Mart, Target, and other nationwide franchises, residents can at least rejoice that their new jobs are safer.
On the southern side of town, Center Avenue runs north and makes a steady decline down a long hill. At the bottom of this hill, the road splits into two streets; one continues west past a bank, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and many other small shops on either side of the road before it splits again. If you turn right at that point, you will pass a small convenience store– which sells Push Pops, Orange Sherbet Push-Ups, Candy Rings, and baseball cards, among other things– after which you immediately begin crossing the Viaduct. No one ever explained to me what a viaduct is, but from my singular experience of the concept it is a long, curving bridge for vehicles and pedestrians that is made of rusting, green-painted metal and has gaping cracks and holes at the places where one section of pavement on the bridge meets the next. The railings along the sidewalks of a viaduct are the kind of steel-bar railings you might see lining the front porch of an old home– just enough space between the bars to scare the children who are afraid of heights. Speaking of height, a viaduct must also be about fifty feet above the ground; but how high it seems is directly proportional to how young you are. The kinds of things that exist below a viaduct include, but are not exclusively limited to: decommissioned trains, rusty train tracks and grimy train yards; rocky, winding creeks that freeze in the winter; dirt roads that crawl alongside these creeks; small soccer fields that have a large, permanent dirt patch in the middle third of the field.
If you continue crossing the Viaduct– jumping over the cracks and holes that let you peek through the bridge to the ground far below– you will eventually come to Main Street. If you could see a topographical cross section of Main Street, it would look like a “W” stretched out over a few miles; only, the middle hill is smaller and longer than the other two. The Viaduct connects to Main Street at the valley between the two left hills of the “W”.
The hill to the left of the Viaduct and Main Street intersection is so steep that it will make your car squeal, and the road going straight up it is made of red bricks that makes your tires hum, as many of the roads in that area do. Along this road and all the others that wind around this hillside are the houses that tell you that you are in the poorer areas of the North. While nearly every house is a two-story, with an attic and a basement, they are usually so small that you will feel cramped in the summer and cozy in the winter in whichever room you are in. The roofs of these houses are steeply slanted– an apparent effort to keep snow from accumulating there and causing a cave-in. It works most of the time, but on days when the snow is fast and heavy, these roofs quickly become the sledding fantasy land of every child, and except for a few stray rumors spread by bragging children, the idea remains a fantasy.
Going the other direction down Main Street, you will pass two car dealerships, one on each side of the road. The one on the left side– the Ford dealership– is better because it is a brick building, and children can see the newer models through the showroom windows, but can’t figure out how the men got the cars inside. The dealership on the right side of the road is only worth mentioning because it has strands of multi-colored, triangular flags running in between the tall poles around the gravel lot, and those are also fun for children to look at.
The town’s main post office is just past the car dealerships, on the right. It is a large, one-story, yellow-brick building with a long wheelchair ramp zig-zagging back and forth across the front of it. If you are on a long walk with your mother and she stops here to mail some important envelopes, you can ask her why the walls inside the post office are covered with small silver doors with numbers on them, and she will probably know.
Up the hill past the post office is an office building, and past that is Butler Memorial Park. Whether you are young or old, you probably won’t know what it is supposed to be a reminder of, but if you are young it makes you remember, each time you go there, that life-size, cast-iron cannons are fun to climb on. This park would be better if it was bigger, had more cannons, and was not right next to the dentist office where you once had minor surgery.
Across the street from the cannon park is the Butler County Court House. It has wide, fancy concrete steps that lead up to a monstrously tall building. You cannot count how many towers it has, but you know that it has a square one with a clock on every side that lights up at night. “Don’t act up, or they’ll lock you in there,” your mother might say.
If you have enough energy to keep walking past this point, you will soon grow tired as you pass blocks and blocks of department stores, insurance offices, and cheap restaurants. When there are no parades to flock to on Main Street– with those wonderful homemade, horse-drawn floats, and the high school and community college marching bands, and the clowns who toss candy to the running, pleading children– the strip of antique-looking stores resumes its usual incapacity to draw more than a small daytime crowd. Several stores closed long ago, but resiliently continue to stand their ground against any attempt to change them into something more useful than a lingering reminder of one’s childhood. Adam’s Toy Store, Woolworth’s, and the Hot Dog Shop are three that have surrendered to newer, but nonetheless useless, business ventures.
Eventually you would come to where the last hill of Main Street begins, but it is quite certain that your mother would never make you walk this far. Here, you will see the First Presbyterian Church on the left, and diagonally across the street is a used car lot ( they also have the multi-colored, triangular flags). As the hill gets steeper, you pass several beauty parlors on the left and a cluster of houses on the right, just behind a big, silver guardrail. This hill is steep like the one at the other end of Main Street, and your car will probably squeal in pain, and also in terror because of the steep drop-off on the right side of the road.
When you get to the top of the hill, there is an endless graveyard on your left. Your grandfather– the one you never met– is buried there, along with so many other people you never met. Near its entrance, you can see a fancy, blue and gold sign that says: “WELCOME TO BUTLER”; and just below it, on the same pole, another one reads: “NORTH SIDE CEMETERY ENTRANCE –>”.
