Buttin' Uglies

So if you read Pittsblog you would have noticed this article from the Rocky Mountain News regarding Pittsburgh.  Peter Leo in the PG noticed it; I can only assume that Peter Leo reads Pittsblog.  A selection from the article:

First impression: [Pittsburgh] is a hard town, filled with hard people who bop around their gun-metal gray burg with nothing but football on their minds...I will tell you this, something I would never tell one of the locals. Pittsburgh is one butt-ugly town...

It is precisely the type of town that would name its professional football team the Steelers. Old mills, long stilled, dot the town. Weeds spill from smokestacks.

Across the Ohio River from where I write this rises downtown Pittsburgh, as dark and forbidding a skyline as you will ever encounter.

Just to the north, right on the river, Heinz Field, home of the Steelers, rises almost cathedral-like, a bright-yellow behemoth that casts shadows on all that surrounds it.

It is, too, a town of bars. I have been here only a short time, but if there is a city block without a bar I haven't driven by it yet...

Alright, let's stop there...

 

If you're from Pittsburgh, you already know that this guy didn't actually visit here; he's slapping together some old copy from, say, 1980, and repackaging it for his editors.  I do not know these "long stilled, old mills" of which he speaks.  Perhaps he dreamt it; dreams are true... in a sense.  Perhaps it was ghost written by Jayson Blair... I don't know. 

 

But, to be fair, I have spent some time in Denver, so I can speak with some level of authority on that City... and do you want to talk about "Butt Ugly"?  Sheesh!

 

Denver is a festering taint stain at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.  It's not so much a City, as it is a place where civilization has splattered to the ground, like a hefty bag filled with meat, tossed out of a passing 747.  It slouches outward, block after block of strip malls and subdivisions, all looking the same, devoid of life.  It oozes outward, unconstrained by topography until it gets to the foothills and it lurches backwards; hell of a flat place for being "mile high".  It is a place upon which people from Texas cast scorn.  It is a 40-year old-housewife-on-Xanax of a City, content to wallow in its vacuousness. It is ugly, bereft of soul.  I wouldn't allow my dog to take a crap there, in the off chance that it might improve the City's image. 

 

In conclusion, Denver can get bent.

FOLLOW UP: Author turns tail after Pittsburgh ex-Pats gang up on him. Still no idea where this 19th Century mill is.