What Were You Doing When the World's Leaders Came to Pittsburgh?

It seems like a million years ago already, but last month the world’s most important 20 leaders came to Pittsburgh. I was actually pretty excited about the event. As a proud booster of my adopted city I have beat the drum for the ‘burgh on many occasions, even risking ostracization from my birth clan when I rooted for the Steelers over the Seahawks in the 2006 Superbowl.

The media hype leading up to the G20 was cool. Pittsburgh was featured in Forbes, in addition to other well appointed publications and our city’s many virtues were extolled to the ooohs and awes of the maddening crowd….of journalists. But as the event got closer, I started to realize what it meant to host a gaggle of global leaders. Here’s what the G20 meant for us:

1) School closures. Jacob had finally started kindergarten on September 10, a date that I thought was shockingly late, especially since my school year started on August 28th. Josh was in the final throes of his dissertation, and so between the two of us (and the best baby sitter ever, Maddy) we muddled through the late summer/early fall gap in child care, and Jacob got a lot of much deserved personal attention from his adults. And, uh, he also got to watch a lot of Scooby Dooby Doo, Where R U.

But then we got word that the public schools were shutting down for two and half days for the G20, starting on Wednesday, September 23, and that those no-school day were being tacked onto the holiday that was already scheduled for Yom Kippur (Monday, September 28th). So Jacob did not even have 2 full weeks of school before he was out, again, for three and a half days. Perhaps world leaders were hoping to secretly chip away at America’s productivity, one rust-belt city at a time (the next G20 will be in Detroit, right?).

2) Freeway closures. In the weeks leading up to the G20 every time I left the house to cross a river I found myself, mysteriously and suddenly, stopped on the freeway. When the traffic would finally evolve into to a slow crawl I would find myself driving past workers prettying up a little area of the freeway here or there. It looked like the city’s version of what my cousin Cindy calls the “10 minute tidy,” only with concrete instead of throw pillows.

3) A 4,000 person militia. The cops came from all over Western Pennsylvania, and, in some cases, from all over the country. They dressed in uniforms that were so incredibly dark that they looked more like costumes than uniforms. The cops acted like action figures, too; my son got an Iron Man doll for his birthday that says, “Activate the microtron. I will fire you.” The G20 militias warned, directed, ordered about and arrested throngs of curious onlookers with a similar robotic, unimaginative monotone.

4) Newfangled weapons. I was shocked to read that the 4,000 person militia had been authorized to use aural weapons for crowd control that had never before been used on American citizens.

5) Empty streets. On Friday afternoon, the day that the G20 was wrapping up, I took the kids to a farm North of Pittsburgh for raspberry picking. The freeways were empty. EMPTY. Except for the military guards on route 579. Otherwise, we had the roads and the raspberries to ourselves. Here, you can see for yourself:



The rasberries were plump and delicious. There were also hundreds of bees enjoying the berries, which, for some reason, did not sting the children. Perhaps they had been warned not to sting anyone by the Pittsburgh police.



Jacob loves to pick berries, though he hates to eat them. He is an absolute sweetheart.


Casey ate as many berries as she could stuff into her little mouth. Or sometimes she just dumped them on the ground. She loved picking berries, and didn't want to leave.