As a born-and-raised Pittsburgher, I’ll go a step further. Portland, with its elaborate facial hair and abundance of strip clubs, represents irony. Pittsburgh, with its working-class pragmatism, is the opposite: earnest and straightforward. It’s a place where people drink cheap beer and wave their Terrible Towels without self-consciousness. Hipsters take faux working-class attributes —brusque beards, Pabst Blue Ribbon and occupations such as butchery — and integrate them into their lives with an ironic wink and a superiority complex. In Pittsburgh, you can find all of the above, only without the derision and affectation. The natural life span of the hipster has come to an end. What was a lifestyle adopted to make fun of the mainstream has now become the mainstream. There are no more [expletive] hipsters to be looked at (The blog “Look at this [expletive] Hipster” hasn’t been updated since September), and jokes about them — much like every skit on Portlandia — have started to feel a minute or a paragraph too long.
Right, Pittsburghers don't do irony very well. Love it or leave it, it's pretty real around here.
Burgh Diaspora digs deeper into comparing the two cities and points out that Pittsburgh has a large number of assets that are built to last. It dug up this quote about Portland.
Why Portland Sucks And Pittsburgh Does Not
“We’re a small town that does not have a major university, that does not have a major arts school,” Schiff says. “We’re off the map in a number of ways.”
Be back with more thoughts about this.
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