YINZ RUN CLUB | PHOTO BY RODGER OBLEY

Charles Pooler rowed his boat down Penn Avenue, past the fires in Downtown’s darkened skyscrapers. Between the dips of his oars in the floodwater, Pooler thought he heard singing.

He traced the sound to the Roosevelt Hotel. As he docked near a second-story window, the astonished reporter saw a sight he’d never forget: There, singing in the gloom, were 600 guests who’d been stranded for nearly a week.

They’d dubbed themselves the Flood Club, choosing a theme song (“River, Stay ’Way from My Door”) and a mascot (a 1-year-old girl named Rosemary). For entertainment, they’d turned to the traveling theater troupes who’d been stranded alongside them, passing time by singing, dancing and dressing mannequins in “what had been beautiful mink coats … floated from the smashed display windows of a nearby department store.”

They’d just endured the worst natural disaster in city history: the St. Patrick’s Day Flood of 1936 that had killed dozens. No one would have blamed them for swearing off Pittsburgh for life. But the Flood Club, found Pooler, had already planned a reunion.

“We’re going to meet annually on St. Patrick’s Day, right in this hotel,” the club’s president said, “and talk over the funny things that have happened to all of us.”

Finding Good Gangs

From the city we live in to the events we endure, our lives are shaped by the people around us — and, to a surprising degree, by whether we call them our friends.

“We need gangs,” the novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said. Decades of research suggest he was right: In any given year, positive social connections can slash our chance of dying by roughly 50%. Without them, our risk of heart disease, depression and other ailments spike — health effects that Dr. Vivek Murthy, the nation’s former surgeon general, compares to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

“So yes,” said Vonnegut, “I tell people to formulate a little gang. And, you know, you love each other.”

The Flood Club was on to something. Whether we’re native yinzers, recent transplants or travelers marooned Downtown, nearly all of us will, at some point, find ourselves needing some friends.

What does it take to make them in Pittsburgh?

Psychological Safety

PHOTO BY RODGER OBLEY

It’s a Wednesday evening in the Strip District: still warm and not quite September, though low clouds signal that summer is ending.

Dan Lampmann doesn’t mind. In a parking lot near Cinderlands Warehouse, he leaps and waves his arms, leading his friends — a hundred of them, give or take — through a series of calisthenics.

PHOTO BY RODGER OBLEY

“First-timers, raise your hands!”

Cue hugs and hollers, handshakes and high-fives. Cue applause and arcs of silly string. Lampmann’s gang of “local, lovable, misfit runners” may be Pittsburgh’s fastest-growing friend group, and tonight, it’s easy to see why: Yinz Run Club’s twice-weekly events feel, even to first-timers, like family reunions in Asics.

“My family moved a couple of times when I was a kid,” Lampmann explains. “I know how scary it is to be 10 years old and to walk up to someone who might want to be my friend and ask, ‘Hey, do you wanna play catch?’” By founding the volunteer-operated Yinz Run Club in 2021, he says, “I wanted to build something that made that process easier.”

PHOTO BY RODGER OBLEY

It started with rock-paper-scissors. In the club’s early days, Lampmann told runners to find someone they didn’t know and play best two out of three. “And then I’d run around and scream with the biggest ‘gym-teacher energy’ possible,” he says, laughing. He figured, “They can relax and think, ‘No matter how awkward I am, I’ll never be as weird as Dan.’”

It’s a feeling scientists call psychological safety, and it’s often what’s missing when we fail to make a friend.

Enter Yinz Run Club. Its 3-mile runs begin and end at breweries, coffee shops and other “third spaces” where members feel comfortable. When new runners join, it’s a volunteer’s job to introduce them to somebody else. Pacers ensure no one gets lost or left behind. There’s a 1-mile option, too.

PHOTO BY RODGER OBLEY

Some members have found romance; others have found self-confidence. One runner told me the club had saved her life. And nearly everyone I spoke with found the thing they needed most: a gang of friends in Pittsburgh.

“It grows exponentially,” says runner Ricky Gupta. “You’ve got a hundred people here. You meet one person, and they introduce you to five more. And over time, you start to build a community.”

PHOTO BY RODGER OBLEY

To Lampmann, that’s the whole point — the running, he says, is secondary.

“Ultimately, we want you to find your people. That’s why we’re here. The running is just a vehicle for building community. And community is a vehicle for supporting a city.”

Bowling Together

There are plenty of people for Lampmann to point to locally: They’re in churches and corner bars, ethnic clubs and cafes. In groups for Girls Who Walk and for Pittsburgh’s self-described Slowpokes. In gangs of music lovers, movie lovers and lovers of Non-Boring Books. They’re craft-beer lovers and Sick of Drinking Millennials, Nerdy Ladies and Explorer Chicks, Toastmasters and introverts.

They’re even — as I learned one Sunday in Crafton — nudists who love to bowl.

Cheekily titled “Balls Out Bowling,” Pittsburgh’s nude bowling event sparks social-media smirks whenever it’s held. But beneath the blacklights at Crafton Ingram Lanes, the bowlers themselves may get the last laugh. Is genitalia present? You betcha. (And lots of it.) But the nudity fades from the foreground faster than one might expect. Far more striking are the bowlers’ fluorescent smiles and the sense that the Pittsburgh Area Naturists — adults of every color, shape, gender and age — are having an impossibly good time.

“Really, it’s a social group for people who happen to be naked,” says the group’s founder, Brandon. (The naturists asked that their last names not be used.) Balls Out is its biggest event, but the club meets elsewhere at least twice a month: There’s naked trivia, naked karaoke and even a naked tour of the Mattress Factory. Smaller events draw 20 to 40 people each; Balls Out brings twice that or more and is held two to three times a year.

It’s a fitting event for a bowling alley. A quarter-century ago, political scientist Robert Putnam wrote “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” a seminal book about the decline of American social clubs. As membership in churches, community groups and bowling leagues plummeted, social isolation became a fact of modern life — a trend that has only intensified since Putnam’s book was published in 2000. (In January, The Atlantic reported that “the share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years.”)

Brandon knows the decline from experience. When he moved to Pittsburgh in 2017, he found his social scene in shambles: most of the area’s naturist groups had fizzled out or disbanded. Alone in a new city without the thing he loved — naturism, he says, helped him battle a debilitating case of body dysmorphia — Brandon decided to build something new.

The Pittsburgh Area Naturists started small: a naked movie night here, a naked game night there. The group outgrew Brandon’s living room, its membership swelling thanks to an ethos of wholehearted acceptance.

Derek, a regular, agrees. First-time naturists tend to be nervous, he says, asking jittery questions about where to sit (“On a towel, always”) or what to do if they find themselves excited (“Just don’t poke anyone with it”). But once they see what the club is about — inclusivity, body positivity, emphatically non-sexual nudity — it doesn’t take long to feel like part of the gang. “When you’re with the naturists,” he says, “the scariest part of nude karaoke isn’t getting naked onstage.

“The scariest part is hitting the high notes.”

When You’re Smiling

A survey by Chamber of Commerce, a product research firm for real estate agents and entrepreneurs, last year ranked Pittsburgh among America’s loneliest cities. If you’re new around here, it’s easy to feel like an outsider, as if your neighbors have known each other since birth. (And most of them probably have.) Adding to the problem is the fact that two of Pittsburgh’s outsized populations — people who live alone and people over 60 — are the demographics most at risk of social isolation.

Anne Kolesar belongs to both.

“I’m one of those people who’s pretty much on their own,” she says. “And so, it’s really important for me to have friends.”

SIXTY PLUS AND SMILING | PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

She moved to Pittsburgh in her later years — not really knowing anyone here — and wanted to make friends. She turned to Meetup, an online platform for social groups globally. Launched in 2002 (and inspired, in part, by “Bowling Alone”), Meetup includes hundreds of Pittsburgh-area clubs. But when Kolesar first encountered it, most were focused on young people. So she started a group for seniors: Sixty Plus and Smiling.

“I thought, ‘If this lasts long enough for me to make two or three good friends in Pittsburgh, I’ll have accomplished my goal,’” she says.

PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

It took a year for the group to get going. Platforms like Meetup can help sustain the effort. Using Meetup to schedule brunches, matinee movies and more, Sixty Plus and Smiling now includes more than 1,600 Pittsburgh-area seniors, and a spin-off group has formed in the South Hills. And virtual events can be “a lifesaver,” says Kolesar, for people who can’t meet up in person.

PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

“It’s interesting,” she says via Zoom. Betty Morgan, a good friend who was with the group nearly from the beginning, has taken the leadership reins of the group since Kolesar spends several months a year on her farm in Western New York. There, Kolesar’s surrounded by nature. She kayaks. She basks in peace and quiet.

It’s beautiful, she says, “but sometimes it’s lonely. I start to miss my friends. And then I think, ‘Time to go back to Pittsburgh.’”

Shelter From the Storm

From the Strip District, Yinz Run Club’s 3-mile loop takes runners Downtown, past what was once the Roosevelt Hotel. The low clouds look to be seconds from releasing a storm, and as the runners return to Cinderlands, the skies open and wind blows leaves from the trees. Summer is over — the days ahead will be dark, cold, dismal and damp.

But, like the Flood Club before them, the runners are having the time of their lives. The gang poses, laughing and soaked, for a group photo. Then they go inside to get out of the rain. And, you know, to love each other.

Ryan Rydzewski is an author based in Aspinwall. His next book explores fulfillment — the weird and wonderful ways we pursue it, share it, and help others find it, too.