“Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood”

Colter Harper

University Press of Mississippi, $30

Pittsburgh, perhaps more than other cities, feels like a loose confederation of neighborhoods rather than a distinct singularity.

New Yorkers are unequivocal in their New York-ness. Chicagoans may divide themselves along the demilitarized zone between the Cubs and White Sox, but are united as denizens of Carl Sandburg’s City of the Big Shoulders. Philadelphians are belligerent in their Philly bonafides, and if you don’t like it you’re apt to get a battery upside the head for your temerity.

Pittsburghers, though? Pittsburghers are from Squirrel Hill or Morningside or Homewood. The North Side and the South Side could just as well have an ocean between them as the rivers. Perhaps it’s Pittsburgh’s natural topography that separates us. The rivers, the hills, the tunnels. The stunning greenery that erupts in the most unlikely spots.

All help foster an insularity that makes each neighborhood unique unto itself. Quite simply, the history of Pittsburgh is the story of our neighborhoods.

Colter Harper is an ethnomusicologist and musician. His new book “Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood” examines the jazz clubs of the Hill District on a granular level. Harper is not simply interested in the legendary music scene fostered by these clubs, though there is much here dedicated to that, but more so his interest lies in how communities organize themselves and how business and culture come together to create identity. “I have sought to understand jazz as a form of community building and to explore how places were claimed and contested,” writes Harper. “By studying the venues, the lives of local musicians, club owners, listeners, labor organizers, and journalists come into focus, and we begin to see the extensive networks that jazz facilitated during the twentieth century…”

“Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs”

Benjamin Herold

Penguin Press, $32

Journalist Benjamin Herold originally hails from Penn Hills, where he grew up in the 1980s. Now an award-winning reporter based in Philadelphia, Herold returned to the tree-lined streets of his youth for “Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unravling of America’s Suburbs.”

In 2015, Penn Hills made headlines when its school district racked up $172 million in debt. The suburb was on the verge of financial collapse. How this happened and why other suburbs across America were falling apart is Herold’s focus. By turns heartbreaking and infuriating, “Disillusioned” interrogates the dream of suburbia and how that dream has come to look like a Ponzi scheme.

Herold seeks to “understand how the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier were linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who lived there now.”

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