Editorial: Pittsburgh construction signs of life
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You have to start somewhere.
Getting back to some kind of normal after weeks of coronavirus pandemic lockdown is going to take a first step, and Pittsburgh is getting ready to stretch its legs. On Monday, the mayor’s office announced construction projects within the city will be able to get back underway starting Friday.
“Following the leadership of Gov. (Tom) Wolf, and in accordance with strong safety measures, the time is right to slowly restart construction activity in the city,” Mayor Bill Peduto said in a statement.
This is a good move.
Getting construction back underway is a smart place to start because it’s often in the open air, without worries of being in a confined space breathing the same air as dozens of other employees. It works because it can put a lot of people back on the job, many of whom could be small-business or self-employed subcontractors.
But maybe more than anything, it’s a positive step because it is motivational.
Construction is the kind of job that is often a little too visible. It can be noisy. It can get in the way. It can slow down traffic or keep you from parking where you want to park or just make a dusty mess.
But that seems like exactly what we need right now.
For weeks, Pittsburgh has been just like other cities and towns around the state and across the country. Shuttered. Quiet. Unless a business was as vital as a hospital or a grocery store, little was happening. It might have made Parkway East easier to navigate, but it also highlighted the difference between a Pittsburgh open for business and a Pittsburgh closed for quarantine.
There may be no more obvious example of a city hard at work than construction, because a city at work is never at rest. It is constantly fixing, building and improving. The evidence of that is in the orange cones and the hard hats and the sounds of the clattering, whining, buzzing machinery.
Just like Pennsylvanians have become accustomed to the PennDOT construction projects being one of the first signs of spring, construction returning to Pittsburgh can be an affirmation that life does, in fact, go on — even in a pandemic.
It might not be all the jobs. It might not be exactly what we remember from seven weeks or so ago, but we have to start somewhere.