Malcolm’s brother held my hand at Shady Lane preschool, his first manager and I drank beers together at the bowling greens on Reynolds, his early rap partner drove me home at the end of more than one shitty South Oakland party. We weren’t close, but our lives were relatively intertwined, which is the way of a town like ours.
PITCHFORK BLUE SLIDE PARK MAC
Mac Miller - né Malcolm McCormick - and I grew up within a few blocks of each other. It’s because he looks just like them, because they can see themselves up on the stage behind him, if not next to him … Miller’s world is a hermetic one, and unless it’s one you inhabit, the album holds no appeal. The reason Miller’s mass of fans follow him is not because of his music, at least not completely. In the infamous Pitchfork pan of Blue Slide Park (a rare 1.0 rating), Jordan Sargent wrote: The album turned out to be the first independent release to debut in the top slot on the Billboard 200 since 1995. The playground itself is named for a single shallow tube dug into the hillside, painted cerulean, down which we all slid as children. Mac Miller’s 2011 debut album Blue Slide Park was named for a children’s playground on the southern edge of Frick Park. Every once in a while, to my delight, we did. Jesse decided we were going to do “science camp,” which just meant that every day we walked to Frick Park and clambered over trees and up rocky hillsides, gathering bouquets of sticks and leaves and trying to find animals bigger than a squirrel.
PITCHFORK BLUE SLIDE PARK FULL
After my mom went back to work full time and my dad was in South America for a month, my 11-year-old brother was charged with taking care of me. She could have been writing about my fifth summer. “I was the first human being to see these shadowed trees, this land I would make my pioneer clearing here, near the water.” “In summer and fall I imagined the woods extending infinitely,” she wrote. They were all part of our shared, uneven territory.ĭillard wandered Frick Park, too, the site of so many generations of childhood curiosity. Throughout the first half of the 90s, I bounced from Katie’s Homes and Gardens-worthy flower beds, to Justine’s barely-there strawberry patch, to Stephanie’s plastic play set behind wire fence.
As if Point Breeze hadn’t so much as seen a season change in 50 years.ĭillard’s Point Breeze was an undivided patchwork of backyards, under a canopy of oak and maple - a vast, open space for the neighborhood’s children to roam. These were my streets, my playgrounds, my chipped staircases.
Thirty years later, I finally read it, and I couldn’t believe how spot-on every description was. In 1987, Annie Dillard published An American Childhood, a memoir about our neighborhood, and it won a Pulitzer. But we all shared this peaceful, lush ecosystem, perched on the edge of wilderness. Some of our dads drank too much, some of our moms were mean, some of our brothers were useless, some of our sisters were bad news. Behind those porches, we mostly had nice lives with comfortable parents, and safe walks to decent schools. Point Breeze, the neighborhood where I grew up, is an outgrowth of quiet, porch-lined green streets shooting off the undomesticated park. Some people debate whether Pittsburgh is the Midwest or the Northeast, or somewhere in between, and they’re wasting their time - the Appalachian woods have clearly staked their claim on the city.īut the people who inhabit the city have worked hard to tame the terrain. It’s a wide gap in the middle of the city where forests were allowed to grow through. Frick Park is one of those holes, sprawly and feral, especially for an urban park. Big ravines, chopped-up cliffsides, green-grown vacant lots subsuming the corpses of houses that lost their fight against the earth and time.
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