Michael Young

My connection to Pitt goes way back. I was born on the South Side and was an occasionally loud little kid whose family had season tickets at old Pitt Stadium, upper section in the bend towards the end zone towering over Fifth Avenue. But life took me to other places.

After many years of education and teaching at universities elsewhere, I came back to the city and, while working at another school here as COVID reigned, I answered an ad for temporary instructors to fill in after many sudden retirements.  

I thought it would be for just one class in one Fall term but had the thrill of being assigned my single section in the Romanian Room on the first floor of what I later learned the students call “Cathy.” (For a few weeks, hearing snips of conversations, I had wondered how they all seemed to know this one person.)

So, fate had me walking into the Commons Room, finding a corner at a heavy table before class, calculating the arches and their patterns, then into a classroom with pieces from the 1939 World’s Fair as our lintel, marble floor and a mosaic as the back wall — plus the stiff student desks finished by hand with small knives by artisans.

Walking out of there, each day onto the promenade that cuffs three sides of the Commons, it would feel as if I was moving from one Hollywood movie set onto an even more magnificent one. From there, it was usually down into the Ground Floor, which reminds me so much, in its design, of similar cornerstone parts of other grand buildings from the ‘30s like Rockefeller Center that were mainly for the workers. My mind could add old-time features like a news stand stacked with magazines and chewing gum, maybe a shoeshine stand, and I felt even more of a sense of belonging.

Thankfully, I was asked to teach in the Spring and now have five years on the faculty. I have had many wonderful memories there, like the day a prospective student and parent came to my then-classroom, the Italian Room, because the mother was from Italy. I showed them around, and we found the mother’s alma mater carved into the back of one of the hardwood benches.

There are more memories, like coming back from Thanksgiving to find the Christmas tree a local high school had decorated in the French Room; or giving a set of lectures in the archetypical auditorium, CL 324; or racing up to the 36th floor to see out over the city; or watching from a briefly assigned 6th floor office as the evening sun would steal towards Soldiers and Sailors, the hospitals and where the stadium had once been.

When I drive to campus and come up that last rise on Forbes at Craft Avenue between Carlow University and Magee-Womens Hospital, I see the top of the Cathedral, her sharp, four-cornered hat, and usually say, “Hello, Cathy.” Her pale, bright stone will shine, even on a partly cloudy day. The sight is now seeing the countenance of an old friend, and we begin a new day’s conversation.