WEXFORD, Pa. — By the point the doorways open at 4:30 p.m., a boisterous line of fifty hungry folks is looping across the gymnasium lobby at Blessed Francis Seelos Academy. Their goal: to occupy tables on the basketball courtroom and, for the parish’s first time because the pandemic descended in 2020, sit down for an old school Lenten barbecue.
Many patrons are members of the flock — St. Aidan Catholic Parish north of Pittsburgh — and greet one another as longtime associates. However lately, newcomers determine within the combine, too. And a few arrive in a approach that unites two wealthy seams of western Pennsylvania tradition — custom and innovation.
The barbecue, a long-established Friday staple throughout Lent, is roaring again from COVID with an help from one thing decidedly newfangled: an interactive map constructed by native volunteer coders that factors the best way to scores of church buildings, fireplace halls and different locations that provide battered and breaded seafood for the taking. Within the course of, the brand new Pittsburgh helps level the best way to the previous.
“I wish to suppose that this venture helps folks get enthusiastic about these very previous cultural and culinary traditions,” says Hollen Barmer, a Tennessee transplant who got here to Pittsburgh twenty years in the past and began the map in 2012 for her fish-fry-loving self.
“Fish fries,” Barmer likes to say, “are an journey.”
TWO PARTS OF PITTSBURGH
At this second in its historical past, Pittsburgh is working to mix its fabled industrial yesterdays with a Twenty first-century financial system primarily based more and more on companies and innovation — one thing the map venture displays.
“Permitting folks to work together with one thing conventional by know-how, it provides a component to it that appeals to a unique group of individuals,” says Ellie Newman, a member and the previous chief of the nonprofit Code for Pittsburgh, which works with Barmer to function the map.
Throughout Lent, 1000’s of western Pennsylvanians — Catholic and non-Catholic alike — stream into Friday afternoon fish fries. Some choose up for takeout. Some chow down proper there — fish and shrimp, fries and cole slaw and mac and cheese, typically pierogies or an area noodle-and-cabbage delicacy referred to as haluski.
Western Pennsylvania loves the previous, however the barbecue itself is steered by some very trendy forces.
Lengthy a practice in American cities with Catholic communities, significantly across the Nice Lakes, fish fries surged in recognition after the Second Vatican Council primarily informed the trustworthy in 1966 that the follow of not consuming meat on Fridays was optionally available — besides throughout Lent, the interval between Ash Wednesday and Easter. That made February to April a concentrated interval of fish consumption.
Then got here the metal trade’s foundering within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. That upended the area, stole parts of civic pleasure and whipped up a fervor for traditions that shouted, loudly, “Pittsburgh!”
“There was a way of destabilization — of `Who’re we?’ And other people tended to focus on issues that symbolized the neighborhood,” says Leslie Przybylek, senior curator on the Heinz Historical past Heart in Pittsburgh.
Meals touchstones like fish fries, pierogies and the “ cookie desk ” — a western Pennsylvania wedding ceremony staple — turned signifiers of identification. On the similar time, technological advances in frozen food and the expansion of quick meals had been making fish extra accessible. The longtime presence of powerhouse regional fish distributor Robert Wholey & Co. additionally honed native tastes.
“Folks in Pennsylvania are used to good fish,” says Invoice Yanicko, a funeral director in suburban West Deer Township who runs the neighborhood barbecue at Our Woman of the Lakes Parish. “They actually don’t need to see a cookie-cutter triangle fish.”
Overlay all that with a strong interactive map (and pent-up pandemic power) and you’ve got a potent combine that helps folks in western Pennsylvania overcome the geographic hesitations of the area’s hills and valleys, and exit looking for fish.
“Placing it in a digital body and inspiring folks to have interaction with it, it provides a degree of vocabulary to it that makes a distinction,” says Przybylek, who favors the fry on the Swissvale Fireplace Division, simply exterior the town. “Totally different generations interact in tales in numerous methods. It actually takes a meals custom and places it right into a platform that speaks to them on a unique degree.”
MAPPING DELICIOUSNESS
At present, whereas church buildings stay a mainstay of Lenten fish fries, fireplace departments give them a run for his or her cash — of which there’s tons at play. Each entities use fish fries as volunteer-staffed fundraisers to offset price range challenges, and every works exhausting to face out. “It takes just a little military to make this occur,” says Keith Younger, a retired businessman who helps with the St. Aidan fry.
Code for Pittsburgh, a bunch designed to create locations the place “civics and know-how meet,” is all-volunteer as effectively. Its various initiatives embody a meals entry map of Pittsburgh and a cartographic catalog that helps monitor vehicle-pedestrian accidents.
The volunteer coding classes held to construct the fish-fry map are — say it? — fish-forward. Swedish Fish candies are set out. Bowls of Goldfish crackers are distributed. Radiohead’s “Bizarre Fishes” performs.
“It’s sort of the proper marriage of issues — a crew of super-nerdy individuals who know all about maps and know all about coding, and fish fries, that are simply so Pittsburgh,” Newman says. “I don’t know of every other metropolis that has this type of obsession. … As quickly as folks within the group heard about it, they had been immediately hooked on it.”
Pittsburgh’s rising status as an innovation hub — with corporations from Google to Uber establishing beachheads right here — is usually forged as current. However innovation lies on the coronary heart of the area’s historical past. The metal trade that constructed it into an industrial powerhouse was a cutting-edge transformation of its day, and advances starting from early motion pictures to the polio vaccine have roots right here.
David Schorr, an IT analyst from the Pittsburgh suburb of West Mifflin, is thought regionally as “ The Codfather ” for his very public affinity to — and expertise with — fish fries. He is aware of the place to go for every part — together with the locations to safe, as he places it, “handmade pierogies personally pinched by church women.” The interactive map, he says, opens myriad prospects of fish-fry forays.
“It makes it a treasure hunt: `Oh — let’s go to that neighborhood,’” Schorr says. “They go, ‘Oh, look, this one’s on my approach house from work.’ Or `I’ve to go go to Aunt Edna and we’ll be driving proper by it.’ Or, `Oh, they’ve sauerkraut soup.’ Or, `I don’t like pollock. This one has cod. I’m going there.’”
The map, Barmer and Newman say, is designed to do exactly that — flip the western Pennsylvania fish-fry tradition into an journey stamped onto the panorama that fosters neighborhood engagement and understanding for natives and newcomers alike.
“As issues turn out to be extra globalized and cities are inclined to look an increasing number of the identical, there’s one thing interesting about coming to a spot like Pittsburgh that also has issues like this which have very deep roots in the neighborhood,” Newman says. “Issues could change round you yearly, however you recognize that yearly you possibly can go to your similar church basement or fireplace corridor and get that fish sandwich.”
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Ted Anthony, director of latest storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Related Press, has been writing about American tradition since 1990. Observe him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted
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Related Press faith protection receives assist by the AP’s collaboration with The Dialog US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely liable for this content material.
