The neighborhoods of Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh has a lot of interesting neighborhoods — Squirrel Hill, oakland, the south side, north shore and Shadyside, among others. I've been out to explore these as well as just to do some reporting. I get sent out to report often in these areas. It could be a car crash like this:

Which I covered on a slow Sunday.

Or it's to a really bad neighborhood. I had to cover a shooting. Here's what happened: At a bunch of public housing projects someone shot a teenager in the face. You could see the shells in the grass across the street and then the body which was blocked off was across the street. The craziest part was that neighbors I talked to said they didn't think much of it because they hear gun shots all the time.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a story out of it really because the police wouldn't release information about what happened, and their PR person had the day off. Go figure.

Anyway, I stuck around the area for a little bit trying to get something out of the SWAT team that was there (because the shooter was apparently still in the area) and my editor called me and said I needed to leave ASAP because I was in a really bad neighborhood.

In a neighborhood I never really would have been in otherwise. Talking to people with life experiences entirely different from mine. And that's what I like.

I'm mostly safe if not always, but I like this kind of nitty gritty part of reporting. Western Pennsylvania is very very hilly, almost mountainous, so the neighborhoods are almost segregated by geography, which is interesting. One minute, you're in an all-white $500,000-house kind of a neighborhood. Keep driving, you're suddenly in a really bad neighborhood.