During his first media availability with the Philadelphia Eagles, former Steelers quarterback Kenny Pickett acknowledged that he wanted to leave Pittsburgh in advance of Friday’s trade that sent him across the state.
He also did little to tamp down a narrative that he pouted his way through much of the last four months, including a refusal to dress for the Week 17 game in Seattle when it became clear he wouldn’t start.
When asked about that storyline surrounding the Seahawks game by the Philadelphia media Monday, Pickett said, “That goes back to a lot of the communication behind closed doors that didn’t go the way that I feel like they went in how it’s getting released. There was a plan there for that game. It went down exactly the way it was planned to go down that entire week.”
That was quite a non-answer answer. In that situation, any answer besides, “It’s not true, I never refused to dress,” is going to leave people continuing to assume you refused to dress.
In terms of the reported trade request, once the Steelers signed Russell Wilson, Pickett said, “It just felt like it was time from the things that transpired and (I) wanted to get a chance to go somewhere else to continue to grow my career.
“It was behind closed doors. I’m confident in the way that I handled it. I handled it the way I should’ve handled it. I’m excited to be here. It worked out so well that Philly was the place I ended up landing in, so I think everything happens for a reason and I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”
Kenny Pickett says he felt it was time to move on from Pittsburgh and go somewhere he could grow his career #Eaglespic.twitter.com/YCYO3Z0FEY
When Pickett says, “It was time,” how much time did he really give it? He was given the starter’s job four weeks into his first regular season. The team benched twice and eventually cut the starter (Mitch Trubisky), who had the job before him. Then they let the guy who took it from Pickett (Mason Rudolph) walk out the door to Tennessee even though he was excellent in winning the last three games of the regular season to guide the team to the playoffs.
Pickett didn’t even take one snap under new offensive coordinator Arthur Smith, and he wasn’t willing to endure one training camp battle from Wilson for his starting job.
Did anyone along the way tell Pickett the history of quarterbacks being challenged for their starting job in Pittsburgh? Kordell Stewart was challenged by the likes of Kent Graham and Mike Tomczak and got it back, eventually leading the team to the 2001 AFC Championship game. At least Wilson has a Hall of Fame track record and (hopefully) something left in the tank.
Four years into his career, future Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw started what would become a Super Bowl season on the bench behind Joe Gilliam.
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Terry Hanratty yielded the starter’s job to Bradshaw in 1971 and stayed with the team all the way through 1976 and won two Super Bowl rings as a result.
• First Call: A new contract for a new Steeler; Kenny Pickett ripped on ESPN; another stop for Josh Dobbs • Duquesne’s Keith Dambrot praises Pitt’s Jeff Capel, rebukes Panthers’ NCAA snub • Madden Monday: Steelers ‘did themselves a favor’ by trading Kenny Pickett to Philadelphia
Sometimes, the road gets tough. Now, through this trade, it may have gotten tougher. Sure, Pickett got his wish to leave Pittsburgh. He’s even going to the Eagles, the team he grew up rooting for as a child.
But in terms of playing time, there is much less of a chance of Pickett wedging his way past Jalen Hurts than there would’ve been here replacing Wilson.
To borrow a favorite cliche of Mike Tomlin’s, that’s a far cry from “smiling in the face of adversity.” That’s just sending a frowny face emoji in a text.
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When Pickett was drafted by the Steelers in 2022, even proponents of the pick understood that he may have had some limitations.
He didn’t have a cannon, but his arm was strong enough. He wasn’t a dynamic scrambler, but he certainly moved well enough. He wasn’t as tall as Big Ben, but he was big enough. His hands weren’t large, but, gosh darn it, those thumb stretching exercises were getting the job done well enough.
Basically, physically, Pickett was enough… enough. Theoretically, what was supposed to make him worthy of a first-round pick was everything else.
His smarts. His maturity. His poise. His leadership. His toughness. His command and knowledge of the game. All the things he exhibitted on a daily basis at the University of Pittsburgh and through his first year and half with the Steelers.
All those intangibles were going to heighten the average tangibles he had to the point that he was a championship-contending NFL quarterback.
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Unfortunately by the end of his brief Steelers career, Pickett’s good physical gifts weren’t close to being good enough. And all those seemingly wonderful off-the-field traits ended up being detractors instead of multipliers.
Someone with so much alleged poise wouldn’t have reacted so negatively, so quickly to Rudolph staying under center late last year, and Wilson getting signed this offseason.
Maybe those positive qualities will manifest once more in Philadelphia if called upon should Hurts falter or get injured. If not, though, if Pickett thought he had had it tough in Pittsburgh, I wonder how he’ll handle criticism in a town that basks in its own reputation for dishing it out.
Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via X. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.
The Parkway East’s Commercial Street Bridge is about to blow – but it’s not happening on Wednesday night.
PennDOT say they were going to bring down the bridge sometime between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Wednesday, but around 8 p.m officials and security said the explosion was postponed.
The demolition will be shown live on PennDOT’s project page or 511 PA, which also has cameras placed along the project’s detour routes.
Watch the live stream here:
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A crowd of about 100 people gathered Wednesday evening at the Summerset at Frick Park residential development for a front-row view of the bridge demolition.
The atmosphere felt more like a neighborhood block party than a construction event. Families brought their children and pets, while groups of friends arrived carrying pizzas and coolers of beer. Lawn chairs lined the hillside as people in shorts and sunglasses settled in to wait for the explosion. Some spectators wore earplugs in anticipation of the blast.
A man with a ukulele strummed some folk tunes to liven the expectant atmosphere as police wrapped red caution tape around the edge of the hill, denoting the 800-foot security perimeter around the bridge.
Merav Amos, from Squirrel Hill, brought her family for a picnic, complete with books, lawn chairs and glasses of wine.
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Amos said she planned the trip when PennDOT released its expected demolition window, but realized then and there that there was one thing she had forgotten.
“I actually hope it’s not going to be too loud, because we don’t have earplugs,” she said.
Amos lives near the Parkway East’s local detour route, and has had to deal with traffic increasing near her home since the bridge closed on Friday. She hoped watching the demolition live would provide a satisfying payoff.
“The last few days were very rough,” she said. “I want to see some action.”
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Jim Christy, of Robinson, parked in the South Side and made the journey over on his bike to watch the explosion.
Christy frequently bikes through the Frick Park trails — some of which were restricted on Wednesday ahead of the demolition.
“You had to be sure-footed,” he recalls about pickup games on Shadyside’s Roslyn Place, one of the nation’s few surviving wooden streets.
Cohen often talks up Roslyn while chauffeuring movie actors around town. “Inevitably,” he says, “they want to come see the street.” It also draws many walkers, bicyclists, bachelor and bachelorette parties, photographers, artists and people who make rubbings of its oak blocks.
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Many other Greater Pittsburgh streets are paved with bricks or stones of various shapes and shades. These old-time toppings seem to be popular but problematic.
They’re considered handsome reminders of Pittsburgh’s past. They’re expensive but durable. They sprout weeds but seldom potholes. Some may reduce runoff and heat.
But they’re bouncy and clattery. They can be slippery when wet or icy. Though many have concrete bases, they tend to develop ruts over time.
Officials often wonder whether to maintain historic pavers or consign them to history. Jacob Russell, Verona’s borough manager, says, “It’s always an ongoing debate.”
The bricks of Allegheny River Boulevard in Oakmont host occasional market nights. Photo by Grant Segall.
Here and there
According to a list of Pittsburgh’s nearly 20,000 official street segments, 623 have bricks, 295 quarried stones (often incorrectly called cobblestones, which are long out of use), and 840 concrete, while the rest are asphalt or “unknown.” But be warned: Some entries on the list are outdated, and one’s been wrong all along. It calls Roslyn asphalt.
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Then again, Knoxville’s Brick Way is listed correctly. It’s plain asphalt, at least today. Brian Kell, a chronicler of Pittsburgh’s streets, can find no record of previous surfaces on this tiny street, first known from an 1887 plan.
Pittsburgh’s many brick streets don’t include Knoxville’s Brick Way. Photo by Grant Segall.
Some streets with brick or stone sections are big and bustling, like downtown’s Grant Street. More seem to be small and quiet, like the Hill District’s Hollace Street. Some are fairly level, like Homewood’s Laxton Street. Others are dizzying, like Oakland’s Joncaire Street and Beechview’s Canton Avenue.
Older pavers seem most common in older neighborhoods, such as Hazelwood, but are rather randomly scattered in them. Squirrel Hill’s Murdoch Road has stone, brick and asphalt segments on different blocks. Middle Street on the North Side has a stone one and a brick one on the same block.
Canton Avenue, America’s steepest residential street, is mostly topped with quarried stone. Photo by Grant Segall.
These pavers are also common in older suburbs, such as McKees Rocks, Oakmont and Sewickley. McKeesport once had a Brick Alley, named for its surface, though better known as a red-light district.
Allegheny County also has 26 miles of dirt or gravel roads, historic, but hardly beloved.
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Streets through the years
According to several sources, including Robin B. Williams of historicpavement.com, the world’s first roads were unpaved, prone to dust, mud and washouts. American settlers topped “plank roads” with boards and “corduroy roads” with logs. Cobblestones proved tough on wheels. A mix of crushed stones was dubbed macadam for Scottish inventor John McAdam. Tar was added and one of the mixes dubbed tarmac.
Wooden blocks became popular, including an 1850s kind called Nicolson or Nicholson blocks, chunks preserved with creosote. So did granite, limestone or sandstone blocks, variously called sets, setts, blockstones or Belgian blocks. The 1870s brought bricks and asphalt. The 1890s brought concrete.
Pittsburgh resident Ned Schano led a winning drive for historical designation from the city for Roslyn Place and its wooden blocks. Photo by Grant Segall.
According to Joel Tarr in “City at the Point,” 19th-century Pittsburgh was quickest to pave the busiest or wealthiest streets, sometimes charging the property owners. Many other streets remained unpaved into the 20th century.
By the mid-1910s, wooden streets were already quaint, the look Roslyn’s developer apparently wanted for this cozy dead end, lined mostly with brick homes. It helped that his son owned a lumberyard, which supplied about 26,000 blocks.
Over the years, the city has replaced many of those blocks with newer ones. To spare them all, it blows and sweeps snow there instead of plowing it.
Williams says that the nation has just a few other wooden streets left, including Cleveland’s Hessler Court, part of Philadelphia’s South Camac Street, and Chicago’s aptly named Wooden Alley.
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Beautiful and bumpy
Most locals praise vintage pavers.
“They’re the coolest things,” Kathy Lutz says of Bridgeville’s several brick streets. “They make me feel nestled in here.” They also remind her of a famous Beatles album cover. “We have Abbey Road in the middle of Bridgeville.”
Crossing Bridgeville’s Gregg Avenue, Kathy Lutz feels like a Beatle crossing Abbey Road. Photo by Grant Segall.
A stone stretch of Bloomfield’s Lima Way is smooth enough for Kelly DiTullio to carry a heaping carton of strawberries home from the neighborhood’s farmers market without spilling any. “It’s charming,” she says, “especially when the greenery starts to grow in between.”
A woman identifying herself just as Kelissa says that her dog, Princess, likes Lima’s stones for relieving herself.
Locals see benefits even in these pavers’ bounces. Drivers slow down, and bystanders hear them coming.
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In Mt. Lebanon Magazine last year, Abigail Schade Gary wrote about that suburb’s many brick pavers, “The charm! The distinction that signifies Mt. Lebanon!” Not quite as enthusiastically, she recalled sliding backward down them in her family’s station wagon. She liked them for sledding but not roller-skating. “Even if you could manage to stay on your feet over the bumpy surface, the unevenness made your teeth chatter.”
A few locals would update some retro roads. “Most of them are in such a state that they need to be paved over,” says Mt. Lebanon’s Greg Carvlin.
The Hill District’s Francis Street has stones of several shades. Photo by Grant Segall.
Cara Zlatos recently hit the bricks of Aspinwall’s Delafield Avenue after an appendectomy at UPMC St. Margaret. She says, “Every bump seemed to find its way straight to my sore abdomen.”
Melissa Lang O’Malley, Aspinwall’s borough manager, says that Delafield’s much-needed repairs will resume this summer.
Bicycles bounce too. According to Julie Walsh, spokeswoman for BikePGH, most riders prefer modern pavement for routine rides, but some choose brick or stone at times for fun, especially in challenging events like the Pittsburgh Roubaix and the Pittsburgh Dirty Dozen.
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Bicyclist Henry Snyder of Squirrel Hill says that historic pavers “give you a little chance to experience what the Tour de France guys do in Paris. You don’t want to do it too long because it sends vibrations down your arm. For a block or two, it’s great.”
This 1925 photo by Allegheny County shows bricks being laid in Shaler on what was called the Butler Plank Road, now William Flinn Highway. Photo courtesy of Northland Historical Image Collection.
Saving surfaces
A 2018 Pittsburgh ordinance calls for preserving historic pavement where safe, unless 75 percent of the street’s property owners petition for asphalt. Eric Setzler, chief engineer of the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, says that it costs $30 per square yard to resurface asphalt, versus $170 for brick or $200 for stone. But brick and stone can last for decades, especially on streets with light traffic.
“There are streets that are probably over 100 years old that have had minimal maintenance,” he says. “They will have some dips and bumps, but they are still in service. … The cost can even out a little.”
Aspinwall’s Lang O’Malley says that recent brick repairs cost about $12 per square foot versus barely $2 for asphalt, but might prove better investments over 30 to 50 years. Besides, “While modern infrastructure needs sometimes require difficult decisions, preserving that historic character where possible remains an important part of maintaining Aspinwall’s identity.”
In a 2016 study of Mt. Lebanon’s brick streets, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation said, “Though costly to install, these streets maintain a good structural condition for decades and add beauty and history to the area.”
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In 2020, a Carnegie Mellon University team estimated that Mt. Lebanon would save about $200,000 over 50 years by maintaining a stretch of brick 700 feet long instead of asphalting it. Ninety-six percent of residents surveyed said the bricks added character, and 82 percent would pay to restore them.
Safety matters, though. A steep brick stretch of that suburb’s Spruceton Avenue was asphalted after an official did a 360 on ice there.
Verona, on the other hand, simply closes a steep stone section of South Avenue during wintry weather.
Potholes in asphalt streets often reveal earlier materials, like these bricks on Joncaire Street. Photo by Grant Segall.
PennDOT maintains just 0.2 miles of bricks or stones on state roads in Allegheny County: stretches of Chestnut Street in Coraopolis, Broadway in Stowe Township and Linden Avenue in East Pittsburgh. “Generally,” says PennDOT Press Secretary Alexis Campbell, “we end up paving them with asphalt.”
Old pavers are often buried under asphalt but reappear in potholes. Others are removed and sometimes relocated. A few are part of the landscape of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Some that PennDOT removed from Castle Shannon Boulevard in Mt. Lebanon are parts of that suburb’s other streets.
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Magic and texture
In the 2010s, resident Ned Schano led a campaign that won city landmark designations for Roslyn and specifically its wood. “Every day,” says Schano, “I make sure to step on the wood when I go outside. It has some magical powers.”
Cohen feels like Roslyn’s wood is ingrained in him. “It’s been a great texture for my whole life. To see it’s still here when so many other things have gone away, it’s amazing.”
The Pittsburgh Public Schools board of education has been under intense scrutiny since its “Future Ready Plan” was first introduced — and then eventually approved — in late May. But a group of parents has filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission in an effort to prevent it from being carried out.
Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization, along with 412 Justice and the Education Rights Network, have filed a complaint against the school board on behalf of five PPS students, claiming the plan, which will close or repurpose several district buildings across the city, violates those students’ civil rights.
Those students represented in the complaint attend Miller Pre K-5 in the Hill District, Manchester Pre K-8 on the North Side and Woolslair Pre K-5 in Bloomfield, all of which would close under the plan, with the students relocating.
“This is part of what we’ve seen across the country, this national school closure crisis,” said Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, a staff attorney and director of education justice for Advancement Project. “We’ve seen it play out in urban, suburban and rural communities, affecting Black and brown children, and it has come to Pittsburgh.”
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The complaint is calling for an investigation into the plan and for the district and school board to act in good faith during that investigation. They hope it will lead to a preliminary injunction, allowing the commission to get a court order for the district to stop the implementation of the plan.
One of the main claims in the complaint is that the school board “based school closure decisions on utilization (enrollment divided by building capacity), despite being notified that doing so would disproportionately close schools in Black neighborhoods. Black students make up 62% of students that will lose their schools, but only 49% of students district-wide.”
“Utilization has no ties to education quality at all,” said Onyeka-Crawford. “In fact, smaller class sizes are tied to better outcomes for students. Community members had flagged that relying on this metric would disproportionately harm Black students.”
Onyeka-Crawford said alternatives were presented to the school board, some that have had success in other cities, but the district went forward with their own plan instead.
“We need to ask: who is Pittsburgh Public Schools and the board accountable to?” she said. “It’s the parents and families, and if this is what parents and families are asking for, it’s up to them to be accountable to those communities, and give parents and students the education and resources that they need.”
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KDKA reached out to the district, but it said it will not comment on pending litigation.
