Probably no community in any city anywhere has gained the infamy that is now and will forevermore be attached to Squirrel Hill. The Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh is where the Tree of Life synagogue is located and the Tree of Life synagogue is where 11 Jewish worshipers were murdered on a recent Saturday by a mad man intent on killing as many Jews as possible.
This has nothing to do with baseball, but it does have something to do with humanity. It also has something to do with my home.
I was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Squirrel Hill, though in a different section from where Tree of Life is located. Squirrel Hill has many different sections and many synagogues of different denominations. The killer apparently chose Tree of Life because it houses a relief agency known as HIAS – Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. He presumably connected that organization to the immigrants who are walking from Honduras to the United States, buying President Trump’s line that the group is a mob, filled with killers and criminals.
Squirrel Hill is not filled with killers and criminals. I have a nephew who lives in Squirrel Hill, in fact, only a couple of blocks from Tree of Life. He is a lawyer. He defends killers and criminals. I asked him if he would defend the Tree of Life killer.
“No,” he said in an e-mail. “I certainly would not profit off of it. But more significantly, I knew one of the victims and I am very close with the family of another. Lastly, this is way too close to home in addition to being so personal in nature. I have attended three funerals, sat shiva and recited Kaddish just these last 5 days.
“These last 7 days have been rough. And as rough as they’ve been for us, it still doesn’t come close to what Dylan, Adam and Allison have had to endure after Parkland. Sad.”
He referred to a similar deadly assault last February at a high school in Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were killed. One of the students who survived the assault and escaped physical, though not emotional, harm was my grandson, Dylan.
When I was growing up, anti-Semitic acts didn’t include murder. We had our share of them, though. One day when I was on my newspaper delivery route, a kid younger but much bigger than I, came along and knocked me down. No reason. Just for the fun and meanness of it.
Another time my friends and I came out of a movie theater on a Friday night and encountered a group of guys from an adjacent neighborhood. They wanted to beat us up, but one of them knew me and told the others to leave us alone. Why did they want to beat us up? We were Jewish and they weren’t.
That was the difference between our section of Squirrel Hill and the one Tree of Life is in. I lived at the low end of Squirrel Hill, adjacent to the Greenfield and Hazelwood sections, the communities that were more likely to produce kids who wanted to fight us.
Not all Greenfield and Hazelwood kids were bad kids. Frank and Larry Lucchino came from Greenfield. Frank Lucchino grew up to be a long-time Allegheny County judge and an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Pittsburgh. Larry, six years younger, played basketball at Princeton and went on to become one of Major League Baseball’s most prominent club executives in the last quarter-century, president and C.E.O. of the Boston Red Sox in his last position.
Then there is Mike McCarthy, coach of the Green Bay Packers. McCarthy grew up in Greenfield but just a few steps from Squirrel Hill. We are nowhere near each other in age, but the houses in which we lived are only three-tenths of a mile apart.
We grew up on parallel streets, he on Greenfield Avenue in the city’s Greenfield district, I on Murray Avenue in the city’s Squirrel Hill section. The elementary school I attended, Roosevelt, stood between the two streets.
All of this geographical closeness caused me trouble in deciding whom to root for when the Packers played the Steelers in the 2011 Super Bowl.
I was no longer living on Murray Avenue when McCarthy was born in 1963, but my parents still lived in the house. My older sister lived less than half a mile from the McCarthys.
To make matters worse, during the week before the game, I talked to McCarthy’s father, Joe, who was my age, and learned that when we went to Pirates games, we both sat in the left field bleachers at Forbes Field.
There were other similarities to consider. As youngsters, Mike and I played baseball at Magee Field. My nephew recalls playing baseball with McCarthy, who is the same age as one of my sons. Another nephew played baseball with Mike’s younger brother.
Despite or because of the various rooting efforts, McCarthy’s Packers won the game, 31-25.
Other notable figures lived in Squirrel Hill. There was Myron Cope, a terrific sports columnist, who became a legendary broadcaster of Steelers game despite or because of the worst announcing voice I have ever heard.
There is Iris Rainer Dart, author of “Beachea,” both novel and film, and other books. Uggy, as we knew her, was 6 years younger than I was, and lived around the corner.
A more recent resident of Squirrel Hill is Mike Tomlin, the Steelers head coach. He lives in the area where the killings occurred.
Richard Moss, the former baseball player union lawyer and prominent agent, isn’t from Squirrel Hill, but he has a connection to Tree of Life. After his father died, his mother married the Tree of Life rabbi, Herman Hailpern.
The size of Squirrel Hill seems to confuse some people. In a news release last week, one organization referred to Squirrel Hill as a small town in Pennsylvania. It’s big enough to be a small town, but it’s not. It is a large community in the city of Pittsburgh.
Because it is so sprawling, however, when Pittsburghers talk about it, they often refer to north of Forbes and south of Forbes to pinpoint the area they’re talking about. North of Forbes or south of Forbes, it is all Squirrel Hill.
There is a major difference in the two sections. North of Forbes is virtually all residential. South of Forbes is a combination of residences and business establishments.
There are more synagogues south of Forbes than north, but the killer found what he wanted north.