OAKLAND—Today, University Place, home to the feared and revered ‘Nordenberg Hall,’ saw a common sight: an assorted jumble of dawdling emergency vehicles. The scant road was home to an ambulance and a police car. Uninformed onlookers might be concerned—‘Is there an emergency? Is someone hurt?’—but they would be wholly mistaken. A closer inspection of the ambulance shows that while its lights are on, the people inside seem to be too calm for it to be an emergency. As for the police car, for all we know, it’s always been there.
Unaccustomed students may be forgiven for thinking that there is some underlying cause behind the visiting professionals. In most circumstances, to see an ambulance, police, or fire vehicle is grounds for something amiss. However, at University Place, it’s quite the opposite. As one paramedic we spoke to put it, “It just felt like the place to be. It’s like my car knew to come here, for no reason in particular, just where it needed to be.” Residents say they feel unsettled when they walk up to their domicile and don’t have to walk past an idling car with a uniformed officer watching them.
Nordenberg Hall has become a meeting place for paramedics, firemen, and police to pull up and relax. Emergency vehicles of all kinds can be spotted just kind of milling about. When we asked one of the cops why there were six police motorbikes in the crosswalk, he simply replied, “Why not?”
Some may object to a public road outside a residential building becoming a plaza for people who, I’ve been told, have real jobs. They neglect to consider, though, that this is where they are meant to be. Who is to say that the wondrous, ever-affable taxpayers of Pittsburgh and the magnanimous students at the University of Pittsburgh don’t want to funnel money and benefits so that about six guys can stand next to vehicles on a barely-used road every day? More than H2P or getting poisoned from the Eatery—this is Pitt’s culture.