Lindsay Patross is a bit breathless this morning. Just back from her fifth Cornell reunion, she found, to her amazement, that people didn’t want to talk about what they were doing. That chagrined her a bit, because, as she puts it, “I work on cool stuff every day.”
Aside from her work with Spreadshirt, connecting e-commerce businesses, most of Lindsay’s cool stuff is blogging about Pittsburgh, about her ongoing love affair with her home town.
This morning’s cool stuff emanates from Lindsay’s office, an East End coffee shop where she’s armed with her Sidekick – combination camera, computer, cellphone – gettin’ it down with the world.
“I’m frantically calling around to see if I can rent a tuba,” reads one blog by Patrick Kent in a Git Aht post. He's referring to the Jalsah middle eastern music fest, Zenith, on the South Side. “I’ve never played a tuba in my life, but I think they need one to add some bottom to it, some presence. Folks would appreciate it, is what I’m thinking.”
After St. Edmund’s and Ellis, Patross, a Squirrel Hill native, majored in American studies at Cornell, discovering an interest in entrepreneurship. Picking up the rudiments of silk screen printing in the Warhol basement, in 2003 she began making her signature IHEARTPGH T-shirts. Setting up a blog of the same name, Lindsay met people who similarly loved living here, and knew out-of-the-way places and things that she could publicize. “How do we talk about things we wouldn’t know about?” she asked.
From Washington’s Landing dragon boat racing to Polish Hill dive bars, Lindsay’s eclectic world ranges all over the city. As do her posts. Writing daily, encouraging 
others to do the same, she has but one rule: “a post has to be positive. IHEARTPGH is not the place for ranting. The goal is to be a resource for why people come to Pittsburgh and why they love it here.”
Now a red-hot underground fave, IHEARTPGH gets some thousand hits a week, many readers sending e-mails and their own feeds. “I’m blown away,” she marvels. “It’s totally cool. IHEARTPGH has become a platform for people to talk to each other. That’s more success than I could ever have hoped for.
“I’ve worked really hard to make the site a resource,” she adds of her ongoing creation of this non-traditional media, user-friendly, democratic, light-speed fast. “Creating blogs is creating interactive newsletters -- history plus other people’s comments. Blogs permit everybody to get their message up. With blogs, the Internet brings people together in ways I could never have predicted. That’s totally cool. Because the future of Pittsburgh 
is in innovation.”
Speaking of her beloved city, “People will come here because they love it here,” she predicts. “People will come here because they want to be here.”
So what does she love about Pittsburgh?
“I’m still falling in love with the place,” she says. “There’s tons and tons of resources and tons and tons of opportunities here. And accessibility. And so many interesting people. You can’t be bored here. Every night there’s passionate people getting together – and willing to share. Every night.”
Award-winning writer Abby Mendelson is the author of numerous books, including The Pittsburgh Steelers Official History and Pittsburgh: A Place in Time. Ghost Dancer, a collection of short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.
Captions:
Lindsay Patross in IHeartPgh gear, Downtown
Lindsay Patross working her sidekick at a cafe
IHeartPgh website
Lindsay Patross with her laptop (and espresso)
All photographs copyright © Ed Rieker