Located next to the convention center, the stadium would have doubled the mass and length of the huge bunker against the river already established by that "lump of black coal" -- as essayist Phillip Lopate described its dark bulk in his literary trip around the edges of Manhattan -- cutting off views and access with nearly a mile of hulking wall.
Martin McGuinn, who took over as chief executive two years ago, is a lawyer by training and oblivious to banker's hours: He's gazing over Pittsburgh from his top-floor office by 5:30 every morning, when the three sprawling rivers below are still black as the coal buried deep in the surrounding hills.
Originally they were derived from coal-tar, the black viscous waste product left over from distilling coal for gas.
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The stream now carries black sediment of waste coal which eventually flows into Lake Kariba.
While the US has turned to shale gas, Europeans have once again embraced the black stuff, as the cost of coal has plummeted.
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Hope comes in the morning for those Appalachia, where coal miners are dying every six hours from black lung disease.
He called in at Gee's Bend, a poor black corner of Alabama, and Inez, a tiny Kentucky coal town where Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty (a third of Inez's residents remain below the poverty line).
Right now, when you fly into a typical American city, you see miles of black roofs (mostly tarpaper shingles, made with a byproduct from burning coal), flanked by green lawns.
Coal exporters are downcast, as they also face low global prices for the black stuff.
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Two summers ago, a truckload of Beijing municipal workers turned up in my neighborhood and began unspooling heavy-duty black power lines, which they attached to our houses, in preparation for a campaign to replace coal-burning furnaces with electric radiators.
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