No matter where you go in America, from the Grand Canyon to Gettysburg, there are certain constants. Some of them confound. Others just make you sad. The fast food joint. The strip mall. The long-distance loneliness of the Interstate.

		Edward Stankowski Jr., a former steelworker, lives in Mount Washington and is an assistant professor of English at La Roche College (stankoe1@ LaRoche.edu). His book "Memory of Steel" chronicles the decline of the steel industry.

The cheapest and saddest of these constants is the ubiquitous gift shop, selling Chinese-made objects that say nothing about a particular place. You've seen the junk: decorative brooms not made for sweeping; shot glasses that won't taste liquor; sea shells exiled from the sea.

A few years back, my wife and I took a trip to Gettysburg. Maybe you've heard of the place. It was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the bloodiest war in our heart-rending history.

We did what tourists do in such places: we toured; we ate. And my wife wanted to stop at a gift shop to pick up a few postcards.

Displayed among the refrigerator magnets was one whose meaning haunts me. Picture this: a Civil War-era cannon; on one side a laughing gray teddy bear; on the other, his simpering blue counterpart. They reached over the cannon's barrel, paws locked in perpetual handshake.

Growing up Polish has made me a man difficult to offend, but this souvenir did. It made me think about the siege of Stalingrad, where for one frozen, starving and hellish winter in the midst of World War II, the Russians fought the Germans house to house.

For the Russians, breaking the siege became part of their national identity. For both sides, the battle became a symbol, or at least something to be revered, not trivialized.

Now you tell me this: Would a tourist in Stalingrad find in the corner gift shop a refrigerator magnet depicting a smiling teddy bear in Russian uniform reaching over the barrel of a panzer to shake hands with a teddy bear in a Nazi uniform?

This all leads me to question the ways in which we treat our history.

I grew up in the South Side when it was a neighborhood and a place to work. Not just somewhere you can buy $5 donuts and urinate in a senior citizen's tomato patch. In the 1970s, if you walked Carson Street with a blue Mohawk and a bone sticking through your nose, someone was going to kick your butt.

Now, I'm not saying that was cool; it's just how it was. South Side was a place more genuine then.

The neighborhood was home to a blocks-long steel mill named the South Side Works. More than just a job site, this mill and others like it forged a uniquely Pittsburgh identity, giving this city and her people good paychecks, a purpose and a well-earned place in history.

South Side's latest contribution to our collective unconscious is a monstrosity called The SouthSide Works, which, more aptly, should be titled the South Side Used to Work. The boutiques and bistros there occupy historic, bloody and, some might argue, sacred ground. But most of you shoppers are clueless.

The SouthSide Works' developers deserve praise for converting a former brownfield site into a viable economic enterprise. I mean, just look at all of the minimum-wage jobs that development has generated. And, after all, what right-thinking, hard-working Americans wouldn't want an unabashedly upscale shopping district complete with unique businesses such as a Cheesecake Factory and Urban Outfitters right in their very own neighborhood? It's all so new, all so clean. And so good at erasing working-class history.

Indeed, the SouthSide Works' Web site says it all: "We have what you've been waiting for ... An experience in shopping, dining, movies and you!" Despite the marketers' exclamation point, I still find it hard to get excited.

South Side at-large has done a nice job of sweeping its steel legacy under history's carpet. So well, in fact, that one never would know there once were belching steel mills stinking up what is becoming an increasingly gentrified neighborhood.

Contrast South Side's amnesia with what's happened in Homestead. There, around the fringes of a similar developmental eyesore called The Waterfront, at least remain tangible hunks of your history. Something as simple as a row of smokestacks can tell you a great deal if you're willing to listen.

None of this is to suggest that South Side's capitalist mecca become a shrine to those of us who worked and those who died in Pittsburgh's steel mills.

But is it too much to ask that the new place pay some small measure of homage to its history? How about a little plaque somewhere along Hot Metal Street? Maybe a small statue outside the cineplex of mill hunk legend Joe Magarac bending a steel bar with his bare hands?

For too many Americans, our shared history is nothing more some cheap marketing opportunity designed to separate the rest of us from our hard-earned. There's a gesture made to history. But it's nothing more than a slogan on a shopping bag. A gesture usually captured in a slick phrase that evokes something but is not intended to tell the whole story.

That's good, because you don't want, don't like, the whole story. It's complicated, it's dirty, sometimes bloody, and it takes too long to tell.