By 5:30 p.m. on September 27, 2013, a forty-foot Rubber Duck had made its way down the Ohio River to the Point of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hung a left and continued along the Allegheny River to the Roberto Clemente Bridge. Thousands of residents cheered as it passed, launching a celebration within the confines of the Steel City that rivaled those of the annual New Year’s Eve First Night festivities.
The Rubber Duck was the creation of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman and had already visited France, Brazil, Japan, and Hong Kong before arriving in Pittsburgh. “I see it as an adult thing,” Hofman explained to CNN of the inflatable sculpture. “It makes you feel young again. It refers to your childhood when there was no stress or economic pressure, no worry about having to pay the rent.”
While other cities expressed an interest in bringing Florentijn Hofman’s Rubber Duck to their locale, Pittsburgh was chosen as its first North American destination, briefly making the Steel City the unofficial Rubber Duck Capital of the United States.
It was not the first time that the region has been associated with aquatic birds, however, as a 1987 episode of the animated DuckTales revealed that the fictional home of Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie was positioned along the banks of the Allegheny River as well. Although the original creator of the metropolis – comic book artist Carl Barks – and his successor Don Rosa often hinted that Duckburg was actually situated in California, its true location was never officially revealed before the “Double-O-Duck” installment of DuckTales.
After a brief stint as an animator for the Walt Disney Company in the late 1930s, Carl Barks became a freelance comic book artist and was given free reign over the dominion of Donald Duck. Not only did he create a hometown for the legendary cartoon character but also gave him a family, including a rich uncle by the name of Scrooge McDuck.
While the moniker was obviously derived from Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, many of the attributes of Scrooge McDuck were influenced by one of Pittsburgh’s most famous icons, Andrew Carnegie. Like Carnegie, Scrooge McDuck was born in Scotland, emigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen – as did the real-life Andrew Carnegie – and became a wealthy and influential industrialist. And just as Carnegie eventually made the Steel City his base of operation, so did Scrooge McDuck with Duckburg.
Duckburg was first mentioned in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #49 and continued to play a key role within the comic books created by both Carl Barks and Don Rosa. Rosa revered Barks as an idol, and his narrative additions to the Duck Universe were essentially faithful to the mythology that Barks initially crafted.
According to that mythology, Duckburg was originally named Fort Drake Borough and was part of a fortress built in the sixteenth century by British explorer Sir Francis Drake. Cornelius Coot – the great, great grandfather of Donald Duck – took possession of Fort Drake when the British later left the city, renaming the locale Duckburg. Although a relatively small and quiet town for most its history, that changed when Scrooge McDuck purchased the old fort from Coot’s descendants.
Like Duckburg, Pittsburgh began life as a series of forts, with Fort Pitt – christened after British Secretary of State William Pitt – being the most prominent. The city itself was initially called Pittsborough, although that quickly evolved into its current permutation. Pittsburgh was also a relatively quiet community until the arrival of Andrew Carnegie, who built the city’s first steel mill in 1875 and went on to forge the region into the steel production capital of the United States.
Although he never had a Money Pit like the one that Scrooge McDuck constructed in Duckburg, Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic legacy still towers over the Steel City, with Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Library, and Carnegie Museums remaining prominent institutions within and around the Three Rivers of Pittsburgh nonetheless.
With the 1987 revelation that Duckburg is actually Pittsburgh in the animated world of the Duck Universe – along with the fact that the fictional city’s richest resident was based on Andrew Carnegie – Pittsburgh already had plenty of reasons to claim the unofficial title of “Duckburgh.” Add a forty-foot Rubber Duck floating on its rivers and the tremendous outpouring of area residents who made their way downtown to “party on the bridge” in celebration of its arrival on September 27, 2013, and it’s hard not to argue that Pittsburgh is now Duckburgh in the official sense as well.
Anthony Letizia