The War on South Craig Street
“I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job.” Oliver Wendell Holmes.
By the summer of 2026, Avirat Kohli had had enough. Two great armies were converging on his Indian grocery, and what would become the first and only battle of the South Craig Street War —‘Scraig,’ or ‘that stuff behind Tepper,’ as CMU students called it —would soon rage across his doorstep. Before the day was over, an Earl Grey tea would explode in the lentil aisle. “I would have shut my doors,” he recalled, “but I was excited by the prospect of new customers.” It was not a wise decision. An army of Pitt students quickly seized his property, giving them major negotiating power against CMU’s computer science squadron.
A food service worker from Chipotle, who, during her morning shift, prepared a veggie bowl for a Pitt student and found battle strategies on the back of their receipt, became an unexpected hero for CMU when she brought it to the war-torn doorstep of 4615 Forbes Avenue, saving the CMU army and possibly Carnegie Mellon itself… T
wo ordinary students, one from the Pitt School of Nursing, the other from the Swanson School of Engineering, who each served three years and together seemed to have been everywhere in Pittsburgh during the war…
An incoming CMU freshman, innocently enjoying boba from Wushiland, ignorant of the war unfolding past the doors that would come to shape her college visit experience, yet went on to become one of the greatest generals the Carnegie Mellon army had ever seen…
These were the brave students who found themselves pitted against one another, neighbors made into enemies, the fabric of Oakland, Pittsburgh torn apart by a divide that would take all day to heal and all week to forget.
At Schenley Plaza during the first (and only) night, then-CMU President Farnam Jahanian said perhaps more than he knew. “Various community stakeholders must come together and share their valuable perspectives,” he said, “before we decide whether Aaron should have poured that cup of ramen noodles on Jessica.” He paused for the booing. “This is not a war. Stop asking for money.”
“To understand the character of the South Craig War,” explained a Dietrich history professor, “you must first understand that the students involved were really petty and immature. This is the nature of all students from any school. It is a nature that unites us all.”
She continued. “For me, this war was not about that library book, or the unpaid electricity bill, or that one guy who kept playing loud music on the bus. It was…it was the crossroads of our being—the very heart of our existence—of our schools—and it was one hell of a battle!”
It’s hard now to conceive of what life was like for the tens of students walking on the sidewalk as the war unfolded. Mothers shielded their children, cars stalled in the street, and even the Carnegie Museum of Art seemed to hold its breath as the first students stepped onto the road, wielding heavy tomes from the Caliban Book Shop. Pitt troops crossed the road by instinct, ignoring the crosswalks and the traffic, as if time itself bent to their will.
“Private students just want clout! You’re not from here, so get out!”
“What a horrible sight it was,” says a CMU art student who had been eating Berry Fresh froyo when it happened. “I felt alienated, abhorred. It was like they didn’t like me.”
"We don’t like you!” shouted the Pitt students from outside. The CMU student shrugged. “Well, it might be up for interpretation.”
The loss of several cups of fro-yo in the ensuing battle was a devastating blow to CMU’s army. They quickly retaliated by rolling buggies into the street, and threatening to smash them into the cars of Pitt students. Actual property damage seemed a bit too far, and so both armies quickly conceded and went back to their summer jobs and summer classes.
“When you see a lonely cup of coffee on the sidewalk of South Craig,” said one creative writing major, “may you always remember what was lost. Let the sound of the crosswalk indicator be a bell, a resounding toll, that sounds even in the dead of night.”