To bathe, or not to bathe. That is the question.

OK, maybe it’s not much of a quandary for The Orbit‘s corner on both obsessive-compulsive and dirty-minded readers, but let’s accept that many of us (ahem) changed our hygienic standards with the onset of the pandemic. Mary—mother of all mothers, blessed virgin, you know, that Mary—seems to have recalibrated her priorities as well. If the Marys of greater McKees Rocks/Stowe Township are any indication, Mary is already comfortable with her proximity to godliness and content with an almost exact day-on/day-off schedule.

In this electronic publication’s early days—before really digging into the subject—we naively thought Bloomfield held the title as the Mary capitol of Pittsburgh. In addition, South Oakland, Stanton Heights, and Lawrenceville all have sizable Mary populations that have earned their own surveys.

That said, McKees Rocks and Stowe Township—the distinction between the two is completely arbitrary to any outsider—may well lay claim to the greatest house-for-house percentage of Marys in metro Pittsburgh. Little Presston, a Rocks neighborhood of just two streets, had enough Marys to fill a whole story. Greater Sto-Rox has so many Marys—just about 50/50 with and without bathtubs—that we’ll not kid ourselves into thinking we won’t have a third or fourth edition on the topic.

So we’ll leave you to it. Enjoy your Marys with the clean aroma of Mr. Bubble or not and please let us know if you’ve got a Mary of your own or Mary story we should hear.