Reflections on Two Days in Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh-

After two days in Detroit, Ecologic's group made the 5 hour drive across Ohio to Pittsburgh. Below is a lengthy interpretation of what we saw there. I'm going to try to separate these into a few shorter pieces that could be pulled into an article.

We arrived in the Sheraton Station Square hotel to a vista of a city transformed. As I arrived in my hotel room, I pulled open my drapes to see the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh. It featured a beautiful mix of early 20th century skyscrapers, mid 1980s glass fronted corporate headquarters, and a few modern LEED- certified towers. Viewed from across the Monongahela river, this was a very different feeling than Detroit. This is not a city where the residents claim a small victory when a downtown skyscraper is merely re-lit at night, never mind filled. But, with that same view came a reminder of Pittsburgh's roots. As I tried to fall asleep, coal trains of up to a mile long rumbled by directly under my window.

We would learn the next day that the view we saw of Pittsburgh was of a reincarnated city. Whereas Detroit had reached its nadir in 2009 (or, we hope that Detroit has hit bottom- only time will tell), Pittsburgh's industrial collapse happened in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Three Rivers at Night

I don't know the full story, but from what were told, a labor conflict at the steel mills over how to re-tool the mills to better compete with more efficient competitors, both foreign and domestic. Labor saw that this more efficient method would result in fewer jobs, so they went on strike- and that strike led directly to the closure of almost every steel mill in the area. In a flash, over 100,000 people, about 10% of the workforce, were out of a job. There was nothing else for them to do, so they left. The reason that Steelers games around the country are always so full is that an entire generation left Pittsburgh, but they didn't loose their affection for the black and gold.