If Australia is a Horror Setting, then Pittsburgh is a Theatre of the Absurd Setting - it's full of contradictions which the inhabitants manage to both ignore and openly embrace.
"What sort of jagov don't know where the Isaly's used to be? Yinz must be new in tahn"
I. History:
Part of Pittsburgh's character is it's obsession with it's own historical background, so this part is going to be lengthy.
Pittsburgh has a history older than the United States. In colonial times, the French built Fort Duquesne at the intersection of navigable rivers. During the French and Indian war, General Braddock and his young lieutenant George Washington captured it and renamed the Fort after Lord William Pitt. A town grew up around the fort, then progressively absorbed the smaller settlements (Birmingham, Allegheny, etc) nearby into a city, at least until that tactic got cockblocked in perpetuity by politics around 1900.
During the early 1800s, Pittsburgh was briefly a frontier settlement and there are a number of "first <X> west of the Alleghenies" plaques around town. But it's the later half of the 1800s where things get interesting. The very first Republican Party convention was held in Pittsburgh in 1856 and despite being North of the Mason-Dixon line, there are a few claims of Underground Railroad hidey-holes about, but not many substantiated.
But after the Civil War is when Pittsburgh became the focal point of Andrew Carnegie's empire. With the navigable rives, railways and the abundance of coal and iron in nearby locations, Pittsburgh became the world leader of Steel Production. That in turn called for laborers and in the period between the Civil War and WWII, Pittsburgh attracted wave after wave of European immigrants to work in the mills and on the rivers and rails. The ethnic diversity and Catholic / Protestant split combined with local topography and geography to result in neighborhoods and suburbs that were (and in many cases still are) pretty ethnically and religiously homogeneous despite the overall metropolitan area being relatively diverse.
Of course, the working conditions were often dangerous, but industry only works when labor is cheap - so Pittsburgh is famous for labor history and the early formation of Unions.
Most notable is the Homestead Steel Strike - which was open war in the streets between striking workers and the hired-gun Pinkertons. Despite Carnegie's implicit orders to his hatchet-man Frick to bring in mercenaries to gun down workers in the street, both go down in local lore as great heroes to be lionized. In Carneige's case that has a lot to do with his philanthrophy and the founding of parks and a massive free library system. In Frick's case it's a bit more mystifying, but he was rich and famous, and Pittsburghers sure do love it when anybody with local connections makes it big.
Up until WWII, Pittsburgh was pretty much all about steel making, labor strife and hardworking immigrants and a couple nifty local customs and tidbits:
- The term "Pittsburgh Rare" for meat that is burnt on the outside but still rare on the inside supposedly originated from millworkers cooking their lunch on the exposed hot metal surfaces inside the steelworks.
- The incline as a form of transit was common. This is a combination of cablecar and track laid up a very steep hill, and we maintain two into the present day as a combination useful public transit and tourist attraction
- The Unitarians agitated for water filtration. link
- Someone famous described Pittsburgh of this era as "Hell with the lid off", which was promptly adopted as an unofficial motto for The Smoky City.
After WWII, David Lawrence was elected mayor and decided to do something about all this pollution and rebuild the city's image. He worked with Richard Mellon (founder of Supply Side economics and opponent of Income Tax) to implement an early an ambitious urban renewal project termed The Renaissance. This spate of smog control and new construction made David Lawrence so popular that anytime a mayor faces tough times, there's an almost knee-jerk reaction to launch a sequel Renaissance.
But the big changes to Pittsburgh were wrought by globalization and Reaganomics destroying our country's manufacturing base. Starting the the late 1970s and acceleration drastically during Regean's recession of 1981-1982, the Steel Mills closed down and much to everyone's surprise didn't come back. You see, up until then it was fairly common for mills to close down and jobs to end when a production run was over, but a new mill would come along and there would be openings for mill workers on new production runs inside a year. So as the main driver of the local economy was being pulled out from under us, most folks here were in denial that it was happening. There was a lot of grumbling as reality set in, the Mayor Launched Renaissance II to try to cheer folks up and some pissed off folks left dead fish in safety deposit boxes in (the Smellin' Mellon campaign) to protest bank involvement with people profiting from mill closings.
The destruction of the primary economic driver of the city resulted in the collapse of most secondary economic drivers and Pittsburgh spent roughly two decades years in something a whole lot like a localized recession. This resulted in rapid acceleration of the population loss that had been happening since WWII, and currently there is an international Pittsburgher diaspora.
Well calling it a diaspora is a mild exaggeration, since over ten thousand teenagers graduate from local Universities every year, and most of them left for better job markets. However the point is that you can find people who self-identify as Pittsburghers in every other major US and Canadian city as well as a couple of South American and European Metropolia. This identity is held together by two main factors: an extensively studied
local dialect and major-league sports fandom. The 1970s were a a decade where the Picksburgh Stillerz and the Buccos won a heap a championships an'at. So the former Pittsburghers who left in the 80s still tended to think of Pittsburgh by it's brief tenure as "The City of Champions", and thus you can head aht an probably find a Steelers bar in your tahn.
Since the collapse of American Manufacturing, Pittsburgh has tried a few things to jump start the local economy. Some of them were laughably bad;
For example: Mayor Murphy's tax giveaways to the Lazarus Department Store and Lord and Taylor - who moved in, razed local landmarks banked their tax credits, got to use their own accountants to prove that they weren't making any money and folded up shop before they would have had to pay back any of the seed money the taxpayer fronted them.
But some of them seem to have worked, and today Universities and Hospitals are the new cornerstones of our economy. We're also paradoxically a leader in environmentally friendly development - the tourism board will tell you about how we're ahead of everywhere in number of LEED certified buildings and how much less toxic things are today than they were even just a few decades back, let alone in the streetlights at noon days of the 40s. They'll also point out that we renamed a bridge after Rachel Carson (who wrote
Silent Spring and awoke the world to the dangers of DDT) and who has local ties. Strangely, they won't really tout just how much actual greenery and green space the city has. Between Carnegie's parks, the landscaping of the University Campuses, a couple impressively large cemeteries and the amount of almost-impossible-to-build on hillsides left wild, there is a staggering amount of greenery in the city. Despite this spate of spinning our economic collapse as eco-friendly we still have a massive problem with overflows from our decrepit combined sewer system discharing raw sewage into the rivers during heavy rainfall. But hey, you can't have tax credits for corporations to locate here and the tax revenue to repair infrastructure at the same time.
Pittsburghers tend to be much more aware of the city's history than dwellers in other cities. It's common practice to give directions according to landmarks which no longer exist - "Turn Right where the Syria Mosque used to be", - and we think it's weird when the listener doesn't know where such landmarks were, because obviously everyone would know something that important. We had a local documentarian make a name for himself with his series on
Things That Aren't There Anymore
II Geography.
Pittsburgh is a thoroughly three-dimensional city, made up of hills, rivers and bridges.
Inside city limits, elevation varies by 200 meters from highest point to lowest point. If you include the various other municipalities in the greater metro area, it's greater than that. Just to drive the hilliness home, local neighborhoods and boroughs include the South Hills, the North Hills, the East Hills, Squirrel Hill, The Hill District, Troy Hill, Spring Hill and Summer Hill. Don't confuse any of those with individually notable hills such as Flagstaff Hill, Negly Hill, Cardiac Hill and Pig's Hill. We have multiple streets where the sidewalk is instead a set of public steps. I've heard it claimed that we have more public stairs than any other city in the world. Thus most places to go are either "up" or "dahn" from the current location.
Inside city limits proper we have around a score of bridges that span our three rivers. We also purportedly have another couple hundred smaller bridges that span various gullies, creeks, railroad tracks, expressways an'at.
...
Administratively, the greater metro area so balkanized that we really ought to call the Balkans Pittsburghized instead. There is a county Chiefs of Police Association. Not mere a police association, but Allegheny County has so many separate police forces that their chiefs need their own association. Allegheny County has over 150 separate municipalities. People from any of these who are not upset over politics or taxes will generally self-identify as Pittsburghers, but they are not technically Pittsburghers in that they generally enjoy slightly higher incomes and notably lower local tax rates than those of us who actually live within the city.