On a late August afternoon in Pittsburgh’s South Side neighbourhood, young people amble past a manicured row of houses alive with the hum of a circular saw. Voices emanate from outdoor restaurants and cafes.
High-tech workers file in and out of grand brick buildings that once stockpiled the goods of local manufacturers and retailers. Not far away, trains rumble along the banks of the Monongahela River. On the site of a former LTV steel mill, boutiques coexist with bank branches and a yoga studio.
Once home to generations of mill workers, the neighbourhood now buzzes with the promise of an urban renaissance that might have seemed impossible 30 years ago, when the region’s manufacturing economy buckled under the strain of an American steel industry in crisis.
Like a number of area communities that have staged a stunning revival in recent years, the South Side still retains its character – and even many of the old buildings – of its former life as an enclave for immigrants. And yet, to the many former residents who have returned to Pittsburgh in the past decade to live or visit, the signs of these neighbourhoods’ transformation are undeniable.
“The city has moved quite a lot,” says Roger Scarlett-Smith, president of GlaxoSmithKline’s North American consumer-health division. “There were areas that were ‘no-go’ areas 10 years ago that are now bijoux, trendy areas.
“It has become more of a cafe society than pierogies [a Polish dish] and beer.”
The face of many neighbourhoods changed along with that of the regional economy, as Pittsburgh’s healthcare, finance and technology industries began to fill the void left by steelmakers and their many suppliers.
Their emergence, along with a real-estate market that never revved hot enough to experience the booms and busts many US cities encountered in the past decade, brought an influx of young professionals.
The area’s many colleges, including the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Duquesne University, have provided companies with a pipeline of talented workers – and gave up-and-coming neighbourhoods a steady supply of tenants.
The region has also benefited from the foresight of its civic leaders, who recognised the importance of restoring the city centre and improving its air and water quality decades before the steel industry’s collapse.
“The Pittsburgh business community made an effort to stabilise the core of the city more than 50 years ago,” says Mike Madison, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has written about the city’s transformation. “They cleaned up downtown, invested in downtown, cleaned up the air. You still see the benefit today.”
By the mid-1940s, stagnant population growth and soot-filled skies had pressed community and business leaders into action. Pittsburgh passed smoke-control regulations, created a parks department and Pennsylvania’s first redevelopment agency to renew the city’s centre. The Urban Development Authority of Pittsburgh soon set to work on the nation’s first privately-funded downtown project at 23-acres next to State Point Park called Gateway Center.
In the 1990s, officials began to accelerate plans to redevelop industrial lots abandoned by steelmakers and other manufacturers during the lean decades. Pittsburgh and Allegheny County are recognised throughout the US for their efforts to revitalise so-called brownfields.
The former LTV mill, called Southside Works, was acquired by the URA in 1993 and cleaned for commercial and residential use. Redevelopment efforts at other sites, including the former iron-producing Carrie Furnace in nearby Rankin and Swissvale, are underway.
Dan Onorato, the county’s executive and a likely candidate for governor next year, estimates that more than 1,500 acres have been cleaned for reuse in the past seven years.
The region built an airport in 1993. Seven years later, construction workers broke ground on the city’s state-of-the art convention centre. Pittsburgh boasts new baseball and football stadiums; a new hockey arena will open next year.
The city’s topography has also help spur urban renewal. The many bridges that connect downtown Pittsburgh to its surrounding area also create traffic bottlenecks, increasing the use of public transportation, residents say. And Western Pennsylvania’s famously hilly terrain has also limited development outside the city, slowing the suburban sprawl that has challenged many US communities’ efforts to revive decaying urban neighbourhoods.
While many Pittsburgh communities have yet to benefit from the upswing experienced by some of their neighbours, a sense of optimism for the city’s future is spreading.
“You will see a brightness both in the culture and in the economy that was missing even five years ago,” Mr Madison says. “There’s no question that Pittsburgh has a forward-moving trajectory.
“And that’s a lot of fun to participate in.”
