How Pittsburgh Got Its Groove Back

Mention Pittsburgh to someone who doesn’t live here. Ask them what springs to mind. (Go ahead. We’ll wait.)

Steel city? Belching black smoke? Post-industrial wasteland? The Steelers?

On our travels, we hear that a lot. But aside from our sports teams (whose greatness is a constant), those images of Pittsburgh recall a different era, a time of high unemployment and low expectations. Perceptions are stubborn things.

Much has changed about Pittsburgh, but few people know it.

For more than a decade, Pittsburgh has been in the midst of a renaissance, a splendid revival that has transformed this 250-year-old poster child for the Rust Belt into a center of technology, banking, energy, health care and education.

At Pittsburgh International Airport, we know the back story all too well. Airports are a reflection of the cities they serve, and Pittsburgh’s decline in the 1980s and 1990s was the airport’s loss, too. The low point may have come in 2004, when US Airways dropped PIT as a hub and consolidated in Philadelphia.

As the gateway to a city on the rise, the airport today is transforming itself as well, with a $1 billion-plus Terminal Modernization Program, an 80 percent growth in nonstop destinations in the last two years, including three international connections, and a growing reputation as a viable and uncongested option for moving freight to and from North America.

“Pittsburgh is a region on the rise, but for a long time, the airport wasn’t keeping up. It was the missing piece to truly complete the regional renaissance,” said Allegheny County Airport Authority CEO Christina Cassotis. “We set a course to change that. Everything we do is focused on what’s best for the region and the airport. Our vision is to advance the region’s role as world leader and we’re doing it.”

This is the story of how Pittsburgh (and its airport) got its groove back, in three acts.

Act 1: Coal and Rivers

George Washington knew it. As a major in the British Colonial Army in the 1700s, the future father of our nation noted the rolling topography and three rivers that made this area a strategic transportation hub.  The great reserves of coal discovered in the region would fuel the furnaces that eventually made more steel in World War II than Germany and Japan combined.

Many thought the industrial boom would never end. Yet as early as the 1940s, a few enlightened city leaders began to ask, “What happens if the steel industry goes away?”

Scoffed at by many, they nonetheless persisted and, as a result, took the first steps in cleaning up Pittsburgh’s air. It took a while, but they succeeded.

“In the 1970s, (Pittsburgh) no longer looked like ‘Hell with the lid off,’ as James Parton once stated, no streetlights turned on at noon, and you didn’t have to take extra white shirts to work, either,” said Bill Flanagan, chief corporate relations officer for the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, an organization that has been working for economic diversification and a better quality of life for all of its 75 years.

No sooner had Pittsburgh begun to clean up its act than the steel industry actually did collapse. The 1980s found Pittsburgh down on its luck: 18.3 percent jobless rate, and a population decline of a quarter million. (That’s one reason there are so many Steelers bars around the country and the world.)

“Pittsburgh’s economy fell off a cliff; arguably the worst setback suffered by any region in the United States in the second half of the 20^th century,” said Flanagan. “The situation was so dire that regional leaders once again came together, this time not to improve the region but to save it.”

Act II: Revival and Reinvention

Pittsburgh had a secret weapon long before the city knew it needed one. Andrew Carnegie, the man who built the steel industry, was feeling guilty about what coal and steel had done to his adopted home.

For his penance, Carnegie became the modern father of philanthropy, systematically giving away the bulk of his great fortune.

His wealth and that of others in the steel and ancillary industries fueled institutions like Carnegie Mellon University. Today, the school produces the tech-rich minds that fuel the robotics, automation and artificial intelligence industries.

That’s why companies like Uber, Facebook, Google, Apple, Disney and others call Pittsburgh