With the reigning champions in NHL hockey (the Penguins) and NFL football (the Steelers, who again beat the Arizona Cardinals Thursday, this time in a preseason game), Pittsburgh has had a good year, tarnished however by two acts of gun violence by lunatics of the Rabid Right. For the next month or so it is the center of different attention: first as the host of the current Netroots convention (President Clinton delivered the keynote Thursday), and then as the host of the international G-20 convention in September--selected by Barack Obama, the same weekend that the Steelers visited the White House, and he put them to work packing care packages for U.S. troops.
Visitors will find some big changes since the last time Pittsburgh was the City of Champions (which was the last time any city had two championship pro teams, in 1979.) The steel mills were pretty much gone by then, and the new economy that is helping Pittsburgh weather the Great Recession better than other Rust Belt cities is symbolized in the bottom photo of downtown from across the Mon River: that big black building peeking from behind the gleaming silver ones used to say U.S. Steel and USX, but now it's UPMC--University of Pittsburgh Medical Centers. Universities and medicine are the biggest game in town, with high tech (centered also at Carnegie Mellon) adding to the diversity.
Pittsburgh has also once again been voted America's Most Liveable City, having maintained modest housing prices that didn't bubble or break as much as elsewhere, meanwhile adding to cultural and arts institutions, and continuing to make the rivers and other natural assets more accessible. I'm sure Netroots people are discovering the walkable downtown from the comfortable green convention center. The city government has had economic problems and the Great Recession has cut into some local institutions, but this is still a great city--even on the relatively gray day in June I snapped these photos.
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