When a Pittsburgh sports team appears on national television, it’s a sure bet that one of the commentators will refer to the team’s hometown as “the Steel City” in one way or another.
But even as the Steel Curtain defense was helping propel the Steelers to the first of four Super Bowls in the 1970s, the industry for which it was named was well into decline.
“It’s been nearly 40 years since the nadir of job destruction in the wake of heavy industry,” said Chris Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research. “The peak of those steel jobs was probably in the 1950s, honestly.”
Sportscasters will inevitably use the nickname when the NFL Draft sets up shop in Pittsburgh from April 23-25.
But if Pittsburgh isn’t “the Steel City” anymore, what is it? What drives the economy and culture at the confluence of the region’s three rivers these days?
It may be tempting to look to the relatively simplified “eds and meds” shorthand of recent years. The region’s universities and health care systems certainly have beefed up their presence across the city’s footprint. But Briem, whose book “Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation” was released in February, said there is no one industry that has supplanted steel in the region.
And that’s probably a good thing.
A steel-dominated city
“The book documents that we were a steel-dominated, steel-dependent region for a lot longer than we should’ve been,” Briem said. “I think the nature of us having multiple generations all connected to the steel industry was really infused into the culture.”
As steelmaking went away, civic and business leaders sought something to replace it.
“The short answer is, nothing has really replaced the steel industry, and nothing really will,” Briem said. “The conditions that made this such a dominating place to produce steel won’t be replicated here or anywhere else.”
During the Industrial Revolution and again during World War II, the navigable waterways that formed Pittsburgh’s footprint, and the Pennsylvania Railroad’s former dominion over regional commercial transportation, created the perfect conditions to turn the city into a steelmaking juggernaut.
But that production likely peaked more than a century ago, during the 1920s, Briem said.
“It was really downhill after that, and it’s mostly accidents of history — the Great Depression, World War II — that extended its importance and made it seem as though it wasn’t in decline.”
The final steel mill within the city limits closed in 1998. Today, steel jobs in Pittsburgh proper are limited to office staff at the U.S. Steel headquarters Downtown, and that is primarily the result of its recent merger with Japan-based Nippon, further illustrating that the one-time American industrial titan has reached the point where it needed a partnership to survive. The only production facilities remaining in the region are in Braddock and Clairton.
Identity
As the Steelers were cementing their legacy as the greatest NFL team of the 1970s, the notion of Pittsburgh as “the Steel City” began to be replaced locally with the “City of Champions” moniker, says Anne Madarasz, chief historian and director of the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum at the Heinz History Center.
“Out of that evolving dark time when steel was shutting down, you got this sense that while the city’s pride might not be on the front page of the paper, it was there in the sports section,” Madarasz said.
The advent of “Steelers Nation” — the notion that no matter where you went in America, you could find a few Steeler fans — is directly tied to the death of steel.
“ ‘Steelers Nation’ was really created by the outflow of people from the region as steel was declining and our sports franchises were rising,” Madarasz said.
Michael Glass, director of urban studies at the University of Pittsburgh, said that following the region’s population dropping by several hundred thousand between 1970 and 1990, it is still largely trying to find its identity.
“We had coal, coke, steel, iron, glass, all of this manufacturing stuff,” Glass said. “It was easy for communities to understand their role in creating the region’s wealth — coal miners, steel workers, barge pilots. But after de-industrialization in the ’70s and gut punch after gut punch, we’re still struggling to sort of find a narrative to move us along.”
Glass said “eds and meds” only describes a small piece of the region.
“It doesn’t describe the kind of economy where you could make a life for yourself the way you could with the good, often union-related jobs you had as part of that broader industrial complex that kept the region going for 150 years,” he said. “If you look out into Fayette County, eds, meds, steel — none of it matters with the level of disinvestment those communities are still fighting against.”
Despite the population decline in the wake of the steel industry, Pittsburgh has grown in many areas.
“When you look at the city today, there’s not just a single answer,” Briem said. “This is a much more diverse economy than it probably has ever been.”
Diversity
The seeds of today’s diversity began growing more than 100 years ago, Madarasz said.
“Pittsburgh has been able to reinvent itself a few times over history,” she said. “Back in the 1920s and ’30s, the creation of the Mellon Institute took the power of Pittsburgh’s universities and combined them with industry to create this center of innovation for the future. The government invested in nuclear energy through the work of Westinghouse.”
Even the abandoned industrial properties left in the wake of steel’s collapse are seeing a second life in many cases — the former Homestead Works is the site of the Waterfront shopping center, and Hazelwood Green sits atop the former J&L steel property.
Tech companies also have found an upside in some of the region’s former industrial sites.
“AI companies are looking for space to build data centers, and we have old industrial sites they’re finding that are very suitable for that,” Madarasz said.
Glass said some towns have cast a skeptical eye toward such proposals.
“You see some suspicion in these communities where people are asking, ‘Is this going to be a benefit to me, or is it going to take the water, take the energy, drive my energy costs up and not benefit my kids?’” he said.
Technology of a different kind has taken root primarily through Carnegie Mellon University: robotics.
“Without a doubt, Pittsburgh has the country’s largest concentration and mass of robotics research and start-ups,” said Howie Choset, professor of robotics, biomedical Engineering, electrical and computer engineering at CMU’s Robotics Institute.
He said Pittsburgh’s longstanding, blue-collar work ethic has helped the robotics industry bloom.
“We have this idea that in Pittsburgh, we make things,” Choset said. “We make machines that matter and that work. And I think that has really helped distinguish us from our peers.”
Choset said that work ethic comes to light in comparing the typical investor or start-up in the Bay Area to one in Pittsburgh.
“In the Bay Area, they try to get as much investment as possible, and they try to get some dominant market, damn the reality,” he said. “Whereas here, we’re more focused on, ‘Let’s solve a problem that generates value.’ And you end up with a lot more companies that last a lot longer as opposed to companies that get a bunch of investment and burn out.”
Bloomfield Robotics, a company that spun off from CMU research labs, partnered with Kubota and last year debuted Flash, a robotic vehicle that can collect data on crop size, monitor plants for disease and send real-time data to farmers in order to maximize crop yields. Gecko Robotics has created robots that not only can inspect military vehicles and ships and collect data, but also make repairs in areas difficult for people to reach.
Choset said part of the legacy of Pittsburgh’s one-time industrial dominance is the hardworking ethos that he felt has attracted thought leaders and investors in tech and robotics.
Madarasz said Pittsburgh has benefited from being a relatively small city with a big-city culture, again, in no small part due to the industrial wealth concentrated in the region by people like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and Richard King Mellon.
“We have Heinz Hall, the Carnegie museums, Phipps Conservatory, the Hillman library and cancer centers,” she said. “Those are all entities funded by industrial wealth that are now managed by foundations.”
Similar to the 1920s, Madarasz said, Pittsburgh today “benefits in many ways from a combination of academic research fueled by industrial and corporate wealth, with some partnership between industry and government to build the modern economy where health care, life science, robotics and computer engineering are dominant.”
That diversity has made the city much stronger, Briem said.
“We have the medical industry, the financial services industry and a great technology base here, and a lot of it is rooted in the ‘eds and meds’ that you hear people mention,” he said. “I think the big lesson is that the steel industry lasted longer than any one industry will exist in one region ever again. We have some great stories of post-industrial change, but we haven’t done as well spreading that change to the larger steel economy in places like Aliquippa, Clairton, Braddock and to some extent the Alle-Kiski Valley.”
Today, Pittsburgh is a prime driver for the regional economy. The city’s job gains constitute the bulk of all employment growth across Southwestern Pennsylvania over the past 15 years, according to Briem’s research.
From 2010 through the middle of 2024, more than 75% of the Pittsburgh region’s employment gains have been generated by jobs within the city. Moreover, at the end of 2024, the city’s 2.7% unemployment rate was lower than that of any county in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
“There’s a strong persistence of memory in Pittsburgh,” Briem said. “We’ll never forget the steel industry. But we’ve moved on.”
