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It had also produced a rigidly stratified society, filthy air, bloody strikes. It had allowed itself to be flooded regularly by the rivers that lap its sides.
Pittsburgh in the 20th Century was a noisy, grimy giant sprawled across a coal seam, gobbling up ore from Mesabi and spewing out molten steel. It squatted, black and ugly, on the hills between the Allegheny and the Monongahela, trailing mill towns up & down its river valleys. It dug the coal and fed it into fiery furnaces, and strewed the mountainous offal of its furnaces across its landscape.
Smoke from its stacks and its chimney pots, ash from its blast furnaces hung over its head in a never-dissipated cloud. Smoke curled even from the gashes in its hillsides, where fire burned internally along the coal seams.
It was a city better seen at night. Then it had mystery, beauty and grandeur—a mammoth black patchwork, spotted with the pink blossoms of the Bessemers, hung with lights stretching out between the pale river highways, the Ohio, the Allegheny and the Monongahela. In the daytime it emerged in all its sprawling ugliness.
To the genteel 18th Century into which it was born, Pittsburgh was the essence of a frontier culture, which it has never quite managed to shake. In recent years it has been jeeringly called an esthetic abortion, a municipal hovel, a mining town on a vast scale. It gobbled up people the way it gobbled up iron ore—people with the names of Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Italy, Hungary, Yugoslavia. Some 1,000,000 of them lived and worked in the city's whole industrial complex, some 700,000 lived within the city's limits.
They rode up & down the cliff in ancient funiculars (the "Inclines"), jammed the buses and trolley cars which filled the cobblestone, alley-like streets. The luckier and better-paid lived in nearby suburbs. Most of the wealthy had fled to the distant suburbs of Sewickley Heights, Fox Chapel, or to Rolling Rock, 50 miles to the east in the mountains near the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
World of Frick & Mellon. In the 20th Century as in the 19th, Pittsburgh was ruled by money and steel, and by people bearing the names of Frick, Carnegie, Mellon. These were men who had made the city great—and who had left behind the ugly, lordly buildings in the business section, their monuments to Coal, Coke, Iron, Steel, Aluminum, who had left behind their Duquesne Club squatting beside Gimbel's department store, their mansions of monstrous Victorian architecture.
They had also left the city their monuments to culture. There stood Andrew Carnegie's blackened sandstone museum, whose bilious, soot-streaked walls were hung with a weird jumble of oil paintings, whose cavernous halls housed Diplodocus carnegiei ("Dippy," the dinosaur) brought from a Wyoming fossil dump. Beside a ravine which belched forth the smoke of locomotives perched the Carnegie Institute. Soaring into the city's grey sky was the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning—42 stories of classrooms and offices piled one on top of another.