Why Pittsburgh?As the nation’s worldview shifts toward Pittsburgh with the G-20 summit featuring President Obama as its host, much has been written in recent days about the selection of this city as the site for a gathering of world leaders. The voice of the city’s young mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, has reportedly grown hoarse as he gives interview after interview to the media descending there, in fulfilling his role as a primary booster of Pittsburgh’s attributes.
The White House has repeatedly cited the city’s transformation from a Rust Belt shell to one whose economy rebounded on the base of the health, education and perhaps technology industries. Granted, those employers have acted as a buffer against the higher unemployment rates experienced elsewhere during the current recession. And many have pointed out that Mr. Obama has become pals with the Rooneys, especially Dan Rooney, the owner of the Steelers and the new ambassador to Ireland. Pittsburgh also is situated in a conjoined region of swing states, and we’ll get to the politics in a bit.
Just watch this video, put together by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, to consider a city that is a phoenix rising up from the ashes.
Still, the economics of this city provide a diverse backdrop for the international conversations that will be part of the global summit commencing in the Steel City. In an interview last Friday with editors from the area, Mr. Obama alluded to featuring Pittsburgh in talking about the possible effects of his efforts to turn the economy around: “It gives me an opportunity to underscore the fact that our long-term success is not just dependent on what happens in New York or Washington or Los Angeles, but it’s going to depend on what happens in cities like Pittsburgh,” he said.
All you have to do, though, to understand this choice is to summon up the current state of Detroit. Time magazine has embarked on an ambitious project, with staff settling in there in a house it bought. Dan Okrent, a native of Detroit (the longtime magazine journalist and The Times’s first public editor), wrote the feature piece for the magazine’s launch of this effort, saying:
If, like me, you’re a Detroit native who recently went home to find out what went wrong, your first instinct is to weep. If you live there still, that’s not the response you’re looking for. Old friends and new acquaintances, people who confront the city’s agony every day, told me, “I hope this isn’t going to be another article about how terrible things are in Detroit.”
It is — and it isn’t. That’s because the story of Detroit is not simply one of a great city’s collapse. It’s also about the erosion of the industries that helped build the country we know today. The ultimate fate of Detroit will reveal much about the character of America in the 21st century. If what was once the most prosperous manufacturing city in the nation has been brought to its knees, what does that say about our recent past? And if it can’t find a way to get up, what does that say about our future?
My comparison between the two cities isn’t original; just as the unemployment rate reached the high teens or beyond in the mid-’80s in Pittsburgh, so does Detroit now see even worse figures and an out-migration of its residents.
In an essay for The Washington Post in March, John G. Craig Jr., a former editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, drew the parallels starkly. He began by describing the collapse of his own city in the mid-1980s to prescribe lessons for Detroit. Here’s part of his intro, starting with the 1985 label promoting Pittsburgh rather surprisingly as the nation’s most livable city at a time when mills and mines were shutting down:
Yet this was also the time of Big Steel’s collapse. By 1988, the industry that had made Pittsburgh, battered by competition from new producers with better technology and better products, had shed 56,000 workers, or 61 percent of its workforce. This loss would reverberate through the economy, draining an equal number of other manufacturing jobs from the region. The resulting shock would drive thousands of young people away, straining an already aging population. And the effects of that exodus are still being felt.
Mr. Craig continued:
So when I think about the lessons the Steel City’s 30-year economic transformation may hold for Detroit, another town built on an industry beaten by competition and confronting bankruptcy, I have to say that the first and hardest lesson for the Motor City is this: Fundamental change will be much longer in coming than you can imagine. You’ll survive. The automakers, bailed out or not, will shrink and adapt to a new future and a new reality. The city will remake itself in whatever ways it can. But there’ll be no “getting over” your past, only moving beyond it.
By all accounts, that’s what Pittsburgh has tried to do. As a former childhood resident of the region who witnessed the decline and the changing landscape so long ago, I spent nearly two weeks in August there this year once again eyeing the city’s evolving efforts to remake itself.
Downtown is vibrant, fun. The city’s signature rolling hills have maintained their everlasting, winding mysteries, extraordinarily resplendent after such lush rains during the long spring and summer. Just drive through the Fort Pitt Tunnels toward the city and watch its skyline open before you and beckon toward the triangle that also is unparalleled. That’s the view of new commerce, but in old times the three rivers, the Monongahela and the Allegheny flowing into the Ohio, represented either the Gateway to the West or the Gateway to the East.
So much for river traffic and tugboats. Much has changed. But it is a city of bridges, and as Greenpeace protesters have demonstrated very well, they’re the perfect perch for rappelling and unfurling signs. (Clarification: Readers have pointed out that Pittsburgh has 446 bridges (!); more than two dozen span the three rivers. )
In many ways, once you traverse those bridges, to south and north, what dots the familiar steep hills and who works and lives among them now unfold on a new canvas, one that still seems unsettled, uneasy. For visitors and guests of the G-20 summit, contradictions abound.
Among the highlights are the six-year-old convention center downtown, touted by even former President Clinton in August as one that’s on the cutting edge of LEED green technology; it’s the hub of G-20 activity. (It was also the site for the Netroots Nations conference of liberal bloggers and that of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which President Obama addressed.) 
