Pittsburgh vs Cleveland: a tale of two Rust Belt cities One thrives while the other despairs
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Pittsburgh was prepared for the decline of American manufacturing. Cleveland wasn’t. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.
Pittsburgh was prepared for the decline of American manufacturing. Cleveland wasn’t. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.
car industryClevelandManufacturingPittsburghRust Belt
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Jeff Bloodworth
Jeff Bloodworth
27 Oct 9 mins
We are family. Bill Peduto learned that in 1979. That year, the two-term Pittsburgh mayor recalls, was “pretty magical”. It was the year his beloved Pirates adopted Sister Sledge’s funkydisco hit—and rode their new theme song to a World Series crown. The “Famalee”, as announcers dubbed the baseball team, cemented a bond between city and team, all while embodying the mayor’s close-knit hometown. Months later, the Pittsburgh Steelers captured the franchise’s fourth Super Bowl, American Football’s biggest prize. In 1979, Pittsburgh the “City of Champions” was born, its black-and-gold jerseys entering into legend. He didn’t realise it at the time, but as the 61-year-old Peduto tells me, it was also the year his city died.
In December 1979, a perfect storm of global competition, outmoded factories, and recession slammed into America’s industrial heartland. US Steel, for a century the jewel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s crown, shuttered 15 plants. Seemingly overnight, the 27,000 steel mill jobs across the city’s Monongahela Valley vanished with them. By 1980, one-in-five Pittsburghers was jobless, and they weren’t alone. In 1950, the industrial Midwest, a seven-state region stretching from Appalachia to Wisconsin, was home to43% ofallAmerican jobs. Starting in the Seventies, steel shed 350,000 jobs, carmakers 500,000; 1.2 million blue-collar jobs disappeared, and Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh lostnearly half of their populations.
The “Steel City” of the Thirties forged the Empire State Building and Golden Gate Bridge. But by the Eighties, Pittsburgh’s once-tidy working-class neighbourhoods were shooting-dens of bullets and heroin. Prostitutes walked the streets. Patrons queued outside bars at 10 in the morning. “I was watching my city die,” Peduto says again. “I mean, right before my eyes.” But family is family, and Peduto, a big man with a booming voice, saved his kin and kiln. The longtime councilman and city mayor from 2014 to 2022, he engineered America’s gold standard in urban revitalisation, with Pittsburgh now widely regarded as the country’s “most liveable city”.
Pittsburgh now teems with the creativetypes who drive startups and young firms. Nearly half of local Zoomers hold college degrees. Their ingenuity pushed city GDP from $79 billion in 2012 to $109 billion by 2021, a37% jump. On a warm autumn evening, I walk the streets of downtown and can almost taste the wealth. Forty-somethings crowd the August Wilson theatre. Twenty-somethings sip cocktails in the dusk. The Steel City is now the Smart City, a centre of new tech boasting three billion-dollar AI firms. Pittsburgh’s legacy companies have come back too: the gleaming offices of Heinz, PPG and even US Steel dominate what locals call the “Golden Triangle” of the downtown, squeezed into the spit of land where the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers all meet. The rivers mean bridges, 446 of them, many of which are painted black and gold: in Pittsburgh, even the infrastructure roots for hometown teams.
Through all this, Pittsburgh hasn’t become some bougie theme park. Instead, it is themost affordable city across the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK. That, of course, still leaves one more question: how did Peduto’s dead city come roaring back to life? For Ken Heineman, the answer starts with history. As far back as the 19th century, explains theauthor of a book on the city, Pittsburgh’s early industrialists lent a “special flavour” to the local elite. Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, Scots-Irish Presbyterians both, practised a civic stewardship that defined the Pittsburgh’s establishment, a code that meshed with the social responsibility of the Catholic working class. Pursuit of the common good became the steel running down the city’s spine, creating social cohesion — and, if you like, a Pittsburgh family.
To educate his kin, Carnegie built 19 libraries across Pittsburgh. Nor did he stop at the city limits. Over 1,600 architectural masterpieces, together known as theCarnegie Libraries, dot the region and the nation. Following suit, the Catholic Church brokered deals between its labourer parishioners and Protestant industrialists. This cooperative, do-gooding impulse helped forge an economic miracle. Blessed with three rivers of water and peace between unions and management, Pittsburgh became the steel capital of the world. By 1944, it was forging more steel than all America’s Axis enemies put together.
Yet the Steel City nearly choked on its success. A thick smog blanketed the city. Streetlights were illuminated by noon. In October 1948, a “death smog” killed 20. Today’s Golden Triangle was a filthy goulash of pollution and decay. At a crossroads, Pittsburgh, as families do, came together. Mayor David Lawrence, the son of Irish immigrants, worked with the scion of the Mellon fortune, Richard King Mellon. Theresult was the Pittsburgh Renaissance. A $600 million masterplan, underwritten by $400 million of Mellon’s fortune, built today’s gleaming Golden Triangle. Colleges and banks dominate what was once an industrial trash heap; all that remains of the area’s rough-hewn past is theIron City Beer headquarters.
Working-class, Catholic, immigrant America— Poles, Slovaks, Italians — also joined with a WASP aristocracy to set the stage for Pittsburgh’s contemporary revival. A “meeting of the minds” is how Heineman puts it, one that cut across class and religious lines and developed a distinct civic tradition focused on growth for the commonweal.
Like in Carnegie’s time, this ethos began with elites rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi. By the 2000s, Peduto was a powerful city councilman. And rather than “manage decline”, he saw his city’s promise in the diverse East End neighbourhood. “I not only represented that area,” he says, “I lived it.” As in the past, proximity mattered. Drinking buddies with Richard Florida, an urbanist and Carnegie Mellon University professor, Peduto frequented a grubby East End dive. Downing beers next to him were working stiffs, but also Johannes Bonatti, a scientist who developed micro-robots for open-heart surgeries. Across the bar was Luis von Ahn, who invented the programming language for Duolingo.
Aware of the “crazy potential” in this single dive, Peduto reinvigorated Pittsburgh’s family links. City Hall, foundations, universities, and the private sector all collaborated. A memorandum of understanding between the city and Carnegie Mellon, the first ever between a municipality and university, meant Mayor Peduto had world-class R&D just a text message away. This is how Pittsburgh became home to the planet’s smartest traffic signals, with a task force devoting itself to connecting entrepreneurs to resources, then marketing their services to Silicon Valley. When Uber needed a city to test driverless cars, it was Pittsburgh that grabbed the billion-dollar investment. Soon enough, the city became an urban laboratory for tech, jobs and investment. Just like in 1979, Pittsburgh was “famalee” — albeit with slightly less disco.
“When Uber needed a city to test driverless cars, it was Pittsburgh that grabbed the billion-dollar investment.”
Pittsburgh, of course, is far from the only city to experience economic trauma. Yet if the family here rallied and recovered, not everyone was so lucky. To understand what I mean, drive 130 miles up the I-76 to Cleveland, Ohio, which, in a way, lived Pittsburgh’s experience without the family twist.
Both cities were deeply defined by waves of immigration. In 1910, 25% of Pittsburghers wereborn in Southern or Eastern Europe. By 1920, a jaw-dropping three-quarters of Clevelanders had come from overseas. There are other similarities too, especially in how both cities became defined by belching factories. Just as Heinz became synonymous with Pittsburgh, for instance, Cleveland enjoyed a long relationship with General Motors. Yet where Peduto and his city slumped but then revived, Cleveland took a different path, and is now the secondpoorest large city in the nation.
How did Cleveland become what Heineman calls “the un-Pittsburgh”? One way of understanding this is by comparing the cities’ moguls. For if Carnegie and Mellon set the tone by the Ohio, John D. Rockefeller long dominated life by Lake Erie. Dr Jon Wlasiuk, a Michigan State Universityprofessor who authoredAn Alternative History of Cleveland, says that Rockefeller’s Standard Oil helped make Cleveland “the engine that drove the American economy”. From 1900 to 1930, the city’s population nearlytripled, making it the nation’s sixth most populous. Shaker Heights, a suburb east of downtown, enjoyed the nation’s highest per capita income. Its manicured leafy, tree-lined streets and mock-Tudor houses were all designed to evoke the cozy feel of a European village.
In the postwar era, US Steel, General Electric, Ford, Chevy, and even NASA came to Cleveland, making the city, in the words of civic boosters, “The Best Location in the Nation”. You get a sense of this past grandeur in the art deco and Beaux Arts buildings that ring Playhouse Square, the nation’s second-largest theatre district, or by gazing up at the Superman Statue on Ontario Street. Clevelanders Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster created the superhero in 1938, a reflection of the city’s brawny optimism.
Yet in the end, the Cleveland family fell apart. Whereas Carnegie and Mellon invested in education alongside their factories, founding institutions that would eventually become Carnegie Mellon University, Rockefeller largely ignored civic Cleveland. Rather than gifting his adopted city with a college of its own, he instead endowed the University of Chicago, before promptly bolting for Manhattan. In 1913, the city got its revenge by filing suit against Rockefeller for unpaid residential taxes, with a judge issuing a subpoena preventing the magnate from even entering the state.
Civic incompetence has stalked Cleveland ever since. For Michael DeAloia, the city’s former tech tsar, one good example is the ominous report civic fathers received in 1959, predicting an imminent end to the long industrial boom. Aware of “1979” two decades in advance, officials founded the Cuyahoga Community College to train young Clevelanders for the white-collar future — but the curriculum, maddeningly, remained focused on manufacturing. DeAloia, who read the 1959 study while writing the college’s official history, was astounded. “I sat there slack-jawed reading this damn thing!”
City leaders were warned. But the306,000 Clevelanders who worked in manufacturing enjoyed no such notice. By all appearances, it was all blue skies and puppy dogs. Through the Sixties, their wages surged by 22%. Clevelandplaced in the top 10% of US cities by per capita income. But, as predicted, it wasn’t to last. By the late Eighties, 40% of Cleveland’s factory jobs had vanished. Median income fell by nearly a third. Strife enveloped the city. Mafia bombings became so common that aCleveland Plain Dealer headline quipped “Bombing Business Booming Here”. In 1978, Cleveland became the first American city to default on its debt since the Great Depression. The “Best Location in the Nation” was now the “Mistake on the Lake”.
Deindustrialisation caused Cleveland’s demise. But a historic lack of social solidarity made its fall all the worse. Class conflict defined the relationship between elites and the working class, typified by Elliot Ness, the city’s director of public safety. Ness viewed organised labour and the unemployed as he did Al Capone: a threat to be beaten. In a 1937 steel strike, Ness sent his goons to smash the union. But Cleveland’s labour movement, infused with communist organisers, responded in kind, and indeed had been shipped out of Pittsburgh to more fertile revolutionary turf.
“Deindustrialisation caused Cleveland’s demise.”
Without these bonds of solidarity, race became ever more divisive: especially once the civil rights movement arrived. Because Cleveland enjoyed an earlier and heartier industrial boom, the city attracted more African-American migrants than Pittsburgh; by 1970, nearly four-in-ten locals were black. And though racial turmoil also roiled Pittsburgh through the postwar period, it was nothing compared to Cleveland’s 1966 Hough Riots, or the 1968 Glenville Shootout, a deadly gunfight between the police and a cell of Black Nationalists. For Heineman, meanwhile, even geography can explain the cities’ varied fates. Divided by three rivers, deep ravines, and steep foothills, he suggests Pittsburgh is really a series of “small towns with communities with a great deal of social cohesion”. Cleveland, by contrast, was built on a flat plane, meaning its different ethnic neighbourhoods were always “running up against each other”.
Whatever the cause, the consequences are starkly clear in Cleveland today. Between islands of architectural wonders lies a sea of empty streets and half-occupied buildings. For many Rust Belt residents, such urban blight can become almost pathological, with Heineman witnessing the drug-spurred aimlessness that enveloped his working-class generation. “Symbolically,” he says, “I went to high school with Eminem’s mother and JD Vance’s mom.” Vince Guerrieri, another Rust Belt native who has lived in both cities, makes a similar point. “People will tell you that it’s not healthy to derive your identity from what you do for a living,” he concedes, “but there are a lot of people who became unmoored because they weren’t working at the auto plant or the steel mill. And now they’ve got to figure out what this all means.” If elections in the Rust Belt show any pattern, certainly, they reveal a people dazed by capitalism’s creative destruction. Like a boxer woozy from upper cuts, they bobble from Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama to Donald Trump.
Pittsburgh is the exception. The lone Rust Belt city to rise from deindustrialisation’s ashes, it is also the only one to remain as solidly Democratic as it was in the Sixties. Yet as the Golden Triangle gleams, and the downtown bars are packed, and the Steelers record their 23rd straight winning season, Pittsburgh’s second renaissance isn’t quite perfect. Born to a Rust Belt coalminer, Allen Dieterich-Ward now studies his native region. And if the city’s lost industrial world could be brutal, it did at least offer vast opportunities across the region. Miners dug the coal. Labour smelted the iron and forged the steel. And Pittsburgh’s elites counted the money, with at least one eye on the little guy. For Deiterich-Ward, however, that world of a democratic capitalism is gone.
The numbers prove him right. Today, 34 of the 100 Pennsylvania towns with thehighest per-capita poverty are in the state’s western portion: in other words the Pittsburgh hinterland. One survey of 18-29-year-old rural southwest Pennsylvanians revealed70% planned to leave. The Ohio Valley, a region anchored by Pittsburgh and Cleveland, leads the nation in deaths of despair. Rural counties that were once the backbone of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party have swung hard to Trump, not out of racism but despair. “The postindustrial city just does not achieve that level of integration,” Dieterich-Ward adds. “There are pockets of wealth. There are pockets of renewal.” Pittsburgh is just such a pocket — but if the city family thrives, its cousins and uncles seem broken and forgotten. Perhaps, then, modern America can learn from 1979 Pittsburgh: we are family, so let’s act like it.
Jeff Bloodworth is a writer and professor of American political history at Gannon University
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