My husband and I just visited Pittsburgh for the first time.We went to PNC Park to see a Cubs game. We stayed at the downtown Hilton. I thought it was comparable to Cincinnati in a lot of ways. It was clean, and the views were very nice. We will be coming back to watch more games in the future.
I grew up in north-central West Virginia, so Pittsburgh was the “big city” that we went to. I am still a Steelers, Pens, and Pirates fan. I went to WVU, so Pitt can go …well, commit unnatural acts with itself.
I always enjoyed the 'Burgh. Big City feel with regular people who talk horrendously. Damn, I hate that Yinzer accent!
It is a city that does need some catching up to do as manufacturing is last century and needs to move forward.
And, yeah, the liquor laws are ridiculous, reflective of the old prohibition era. You can’t buy beer in a grocery store or a convenience store. You have to go to a beer wholesaler and buy a warm case, or pay ridiculous bar prices for cold beer.
As someone who lives in Cleveland’s eastern suburbs, that’s the impression I get, too. Cleveland’s downtown is okay, but the bulk of its city neighborhoods are rough; either ghetto or “seen better days” blue-collar ethnic, with few middle-class or upper income areas outside of the usual gentrifying loft/warehouse zones every larger city seems to have near its downtown. The suburbs, though, more than make up for it. Cleveland has horrendous urban sprawl for a region its size, but suburban communities are almost universally quite nice. Even working class suburbs like Garfield Heights and Parma have a certain orderliness and tidiness about them.
In Pittsburgh, there seemed to be a higher percentage of an in-town middle class and upper income population. The suburbs, though, seemed run-down; too many beat-up rowhomes, commercial strips lined by semi-industrial uses like excavating firms and machine shops, and very little “quaintness” to speak of; instead, they seem more “rugged”, for lack of a better word.
What comes to mind? This pretty young Canadian gal who broke my heart after a visit to Pittsburgh.
When I hear “Pittsburgh” I think of a great city that has figured out how to save itself. I wish Cleveland could do the same.
The times I have been there it was bright and sunny and we had a great time shopping and eating out.
Nah. My Yinzer Kin actually live in, I think, Norvelt but their Post Office is Greensburg. We pretty much just swoop in via the Turnpike and then use 30 to get around. It seems like parts of 30 have been built up to look kind of nice (there’s a mall near a Holiday Inn where we stay) but at the same time feels very messy and confusing once you get past the rebuilt parts.
I went to Pittsburgh for a wedding in 2001. Not a bad city, but I prefer the Twin Cities. Definitely older and more heavy-industrial.
Very hilly–reminded me a little bit of Montana, which is where I grew up.
We liked the Carnegie Museum and the Andy Warhol Museum.
Navigating is a nightmare. We tried to Mapquest something (a comedy club, I think), and ended up in the complete middle of nowhere. We tried to turn around in a parking lot and a cop harassed us. Now, around here, once the cop figured out we were tourists, he probably would do his best to help us, give us directions, etc. Not in Pittsburgh. Rather unhelpful. Obviously unused to people “not from here”.
Road construction everywhere and stop signs at the end of freeway on-ramps (???).
A few buildings were still rather sooty. We did see one building being washed.
We needed a pair of little girls’ tights and there was nowhere near the hotel to get them. Someone directed us to an Ames discount store–like Walmart only worse. I understand they are now gone.
There was a cookie table at the wedding. I’ve never seen that before, but it was pretty nice 
The first question my mom asked when we told her we were getting married in Virginia was whether there would be a cookie table.
She made sure there was one there - 100 dozen homemade cookies were transported from Pittsburgh to Fairfax, Virginia for a wedding with only a hundred guests.
I grew up in the Mon Valley.
Hubby and I grew up in the burbs of Pittsburgh and moved to FL after graduating about 7 years ago. There were few jobs for hubby in the enginering field so we decided to move.
What I really love about the city is the Oakland area, in particular where Pitt and CMU are. Yes, driving is hell and walking is even more scarier - SO much traffic and lots of one way streets. U of Pitt in the springtime, and even early fall, it’s so gorgeous there. The greens around Phipps conservatory and CMU you almost forget that 5 mins away is this old feeling city. Hubby would join me at the Cathedral of Learning for studytime, or meals in between classes and we felt like monks studying in there. It was a great and beautiful place.
What bugs me about the city…
Even though there has been some new construction, it really looks out of place. To me, everything feels like it’s stuck from the early 80s. It seems just as run down and dirty as it did when I was a kid.
I commuted to Pitt my last 2 years of college, and as always it seemed like something was under construction. I always seemed to miss the landslides that plagued the areas along Route 28. Navigation for us was generally not a problem, since we grew up there, but there are so many over/underpasses and quick turns between streets and lights it was white knuckle driving even when it was sunny out. There’s never a direct way to get anywhere.
I really don’t miss the lack of sun; however, I do miss the spring and fall up there. The trees coming out in the spring, and the changing of the leaves.
Most of hubby’s family still lives up there as does most of my dad’s side of the family - mom and her sisters have moved further south in the US. Going up in a few weeks to indulge in our favorite college foods and to spend time with family we usually see once a year.
Cincinnati actually has about 20,000 more people than Pittsburgh, so I guess that would make Cincy the bigger, shittier version of Pitt.
I live in Pennsylvania, but I’ve only been to Pittsburgh once passing through. I tend to think of it in the regular, stereotypical ways.
When I was growing up, I had a friend from Pittsburgh. Whenever we’d play football or baseball, he’d pronounce the word “zero” as if it rhymed with “pharoah” (zairo, I guess), which I always though was pretty funny.
My hometown, Buffalo, seems culturally more similar to Pittsburgh (an abundance of regional idiosyncrasies, blue-collar soul, plenty of high and low culture without much middle, football fanatics, etc), but with a built and natural environment far more similar to Cleveland (lakefront location, relatively flat, housing stock consisting mainly of frame single family houses and two-flats, etc).
One cultural quirk of Buffalo is that the natives believe every aspect of the city is somehow more “authentic”, “genuine”, “honest”, and “real”, and that the world beyond is “plastic”, “fake”, “corporate”, “sanitized”, and so on. Upscale amenities that are embraced in other parts of the country, such as lifestyle centers, boutique hotels, high-end chain stores, and the like, face opposition when they’re even mentioned in the context of being in Buffalo, because they are “fake” and so on. The Cleveland area really doesn’t seem to have that attitude. I wonder if it’s prevalent in Pittsburgh, though.
I think many people leave Buffalo not because they can’t find a job there, but because they’ve been to other cities, and they know the grass is greener. The number of their peers is shrinking in Buffalo, and growing in places like Charlotte and Chicago. They feel like they don’t fit in; that Buffalo belongs to the beer-bellied Bills fanatics, and not the young professionals that drive the post-industrial economy and culture of today. I wonder if the same can be said of Pittsburgh; that young people leave not necessarily because of the job market, but because by virtue of being a young, educated professional, they feel like they don’t fit in with the dominant culture.
I almost didn’t let Mr. Neville apply for a professorship here, since I believed the stereotypes about Pittsburgh. I didn’t think there’d be much of a Jewish community here, either (and living somewhere with a sizeable Jewish community was a must for us). Turned out that the Jewish community, while a bit smaller than the community in the SF Bay Area where we used to live, is more active. Getting kosher meat and finding a synagogue is not a problem. We live in Squirrel Hill, and I like our neighborhood.
I’m not into professional sports, but I like the Steelers- I don’t watch them play, but I go to their website for when they are playing. When the games are going on is a good time to go to Costco or Target and not have to deal with crowds.
There are blighted neighborhoods around, though, and the traffic is worse than I thought it would be. I now have a job where I can take a bus to work, though, so I don’t drive so much now.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Pittsburgh is a certain Calvin and Hobbes cartoon:
That said, I’ve visited Pittsburgh a few times, and have never not enjoyed myself. The Carnegie Science Center is amazing, for one thing.
Why can’t they shake their image? They continue to identify themselves as steel-town, so it’s no wonder people think of it as “rust belt.” That said, a lot of Rust Belt cities are great to visit - I like Cleveland, too.