In the greater Pittsburgh area, such segregation as remains is largely a residue of when the milltowns were company towns. The companies tended to house their proles by ethnic group. When the mills crashed, a big chunk of the population moved away. Those who stayed behind stayed in the towns/neighborhoods where the company had originally placed their families because those places had been home for several generations.
Pittsburgh has its own very distinctive accent and vocabulary —
Yinz or Yunz = Y’all
Jumbo = bologna
Jagoff = asshole
rubbij = garbage
Chip-chop meat = cold cuts
Redd up = tidy
Sweep = vacuum clean
Buggy = shopping cart
Nebby = nosey
Gumband = rubber band
An’at = etc.
Jagger bush = thorns
I did it via PM but I already clued her (I believe she’s a her) in on
“Jeet jet” and the related “no jew”
Ya just gotta love it!
True, it’s been 10 yrs since I lived there, and I know Cranberry has exploded so I would imagine McKnight etc too.
Oh, and it gets pretty “slippy” in the winter with all that snow and slush! 
Thanks, everyone, for the responses so far and the PMs. I’m starting to get a good idea of what the area is like. I think I might like it, although you never know until you actually live there. It certainly can’t be the worse place I’ve ever lived, though…
I don’t consider that Pittsburghese. We used to say that in southwestern Ohio, and I’ve heard people from all over the midwest claim it as their own.
“Jeet?”
“Jew?”
“Squeet!”
Yah, getcherself a box ah gumbands and go ret up a room.
From 1985 to 2007 I was married to someone from Squirrel Hill. We did get into dahntahn ( Downtown ) a fair bit. Her parents taught at both schools. ( one at each ). Got to Mt. Lebanon a few times a year to visit other family. It always seemed a city that wanted to get past the filth of Big Steel and didn’t know where to go.
I loved the neighborhoods, but then I’m from The City of Brotherly Love ( ahem ) and so appreciate varied neighborhoods.
Go, enjoy ! Be warned, the sun shines brightly for no more than 18 days per calendar year.
Bubbler = water fountain
A lot of what Ascenray lists is clearly Scottish hangover.
Could be. But its common enough to Pittsburgh that a local band (Johnny Angel and the Halos) used it as an album title.
If you want a taste of Pittsburgh and can make it all the way through, watch the movie “My Tale of Two Cities”. It rambles a bit but its a documentary of sorts and not “Inspector Gadget” (which in itself was filmed here and features the “Tomb of the Unknown Bowler”). Or watch any “Pittsburgh” special by Rick Sebak. Quite a few are around the web.
And if you watch the former (or cheat and just watch the clips on their website), one of the all-time great Dopers is the colonial guy in the blue coat. OK – its just me; but I think I’m great.
I’ve been here (Beaver County) for about ten years now, and love it. My husband and I met at Slippery Rock University and settled here years later, and our daughter has never known another home. The Pittsburgh area has lots of great schools (elementary to university, public and private), world-class restaurants, beautiful architecture, museums, cultural halls, sports stadiums and teams, hospitals, waterways and hiking and biking trails and state parks, and … well, I’m babbling, but you get my point.
I find the people to be really warm and welcoming. Most of our friends here grew up here and have lots of family nearby.
The weather is a little bit of everything. No matter what you like, you’re bound to find some, but not too much, of it. It’s snowing now, for one of the first times all season. Schools are overly fond of calling “two-hour delays,” a compromise, I guess, between kids traveling on treacherous roads (or standing at frigid bus stops) and canceling school altogether, but it’s not always effective - it’s not like weather magically improves at 8:00 a.m.
We never experienced much of a “bubble,” so we didn’t have much to recover from. Housing values are steadily increasing, and unemployment is steadily decreasing.
There’s a lot of activity right now in gas and oil industries, and other than that, education, medicine, technology are all very big in Pittsburgh.
This is not the smoky steel city of the 70’s - it’s a truly promising, bright and beautiful place to be. If you decide to move here, I hope you love it, too!
Oh, and always respect the Parking Chair. Technically, you have no legal right to set one out. But if you see someone reserving a space with a chair, DO NOT MOVE IT. That makes you a major jagoff.
That should be familiar to anyone from a snowy place — Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Erie. I recall a kerfluffle a few years ago when Boston city govt tried to tell people they couldn’t use chairs to save parking.
I would suggest coming back with your questions when you’ve kind of narrowed it down to a couple of neighborhoods you’re considering. It’s a very varied city. I lived in the South Hills most of my life and had next to nothing in common with my Carrick or Lawrenceville cousins.
Many parts of the region never recovered from the collapse of the steel industry. This guy’s blog will give you a nice look at the area. Yeah, there are nice things in the Pittsburgh area. It is also a reality that there is an overall shabbiness to much of it and a sense that real prosperity isn’t coming back.
I live here and I like it here but there is a reason that so many of our young people leave.
I’m speaking more of the city specifically than the region generally, but my impression is that Pittsburgh’s more attractive to young professionals than it was a decade ago and is on track to become even more so in the next ten years. The job market can always be better, but the number of jobs downtown is increasing, UPMC continues to be a behemoth and plans to only get bigger, the colleges are what they are, and you have things like Google expanding their office space at Bakery Square to 200,000 square feet (That is 80% the size of the space at the much touted US Steel headquarters that will be built on the Civic Arena site. On the one hand, that shows how large of a presence Google has in Pittsburgh. On the other, it’s a huge indicator of how far US Steel has fallen.).
Additionally, a lot (at least for Pittsburgh) of interesting new development is going on. Bakery Square is moving along, the East Liberty transit center looks like it will be very impressive and have a huge impact on its surroundings because of the large amount of residential and retail involved in it, and there are pretty massive apartment buildings under construction in the strip district that will bring the population in that neighborhood to a couple thousand if I’m remembering right. That short list is biased toward the east end because that’s where I live, but my point is that the city itself is seeing more development than it has in a long time and a lot of the progress appears to be sustainable.
Even though the number of available units is increasing, I believe that a lot of people who haven’t lived here since 2010 or so would be taken aback by the trajectory of rent in a lot of neighborhoods. This article has a map claiming that the rent for the Pittsburgh metro region went up at the third highest percent of any in the nation last year. Hopefully, as supply increases, prices will at least stabilize. In the mean time, I have friends who’ve had to lower their expectations with regard to housing in the last few years because rent is increasing faster than their incomes. I think that’s an indication that demand is increasing because more and more young people are choosing and able to stay in Pittsburgh.
Having snow today and being at work and wondering if my street’s been plowed yet (it’s not), I reminded myself of another thing that makes me optimistic about Pittsburgh: the newish mayor appears to be doing a good job of modernizing a lot of the city government. The latest public-facing example is the snow plow tracking map. You can get real time locations of all the plows as wells as markings on the streets indicating whether they’ve been treated in a time-frame you can specify.
On that note, if you’ve only ever lived in warmer places like Tucson and North Carolina, you’ll have to get used to getting around in the snow. We got a few inches last night and will get a couple more today. Some roads were terrible but many were just wet. That was not nearly enough snow to cancel schools or to justify not going in to work.
Well, I did grow up in Michigan, and now I live in the mountains of NC, and we get some snow, and quite a bit of ice. From what I’m seeing from a lot of you, I do think I might like it there. I work in the medical field, so it’s good to know that healthcare is booming there. Are there regional foods? All I can think of is scrapple!
Chipped ham. Don’t worry, you’ll love it. With BBQ sauce on buns.
Primanti’s, but I don’t much care for them. (It’s a restaurant)
Be sure to go to the Oyster House dahntahn.
Lots of yum polish food, but maybe because that’s my background.
Some vile thing called City Chicken.
They put french fries on salads.
“Bumpy roads,
Take me home,
To the place,
I belong,
Pennsylvania,
Land of potholes,
Take me home.”
/me pours a big glass of wooder on youse guys’s heads.