Pittsburgh Audio Tours

Pittsburgh has 446 bridges, more than any other city on earth, and it has needed every single one. Built at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers where they join to form the Ohio, the city spent a century producing the steel that framed modern America, then spent the next four decades figuring out what to come after that. The answer turned out to be universities, hospitals, and enough tech investment to make the old Carnegie steel district in the Strip look positively quaint.

Walk up to the Duquesne Incline on the South Side and the view from Mount Washington will stop you cold: the Golden Triangle, the three rivers, the 30 skyscrapers rising from what James Parton called 'hell with the lid off' in 1868.

That hell is long gone. The neighborhoods that replaced the mills, from the art galleries of Lawrenceville to the Jewish bakeries of Squirrel Hill to the Italian delis of Bloomfield, tell a story of immigrant communities that decided to outlast the industry that brought them here. Pittsburgh has 800 sets of outdoor public stairways because of its hills, and the city used every one of them to climb back from collapse.