A glimpse of Pittsburgh's future that never was
In 1995 I merged my libertarian politics with my urge to needle my liberal workmates at the Post-Gazette to envision 'The Steel City' in the year 2020. My foresight was both clear and cloudy.
As part of an otherwise series special Sunday project for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s business section, I wrote this subversive “essay” about what I thought the city was going to be like in 25 years, when hated Senator Rick Santorum was president, local boy Michael Keaton owned the Pirates, the city was full of young people and the economy was digitized, deregulated and healthy. Few readers read this because it was at the back of the special section and the PG worker bees ‘forgot’ to list it in the index. I’m sure it was just an accident.
Pittsburgh in 2020? Not quite
By Bill Steigerwald
As promised, the Bullet Train America (BTA) shot me from Chicago to the terminal at old Greater Pitt in just under two hours.
But my timing was terrible.
Rick Santorum had just landed in Air Force One, so my Yellow Cab is trapped in the parking lot for half an hour until his motorcade pulls out for Downtown.
My wizened cabbie tells me President Santorum is in town to hit up the rich hotshots in the computer and high-tech industries.
He'll have no trouble picking their thick wallets with his surefire theme for getting re-elected in 2020 — cutting the federal income tax to a flat rate of 11 percent.
I've come back home for the first time since the late '90s, when I retired to Montana after winning the lottery. I tell the cabbie I've come back to visit my brother John the Congressman.
But I really want to see for myself the New Pittsburgh — what the experts are saying is the fastest growing, most youthful and most praised of America's new so-called "Renaissance Cities."
In less than 25 years, the former capital of the Manufacturing Age had been transformed. An economy of mills and factories had been swept away forever by the harsh but ultimately creative hurricane of capitalism.
What was left was a kindler, gentler economy.
It was so diversified it had become virtually recession proof: advanced cyberware, movies, multi-organ transplants, health services, bio-tech research. global financial services, multimedia software, machine tools, smokeless manufacturing, tourism. No single industry was dominant.
Thus, in 2020, the Steel City had no suitable nickname. Sony, British Airways and Kennywood Corp. were its top employers. The names H.J. Heinz and Mellon had joined Gulf, Koppers and TCI in capitalism's bottomless dustbin.
Yet the New Pittsburgh had become a Promised Land for a wave of socially desirable immigrant families. They are smart, young, entrepreneurial and fertile. They are Puffies (professional urban fertile families) — the pioneers in America's Back to the City Movement.
As we zip toward town on auto drive, my cabbie turns around to explain why the Parkway West traffic is so light.
The Gov. Ridge Beltway and the Tom Foerster Toll Road took away most of the congestion, he says. So did outlawing trucks. Near Carnegie, my cabbie points out something interesting — the overgrown ruins of the Airport Busway near Carnegie.
"It's a bike trail now," he says, before commanding his dashboard computer to play back the latest local newscast newscast:
This is the Post-Gazette Radio Network. I'm Blake Steigerwald. First the headlines: President Santorum's campaign makes a stop at Penzer Plaza tonight... Michael Keaton promises he won't move the Pirates... And Governor....
"Go to Keaton story," my cabbie interrupts:
Michael Keaton is still denying rumors he will move the Pirates to Mexico City next year. Attendance at Clemente Park has been stuck at around 2 million a year since the Pirates joined the World Baseball League six years ago. But Keaton says he and wife Sharon Stone are not worried:
"When we bought the team in '98, we promised never to move it. We're not going to turn into turncoats now for a lousy 10 million bucks."
Last year, the Pirates earned $200 million in global pay-satellite revenues, second only to the Tokyo Dodgers.
Meanwhile, the Pirates won their third straight last night, beating the Havana Yankees, 4-1. Ken Griffey III — fresh from signing a $100-million lifetime contract — hit two home runs and drove in three. Tomorrow the Pirates play in Manila.
Keaton always knew he'd never have to move the Pirates, I said to myself as we hurtled through the Fort Pitt Tunnels.
He knew that once the Internet’s Info Tollway got rolling, it wouldn't matter what size market a team was located in. He knew that in cyberspace, all sports teams are software waiting to be smartly marketed, and all are created equal.
Over the years, like most loyal Lost Pittsburghers, I had subscribed by satellite to the Pittsburgh Sports Channel and to the weekly edition of the Post-Gazette. Therefore, I knew all about big developments like Clemente Park, Rooney Stadium and the Urban Fun Zone at Point State Park.
But I didn't know how this New Pittsburgh had come to be. Apparently, it just happened, springing spontaneously from powerful social, political and economic forces no one could foresee, control or stop.
Pennsylvania had been swept along in the national anti-government deluge of the late 1900s, when thousands of useless laws and economically hurtsome regulations were repealed.
Apparently, the single biggest local boon to Pittsburgh's rapid population growth came in 2005 with the passage of Gov. Dawida's sweeping school choice program.
Because choice severed the local geopolitical connection between where you lived and where your kids went to school, thousands of families began abandoning their dull suburbs for the city, where taxes were low and life was better, richer and more stimulating.
Even more important, however, were the macro-economic policies pushed through Congress by the Constitution Party in the early 2000s. By returning to the gold standard, the Kemp administration precipitated a decade of 3-percent interest rates and jump-started a worldwide economic boom that quickly trickled down to underpopulated, underdeveloped cities like Pittsburgh.
Like Britain's bankers in the 19th century, Pittsburgh's powerful banks — particularly Dutch ING/PNC —found themselves with billions of surplus capital to invest in new or growing companies.
Not even mega-projects like the Art Rooney Sports Complex & Gambling Center or Mister Rogers World could dent their coffers.
In this hothouse economy, it wasn't long before a thousand new 19th-century townhouses built by NVR Cityhomes bloomed on the North Side, between where Three Rivers Stadium and the Warhol Museum once stood. Another 500 houses took root in the Hill District, the city's most coveted neighborhood and home of the world renowned Crawford Jazz Museum.
Meanwhile, in Downtown, some famous landmarks of the local skyline were becoming half-empty monuments to the corporate dinosaurs who built them. Downsizing, decentralizing, mergers, buy outs, maxi-flex time, telecommuting and the 21st century's raging mania for doing everything possible at home had taken their toll by 2005.
Much Downtown office space was converted to apartments and condos, in the same way that the Gulf Building was in 2002, when tort reform decimated the legal industry.
By 2010 Downtown's permanent live-in population had surpassed its work-in population. Downtowners were conspicuously youthful, bright and cosmopolitan, tolerant, generous and nicotine free. They were proud Puffies.
Happily, throughout this evolution. Pittsburgh's low crime rate continued its historic decline. It was due in part to a totally cashless society. But the personal cellular videophone-security devices everyone wore and a glut of high wage jobs for teenagers didn't hurt, either.
Crime really plummeted in 2012, however, when drugs were legalized. Prisons and jails became so depopulated, the nicer ones were often sold off for conversion to hotels, which is where the Westin on the Mon overlooking Clemente Park came from.
As my cabbie gives me a quick tour of the Golden Triangle, he tells me that Downtown is known for its nightlife. Clubs and theaters and galleries hum till dawn. Sidewalks teem. Its supermarkets stay open 24 hours.
With so many jitneys and mini-vans, he says, cars are unnecessary. Plus the T2 light-rail system links Downtown with the hospital jobs in Pittland (formerly Oakland) and the fun on the north side, while river taxis connect the Penzer Plaza/Convention Center in the Strip to the casino-hotels.
The enclosed Smithfield Street Mall bustles 24 hours a day. So does The Point, which, now that it is a themepark run by Disney’s local subsidiary, the Kennywood Corp., is a year-round carnival of indoor and outdoor fun.
Sony's 30-story outdoor holographic theater and the USX Virtual Reality Industrial Age theme park/museum are The Point's big tourist draws. But the locals get maximum use out of the park's skating rink, skateboard ramps and lighted athletic fields.
Before we head south to my brother's house, I get my cabbie to take a spin through the South Side to show me its famous population of retro-hipsters.
Wigged out on yesterday, they read books and smoke Camels in funky coffee shops, listen to Coltrane on CDs and hang out at Quentin Tarantino Retrospectives in musty theaters.
In Bell Oceanic's first all-digital city, they were the stubborn dissidents who refused to let themselves be caught in anyone's web of fiber-optic wires, no matter how many thousand channels it carried.
Later, in Pittsburgh’s southern suburbs, after we cut through the dark and lifeless business district of Mt. Lebanon, we pass the Upper St. Clair Deer Preserve.
That's when I remember I have to pick up something for my brother.
“I want to stop somewhere so I can get a bottle of wine," I say to my cabbie.
"Sorry," he replies, "It's Sunday. The state stores are closed."