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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

As a Pittsburgh native, it's been exciting to see the city develop over the past decade.

One of the things that nearly everyone seems to forget about Pittsburgh is that is was once one of the single largest business and manufacturing cities in the country, if not the world. Some of the world's richest men lived and worked in Pittsburgh, including Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, H. J. Heinz, and George Westinghouse, to name a few. Nikola Tesla spent some time here, as well. Many streets are named after industrialists, which adds a unique flavor.

If anything, Pittsburgh's recent rise is a return to success.

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It is exciting, and I have mixed feelings.

For instance, there is a lot of new development down along the Strip. I don't see how this won't end up eventually pushing out many of the old-Pittsburgh businesses that make the Strip awesome for everyone, replacing them with higher-end stuff. Rather like how the enormous cobblestone plaza in front of St Stanislaus Church in the Strip was asphalted over since my student days. But I get it, it was uneven, it had an old trolley track, nobody wants to maintain cobblestone.

So yeah, I would like to see Pittsburgh continue to develop, I just hope people are not in a hurry to displace what makes it cool.

I'd agree, overall it's a mixed bag. The new-ish Bakery Square complex (which is home to Google) is pretty hideous.

Pittsburgh more-or-less has the same type of architecture as large parts of New York, specifically huge (previously) empty warehouse spaces. I'd really like to see more old warehouses kept and retro-fitted, rather than replaced with Bakery Square-esque architecture.

Wasn't the Bakery Square building itself an old Nabisco factory? I agree that all the new apartment buildings around it are pretty out-of-place, but I do think there are plenty of reasonable attempts at keeping historical bits around...

The bakery itself is cool, maybe the parent doesn't like the stuff added around it. The bakery building still has the NBC sign, in terracotta, above the original entrance.

The original building is an architectural marvel and gem. So glad they left it alone for the most part during the renovation. I remember for years driving by when it had the sign: "For lease - 500,000 square feet"

> I just hope people are not in a hurry to displace what makes it cool

They probably are, but only because everyone has a different perspective on what things like "culture" and "cool" mean. I personally think tearing down the East Liberty high rise projects was largely positive - but many people disagree.

It's great if you are a white person making 60k+ a year (a good bit of money in this city). There was a huge string of neglectful decisions to lower income families who have lived there for decades being forced out. These aren't "bad" people or criminals either. You guessed it: An overwhelming majority are African American.

I can already hear someone typing "well that's just life, they should get over it." This would perfectly represent the ignorance around a lot of the city-wide issues. So much of today is around the hype-cycle issues presented from the upper-class/startup/city officials perspective.

It isn't all bad, by any means, and I apologize if I sound jaded. To declare the city or an area wholly on the up-and-up or "largely positive" is certainly a sheltered perspective though.

> It's great if you are a white person

I'm not white

> To declare the city or an area wholly on the up-and-up or "largely positive" is certainly a sheltered perspective though.

Ironically, your perspective strikes me as a bit sheltered. Have you ever lived in or spent any time around a highrise project? Anywhere? They fucking suck, are incredibly difficult to police & govern, and almost invariably become hotbeds of shit. Tearing them down and distributing its residents to saner public housing is most definitely defensible as compared to just letting a bad situation fester uncontrollably.

You could say the same about any number of old U.S. cities. Their declines, while dramatic at the core, have been wildly exaggerated. People didn't really leave Pittsburgh or St. Louis or Detroit. They just changed where in the region they lived. The story here is more about a return to urban living than anything.

There's certainly a hipster bubble in Pittsburgh around Oakland, Shadyside, -W-e-s-t- East Liberty, Southside, and Squirrel Hill which are the neighborhoods around CMU and U Pitt. The rest of Pittsburgh and the suburban region is pretty rough, though. Personally, I loved North Hills, Mt. Lebanon, and Dormont. But the start-up quality is only present in the neighborhoods abutting CMU and U Pitt. As a non-white, we were sometimes bothered by the extreme whiteness and slight red-necky feel of non-East End neighborhoods.

Edit: as pointed out by comments below, East Liberty.

Well, I'm not completely sure that I trust your judgement, as you left out the single biggest hipster area of Lawrenceville and also spelled "East Liberty" as "West Liberty," which is an entirely different area.

That said... the extreme whiteness and slight red-necky feel of non-East End neighborhoods.

...is definitely still an issue. It's getting better though, and for the most part anywhere within the city limits is relatively diverse. Pittsburgh's biggest problem is that the segregation is by neighborhood. It's comparable to Chicago, in many ways.

Mine is but one perspective, as most comments everywhere are. One can also add Bloomfield to the list of neighborhoods with hipster-gentrification.

the extreme whiteness and slight red-necky feel

Bigotry based on racial, subcultural, and socioeconomic markers? I was born in Pittsburgh and I grew up in that part of the country. All manner of people fit those racial, subcultural, and socioeconomic markers -- good and bad.

As a non-white myself, let me just say this: Most of the time, most people are basically good. However, if you stand out from the crowd, even for reasons you can't help, that small single-percentage of jerks and sociopaths is going to spot you and pay some unwanted attention to you.

The above is contingent on group-think or mob psychology not having taken sway, of course. Those factors change the situation completely.

I spent middle school and junior high in a pittsburgh suburb. it was the first place in the country I had ever heard friends of mine expressing overt racism.

> As a non-white, we were sometimes bothered by the extreme whiteness and slight red-necky feel of non-East End neighborhoods.

Hey shas3, this is serious question, which I'm asking purely out of curiosity. I'm not judging you or trying to embarrass you. Would you consider it okay if a white person were say, for example, about Detroit, "as a white, I was sometimes bothered by the extreme blackness and slight ghetto feel of many Detroit neighborhoods."

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