Once know as the Steel City, Pittsburgh's towering smokestacks and bustling factories were the heartbeat of American industry.

For much of the 20th century.

Pittsburgh stee was the backbone of the country, fueling manufacturing and a booming economy.

But as the world changed, so did Pittsburgh.

By the late 1970s, the once vibrant steel industry was crumbling.

Factories shut down, job vanished, and the skyline once filled with a glint of steel mills, was replaced with a painful reminder of a fading era.

Faced with economic hardship, the city reinvented itself not through industry but through innovation.

A new chapter was written, one rooted in education, medicine and technology.

From the Ashes of Steel.

Pittsburgh has emerged as a city of resilience, proving that transformation isn't just about change.

It's about reinvention.

Now, Pittsburgh stands tall, not in steel, but in science, technology and the promis of a future full of possibility.

From steel to science.

From grit to greatness.

This is Pittsburgh and a story of an iconic rebirth.

When people visit Pittsburgh for the first time, I think for a lot of people who haven't been here, they still have in their mindset that Pittsburgh's an industrial city.

Some people would have an image of an old, rusting industrial town that has seen better days.

When you come to Pittsburgh from the airport and you make the drive in through the Parkway West, there's a point during that, if you're paying attention, you get a glimpse of the tops of some of the skyscrapers downtown.

Give you a little foreshadow of where you're headed, but you don't quite understand it.

And you're winding through the hills.

You have no ide that there's a city right here.

So you go through this tunnel and then all opens up.

Many of us refer to it as the oh wow moment.

They come through that tunnel and it's like, oh, wow, what a beautiful city.

It's not what I expected.

Once you're through that tunnel, you end up going into the city's neighborhoods, and it's there where the true life and the character of the city exists.

They built the cit where you wouldn't expect one.

Perched on the sides of the hills.

And as a result, you have all these unique neighborhoods that were kind of geographically isolated.

All of these neighborhood brought something to Pittsburgh that was special and it still has that quality.

And we've got bridges that connect those various different neighborhoods.

The Art Commissio wanted the city to have bridges with beautiful views.

As a result, no matter where you are.

You can walk on our bridges and look out and see tha captivating beauty of the area.

We have this defined Pittsburgh style where architecture is just as important as anything else.

In fact some of our bridges are not even in the ideal locations, and that's to satisfy architectural requirements.

I mean, what other city does this?

The city was smart enough not to overdeveloped the slopes.

That's allowed us to maintain green space that you can see even from the downtown area.

I was overwhelmed by how green Pittsburgh is.

The trees with their canopie formed this sort of green carpet that just seemed almost overwhelmingly profuse.

The buildings of the city ar always surrounded by the trees.

They do provide a beautiful backdrop and provides a nice contras to the skyscrapers in downtown.

We're always enclosed by these walls around u that contain us and define us.

And I think that defined edge actually helps create the character of the city, because when you look out, you always see the boundaries of this city, and you feel at home because you're in this environment.

The cit is not a city of a large grid.

It is a city that the streets and roads they all twist and turn and how we move and live within that is is pretty unique.

Our topography creates the opportunity for even better design.

Hiding, and then revealing the view creating changes in elevation.

Unexpected reveal showing different points of view or telling the story of the context of the site.

You really can't copy that.

One of my favorite things is just looking at the window and being able to see the ro houses climbing up the hillside and the rooftop and the chimneys, and it's like the immigrant cities that the people came from.

If you go to Italy and you se the hilltop towns, you can sense the same feeling of houses stacked along the hills.

It has a European flavor of the European immigrants who came here in the 17 and 1800s, early 1900s and were building these beautiful structures.

A lot of those buildings have really beautiful craftsmanship type of detailing to it.

Carving of stone.

A lot of it is very heavy and sturdy.

Kind of strong.

There's federal style, there's neo-Gothic, there's Tudor, Roman- esque buildings like the county courthouse and that sort of tone.

But as time's gone by, the city has started to incorporate other products that it was known for, like steel and aluminum and glass.

And so we see that reflecte in many of the newer buildings today.

US Steel builds the tallest steel building.

PPG Pittsburg Plate Glass builds magnificent glass castle like structure.

Alcoa Aluminum builds the firs major aluminum office building.

That mix represents our history.

The city's eclectic quality is indeed one of its biggest strengths.

More buildings, more varieties, more thought, more character.

Pittsburgh.

Steel town.

Heart of America's industrial might.

Drawing its sustenance from rivers like the Monongahela, the vital artery on which the economic life of the city and the whole nation depend.

Pittsburgh was very uniquely positioned to start advancing manufacturing.

It was at its time, a perfect place for industry.

Unlike New York City or Philadelphia, it was very easy to access the raw materials, and it was easy to transport that on the rivers.

Pittsburgh being at the start of the Ohio River, became a natural gateway to the west.

From here you had the ability to head west.

You'd go out the Ohio to the Mississippi, all the way to New Orleans, and you're out to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond.

Or you're heading even further west and get into the hinterlands.

If you go to the north, you're going to eventually connect up with the Saint Lawrence Seaway.

So this is a major shipping point, and it's strategically really important because of that.

In that era, transpor was much more river dependent.

And so steel being a heavy commodity, both in terms of its inputs and its outputs, you know, the nature of the plants needing some access to the rivers to be able to transport the coal and the raw materials that were needed to make steel.

And then after the steel product was finished off, it went to the markets, not only rivers for navigation and for cooling, but we sit on the Pittsburgh scene, you know, the richest by two minutes coal seam in the world.

And that's really the fuel.

There was also a lot of broad, flat land down in the river valleys that provided space for the steel industry to build its plants, and so because that's here, you know, along with the rivers, along with the capital necessary, Pittsburgh becomes, you know, central to the growth of America's 20th century industrialists.

Like, obviously, Andrew Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse came here and decided that this was the place they were going to put that in, move that forward.

They started to take advantage of the proximity of all the resources, and they continue to build on that legacy.

Steel has been made for thousands of years, but in small batches, and it was exceedingly valuable because it was hard to make.

You can make it by the pound.

It would take you hours and hours and hours to do it.

And it was costly.

But in the late 1860s and early 1870s in Great Britain, Henry Bessemer comes up with the Bessemer process.

What the Bessemer converter allows for is the ability to make steel by the ton and make it very quickly and inexpensively.

So that changes the game.

Instead of it being 12 hours of one man puddling to give you a few pounds of steel, now you have 8 to 12 minutes and you have multiple tons of steel.

So that allows for this rapid growth of the industry.

Andrew Carnegie sees it in action in 1872, in England and says, oh my God, this is it.

And comes back to Pittsburgh and convinces a number of his partners in th iron business that like, look, we need to get into this and ended up building an empire.

Totally transformed what was happening here an along the Pittsburgh riverfront down into the Youghiogheny in Connersville, up into Indiana County and Armstrong County.

From 1870 to 1920, There were 40,000 beehive coke ovens that were producing coke for this industry.

So making all that steel here drew a lot of people here.

The jobs were here, the industry here.

The growth was here in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Pittsburgh had more concentrated capital than anywhere in the worl other than New York and London.

I mean, think about that.

And at one point you know, Pittsburgh is making 60% of the country's steel and really produced the steel that built the rail lines, the skyscrapers, the bridges all over America.

We produced more steel during World War Two than both Japan and Germany combined, which is pretty substantial because Japan and Germany had booming steel industries.

What starts happening after World Wa Two is a lack of reinvestment.

US steel, Jones and Laughlin, on and on.

Okay, it isn't just one company its all of these companies are not reinvesting back into the plant the way Andrew Carnegie used to.

So you end up with a production facility that was state of the art in 1900.

But by 1950 and 1960, 1970, no longer okay, you can't keep up.

Your technology gets to be so old.

It would be cheaper to build new somewhere else than it would be to come in and invest a lot of money in a high cost facility.

The big steel companies her did not adapt, did not change, did not make investments and it caught up to us with a vengeance in the 1980s and that they were sort of behind the power curve, competing with both domestic and international manufacturers.

The world caught up to us, and we hit rock bottom economically in so many ways.

With unemployment that hit almost 20% and the exodus of young people that left because of the lack of opportunities when we lost hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs over a very short period of time.

We had hit such a rock bottom that we had to look around and say, okay, what are we going to do to survive?

The Pittsburgh region was forced to do this sort of cataclysmic change.

For Pittsburgh to remain relevant, the city would have to diversify.

They would have to invest in new technology.

They couldn't be a single sector economy forever.

That was almost like we were forced back into the forward thinking, what's next?

What can we be competitive in?

And the growth since then has come fro sort of a slow and steady growth in what we call Eds and Meds.

So education and health care.

But things like ou universities, particularly Pitt and CMU and the innovations that they were they were starting to develop, commercializin those research and development, you know, facilities that were coming out became an important part of what we did.

And that history really begins in 1980 with the recruitment of Doctor Tom Starzl .

The pioneer of organ transplantation and the recruitment of Docto Bartley Griffith, a very young cardiac surgeon.

Doctor Starzl came and h brought a gift of life with him.

He could do transplants and in his heyday I think he was doing a transplant every 23 hours, something like that.

He was just incredibly, absolutely incredible.

Doctor Griffith said, why don't we use the artificial heart in a different way?

We'll implant the artificial heart, but not for permanence, but rather will allow the patient to wait until a done organ becomes available.

By 1984, Doctor Griffith was doing among the most heart transplants in the entire United States.

Of course, if you do this kind of work, word gets out right.

People get to know UPMC had become not just a hospital that was serving the people of the region, but people were coming from all over the world to come to Pittsburgh to get the best medical care.

People say, well, who is the most important recruit for the University of Pittsburgh?

So you have to say Tony Dorsett, right.

But no comparison what Doctor Starzl and Doctor Griffith did here is they literally transform the entire western Pennsylvania region.

As UPMC was forging its path as a leader in medicine, Carnegie Mellon University, just down the street, was revolutionizing the worl with trailblazing innovations.

Carnegie Mellon University was the first university to really start a robotics curriculum in the late 70s, moving into this direction became very important.

It's become a birthplace for a lot of things around robotics, around technology, computer science.

And that's attracted a lot of corporations from around the country.

Great education great academic research location has built a core of talent here.

And these national scale firms Google, Amazon, Apple are really trying to tap into the talent here.

They want to be on th cutting edge of the technology that's occurring, and that's occurring at place like Carnegie Mellon University.

This young, talented workforce that's coming out and has a lot of options.

They want to have good quality of life.

They also want to live in a place that's affordable.

Certain cities which have done great, great things, like the Silicon Valley and the Bostons and the New Yorks are great powerhouses, but they're very expensive to live, particularl when you're just starting out, in your career.

So a place like Pittsburgh, who can reach all those other things, attract talent.

We have low cost of living.

We have a lot of open space.

So it's got all these ingredients to start a scrappy business.

There's great kind of assets for robotics.

There's a talent pool here.

Pittsburgh's allowed us to grow more kind of organically, not with investor money, not with investor timelines, and grow to something where we we are able to now have an office in Norway an really build a strong foundation Their developing technologies, inventing things that the rest of the world needs.

We have begun to see mor private sector firms create it.

Right.

You know, we talk about the Duolingo or other things of the world.

It's spawned corporations like Astrobotic, which is working on things like lunar landers right now.

Robotics is going to impact the world here, and we're the cente for it.

The fundamental stories.

there's been a diversificatio of the regional economy in a way that it wasn't diversified for many decades, even when manufacturing was doing well.

It was very cyclical.

Manufacturing jobs would go up and down based on the national business cycle.

That's fundamentally been replaced by a much more stable growth across the education sector, across the medical sector.

I don't know if there's any American city or region that is transformed mor than what Pittsburgh has become.

The town formerly known a the Steel City has swapped blast furnaces for research centers and hardhats for lab coats.

Although the economic landscape of Pittsburgh has changed, the city's spirit remains the same a city built on hard work, innovation and an unwavering commitment to progress.

Pittsburgh is a much different place than it was a few decades ago, but the people and some of the things that ar in our DNA, like our work ethic and our innovation, are still part and parcel of what makes this region special.

Pittsburgh has a kind of can-do spirit.

You know, our grandparents al worked hard for a living, right?

People worked in the steel mills.

That hard work is a part of the ethos of Pittsburgh.

And people havent shed that.

It's not been lost.

They they hang on to it.

It really is who we are.

And even though things have changed here and industries have changed and, you know, evolved and grown, we've not lost that.

And I don't think we ever will because that truly defines this region.

And peopl here take great pride in that.

I remember my mother told me once when the pollution was worse, people would have to change white shirts.

They would wear a white shirt, go out, and all of the soot would come on a white shirt.

I asked my mother, Weren't you upset about this when she said, well, it meant that everybody was working.

There's a pragmatism, I think, that Pittsburghers have always had when it comes to working to get things done, to succeed, to get the project done, to continue to move forward.

Whether it was making steel, making aluminum or now making a robot.

Having lived through the difficult times, survive the the demise of the steel industry and emerged from that almost like the phoenix rising from the ashes.

It's representative of the qualities of steel in its resilience.

It can flex without breaking.

It can rust but still be strong.

And I think that carries through to today.

Just that sense that, yeah, we can overcome everything that's thrown at us.

People who are from here are always from here.

Deep connection to the region, deep connections to the story of the region.

And it is what sustained us through some pretty bad times and I think will carry us into the future.

And we're still doing incredible things here.

Manufacturing base may have changed.

What we're producing may have changed, but there's great things coming out of this region.

It's an open question as to where we go from here.

I think we've laid a great foundation, but there's still a lot of work to be done.