The Tech Reinvention

Pittsburgh spent the nineteen eighties losing steel jobs by the tens of thousands. It spent the nineteen nineties figuring out what it was going to be instead. The answer turned out to be universities, medicine, and robots.

Carnegie Mellon University, which Andrew Carnegie had founded in nineteen hundred as the Carnegie Technical Schools, had spent decades building what became one of the world's strongest computer science and robotics programs. When the steel economy collapsed, Carnegie Mellon was already positioned as a research institution that attracted federal funding and spun out companies. The University of Pittsburgh, just across Schenley Park, had a medical school that partnered with UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which grew across the nineteen nineties and two-thousands into one of the largest integrated health systems in the country.

These two anchors created a different kind of economy. Technology companies moved into old industrial neighborhoods. Google opened a Pittsburgh office in the mid two-thousands, and Uber opened an advanced technologies center near the Carnegie Mellon campus in twenty fifteen to work on autonomous vehicle technology, partly because Carnegie Mellon had the talent and the expertise. The city that had made steel to build the railroads that moved American goods across a continent was now writing code to teach cars to drive themselves.

Pittsburgh today has fewer people than it had at its industrial peak. The smaller river towns are still struggling with the consequences of the steel collapse. But the city itself, the place defined by its rivers and hills and its willingness to rebuild from catastrophe, has reinvented itself around universities, medicine, and technology. What Pittsburgh does next is, as it has always been, an open question.