I have been in Pittsburgh for 5 days for the POD conference. Sometimes at conferences you don’t get a chance to see much of a city, but I managed to fly in slightly early and booked an extra night at the end of the trip to enable me to explore a bit more. Pittsburgh became a key settlement for a number of reasons, but the most important ones are that it has a rich seam of coal nearby and it is at the confluence of 3 rivers – the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River meet to become the Ohio River. You can compare the picture I took with the artist’s impression from the 1700s. Point park, the spit of land on the picture, contains Fort Pitt, built by the British in the 1700s – named after William Pitt the elder – during the French and Indian wars. The lands at the time belonged to the Iroquois, Lenape and Shawnee.

Pittsburgh is known both as The Steel City for its 300 steel related businesses as well as the City of Bridges for its 400+ bridges! You can see the influence of industry everywhere, with large railways running through the city, the large warehouse district known as The Strip District, now a busy area of shops and trendy eating places.

You get great views from opposite Point Park by taking the Duquesne Incline, a funicular on Mount Washington, the steep outcrop of rock opposite downtown Pittsburgh. I went for a lovely walk across Fort Pitt bridge and up the Duquesne Incline and then walked along the top of the escarpment and came back on the Monongahela Incline, another funicular that then enables you to return to downtown by crossing over the Smithfield Street bridge (designed by John A Roebling, who is also famous for designing the Brooklyn Bridge and a large scale cannon!).

The city is also famous for Senator Heinz who founded a food bottling company that became the Heinz we know so well today. I visited the Heinz History Center and was entertained to see that travelling salesmen used to have a leather pouch in which they carried different sizes of pickled cucumber so that shop managers could select which size of pickles they wanted to purchase!

Exploring Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania / Star spangled banter by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0