Today, when Pittsburgh men grow nervous in one of their chronic fits of agitation—generally started by some talkative city, such as Chicago and Duluth, proclaiming herself as the future center of the steel industry—she gains comfort from the sayings of two Presidents—General Washington, as just quoted, and the gentleman who sits at the head of the board of the United States Steel Corporation, who goes out there from time to time and tells them to be of good cheer, that the center of the steel business is irrevocably fixed within their town. Pittsburgh worries much more about the steel business than about the Richardson Court House, which has just been left high and dry upon a local Gibraltar because of the desire of the local aldermen to lower Fifth avenue some eight or ten feet. But who shall say that she should not be restive about a business that reaches an output in a single twelvemonth of something over 150,000,000 tons? That is a jewel that is well worth the keeping.
*****
Philadelphia stands at the east end of Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh is the west gate of that Keystone commonwealth. Yet two peas in a pod were never half so different. Philadelphia stands for conservatism, Pittsburgh for progress. While Philadelphia was climbing to the zenith of her power and influence through the first three-quarters of the last century and reaching her apotheosis in her great Centennial, Pittsburgh was quiet beneath her smoke umbrellas experimenting with that strange new metal, which man called steel. In the day dreams that Philadelphia enjoyed in 1876 Pittsburgh was forgotten.
"I suppose the Pennsylvania railroad must have some place to end at," said a lady from Rittenhouse square, when her attention was called to the city at the junction of the three rivers. And in the next year that lady and many other ladies of the staunch old Quaker town were holding up their hands in holy horror at the news from Pittsburgh. Great riots, the bloodiest that had ever been known, were marking the railroad strike there—why, in a single day the rioters had burned the great Union station, every other railroad structure, and every car in the place. That was bad advertising for a town that had none too many friends.
But Pittsburgh was finding herself—she is still in that fascinating process of development. For word was eking out from the rough mountains of western Pennsylvania that a little group of Scotchmen—led by a shrewd ironmaster whom politic folk were already calling "Mr. Carnegie"—had made steel an economic structural possibility. In this day when wood has become a luxury, steel is coming into its own and Pittsburgh is today the most metropolitan city between New York and Chicago. But she is still finding herself. The Survey, financed by Mrs. Russell Sage, and equipped with some of the ablest and fairest minded social workers in America, has called sharp attention to her shortcomings. The Survey did its work thoroughly and it was not the work of a minute or a day or a week or a month. When its report was ready, Pittsburgh smarted. It was the sort of smarting that goes before a cure.
Much has been done already. The man who went to Pittsburgh as recently as ten years ago carried away some pretty definite memories of neglected railroad stations and inferior hotel facilities. He remembered that in Liberty and Penn avenues—two of the chief shopping streets in the city—long trails of freight cars were constantly being shifted by dirty switch engines in among the trolley cars, while farther up these same avenues the Fort Wayne railroad tracks formed two of the nastiest grade crossings in America. When a fine new hotel was finally built away out Fifth avenue, he could sit on its porch and face Pittsburgh's famous farm. The Schenley farm stretched over the hill and far away. Its barns were sharply silhouetted upon the horizon, rail zigzag fences ran up and down the slopes and sometimes one could see cattle outlined against the sky edge.
The farm was a sore spot in Pittsburgh development. It occupied a tract somewhat similar in location to that of Central Park in Manhattan, and the struggling, growing town crawled its way around the obstacle slowly—then grew many miles east once again. Resentment gathered against the farm, and finally a bill was slipped through at Harrisburg imposing double taxes on property held by persons residing out of the United States—a distinct slap at the Schenley estate. When the estate protested, word was carried oversea to it that if a good part of the farm were dedicated to the city as a park that bill would be withdrawn.
So Pittsburgh gained its splendid new park, and a site for one of the finest civic centers in America. The farm has begun to disappear—the University of Pittsburgh is absorbing its last undeveloped slope for an American Acropolis that shall put Athens in the pale. The new Athletic Club, the development of the Hotel Schenley, the great Soldiers' Memorial Hall which Allegheny county has just finished, the even greater Carnegie Institute, the graceful twin-spired cathedral, all are going toward the making of this fine, new civic center, and Pittsburgh being Pittsburgh, and the Pirates social heroes, Forbes Field the finest baseball park in all this land—a wizardry of glass and steel and concrete—is a distinctive feature of this improvement.
The old and the new at Pittsburgh