Andy Warhol’s Pittsburgh: The City That Made an Icon

The image most people carry of Andy Warhol is a specific one: silver wig, dark sunglasses, dry wit, surrounded by beautiful people in a Manhattan loft called the Factory, holding a camera and speaking in careful monosyllables about soup cans and celebrity. It is an image Warhol himself constructed with great deliberateness, and it is…

KDKA Radio History: How Pittsburgh Invented Broadcasting

The night of November 2, 1920, was cold and clear in Pittsburgh, and somewhere on the roof of a Westinghouse factory in East Pittsburgh, a small group of men huddled around a transmitter inside a makeshift wooden shack and did something that had never been done before. They broadcast a radio program to the general…

The Steel Curtain: Pittsburgh Steelers 1970s Dynasty

The Pittsburgh Steelers 1970s dynasty is the standard against which every other run of sustained excellence in professional football is measured. Four Super Bowl championships in six seasons. A defense so suffocating it earned a nickname that referenced both the city’s industrial identity and the most foreboding geopolitical barrier of the Cold War era. A…

Pittsburgh Inclines History: Duquesne & Monongahela

On a clear evening, if you stand at the base of the Duquesne Incline on West Carson Street and watch one of its vintage wooden cars creak slowly up the face of Mount Washington, it is easy to forget that you are looking at a piece of living Pittsburgh inclines history. The car climbs at…

Pittsburgh Hosted the 1948 NFL Draft Before. Here’s What That Looked Like.

When the NFL rolls into Pittsburgh for the 2026 Draft on April 23rd, the city is going to look like a football carnival. The North Shore packed. Point State Park lit up. Acrisure Stadium as the backdrop for a broadcast seen by millions. It will feel enormous. It will feel new. It won’t be new.…

Bootleg Tunnels and Speakeasies Under Pittsburgh’s Strip District

On a Tuesday afternoon in 1925, a federal Prohibition agent walking down Smallman Street would have seen nothing unusual. Produce vendors hawking vegetables. Freight trucks rumbling over cobblestones. Warehouse workers loading and unloading cargo along the Allegheny River. Then the agent would have noticed the door. Unmarked. Reinforced. A small sliding panel at eye level.…

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