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…
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 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…
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…
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.…
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.…
Sometime around 1782 — possibly earlier — a trader named Daniel Elliott built a sandstone tavern along the road connecting Washington and Pittsburgh, and travelers heading into the frontier started stopping there for a drink, a meal, and a place to sleep. That building is still standing. It sits at 434 Greentree Road, two stories…
In 1792, when Pittsburgh was barely a city and the surrounding region was still very much a frontier, a man named John Woods built a stone house overlooking the Monongahela River in what is now Hazelwood. That house is still standing. It has two-foot-thick rubble-stone walls, hand-hewn beams, wide-plank floors, and fireplaces at each end.…
At 403 East Ohio Street on Pittsburgh’s North Side, there is a two-story brick building that has been part of the neighborhood since the 1890s. It started as a soda fountain. It became one of the first licensed bars in Pittsburgh after Prohibition ended. It survived a pandemic closure and came back under new ownership.…
There is a building on Market Square that has been serving food and drinks since Ulysses S. Grant was president. Not a building that looks old. Not a place that leans on vintage aesthetics as a marketing strategy. An actual bar and restaurant that has been continuously operating in the same spot in downtown Pittsburgh…