Pittsburgh peaked at 676,806 people in 1950. The city lost residents to its suburbs first, then to other regions when steel collapsed in the 1980s. Here are the numbers and the causes.
Pittsburgh was named with a Scottish h in 1758, lost it in federal usage in the early 1890s and got it back on July 19, 1911. The real story is messier than the legend.
Ida Tarbell Standard Oil began in Titusville in 1872, with a tank builder’s daughter listening to her father. Here is what is documented, what she recalled, and where Pittsburgh refiners fit.
A Pittsburgh commercial shop, a late-night TV host and ten investors who, by the filmmakers’ account, put up about $600 each made Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Here is the documented story, from Evans City to the missing copyright notice.
The Silver Bridge collapse killed 46 people in 1967. Mothman reports from Point Pleasant came before it, and a book later tied them together. Here is what is documented, what is legend, and how Pittsburgh’s own eyebar bridges connect.
A cafeteria worker in Wichita wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier in 1942. The paper turned it into the Double V campaign, with pins, songs, FBI visits and a Justice Department threat.
Jones & Laughlin owned the houses, the police and the ballot box in Aliquippa. Ten fired steelworkers’ cases led the Supreme Court to uphold the Wagner Act in 1937. Here is the story.
No Bigfoot has ever been proven, but Westmoreland and Fayette counties have a long paper trail of reports. Here is what is documented, what is legend, and what was faked.
In October 1948 a smog settled over Donora, Pennsylvania. Twenty people died and thousands fell ill. Here is what happened, what the federal inquiry found, and what is still argued.
Vandergrift, Pennsylvania was planned by the Olmsted firm for Apollo Iron and Steel in 1895. Here is how the town was designed, who it left out, and the debate over why.