Isaly’s Pittsburgh: Chipped Ham, Klondike Bars & a Lost Legacy Chipped ham Pittsburgh style is one of those foods that is almost impossible to explain to someone who did not grow up with it. Order it at a deli counter anywhere outside western Pennsylvania and watch what happens. The person behind the counter will look…
Somewhere in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the late 1960s, a young man with no formal medical background beyond a rigorous training program was doing things in the back of a moving ambulance that had never been done outside a hospital. He was managing airways, starting intravenous lines, monitoring cardiac rhythms, and making clinical decisions that…
On the morning of February 11, 2001, thousands of Pittsburgh residents gathered on bridges, riverbanks, and rooftops before sunrise to watch a building die. Three Rivers Stadium Pittsburgh had stood at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers for thirty years, and at seven in the morning a series of precisely placed explosive charges…
The 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates arrived at the World Series trailing in a way that should have ended their season. Down three games to one against the Baltimore Orioles, facing elimination on the road, managed by a man whose mother had died that very morning, the Pirates did something that only a handful of teams in…
There is a moment, stepping through the front doors of the William Penn Hotel Pittsburgh and into the lobby, when the city outside seems to fall away. The ornate plasterwork overhead, the grand chandeliers throwing warm light across the polished floors, the sense of accumulated occasion that clings to a room where generations of deals…
In the entire history of professional sports, it is difficult to find a franchise whose story moves more dramatically from the edge of oblivion to the top of the world than the Pittsburgh Penguins. Pittsburgh Penguins history is not a straightforward rise-to-greatness narrative. It is something stranger and more interesting than that: a fifty-year chronicle…
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…