Just as with the Sonya Labs posting about Pittsburgh that I wrote about yesterday, a significant number of friends, family and colleagues pointed out this story about Pittsburgh in the NY Times over the weekend. The feature has some nice praise for Pittsburgh:
“[T]his city of 89 distinct neighborhoods is a cool and — dare I say, hip—city. There are great restaurants, excellent shopping, breakthrough galleries and prestigious museums. The convergence of three rivers and surrounding green hills also make it a surprisingly pretty urban setting.”
This piece echoes an earlier story about the Lawrenceville Design District back in 2007. The Times likes Pittsburgh, it seems. /me too.
What was nice for me about the 35-hours features was that it actually had a bunch of suggestions that none of our friends or acquaintances had suggested yet. We’re still unpacking, settling, repairing, finishing the house, so we’re not really ready to get out and about too much, but it’s nice to have a long list of stuff we could do, if only we had time.
It’s also been nice to see that so many people we know are interested in Pittsburgh and our lives here. Finally, it’s interesting to see an article like this in the context of Sonya Lab’s concern about Pittsburgh not having a welcome mat out. This kind of national PR is pretty valuable for a city. Now if Pittsburgh could just do something about the air quality.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Pittsburgh Slim Music, Videos, Fan Site » Blog Archive » NY Times: 36 Hours in Pittsburgh // Jul 9, 2008 at 20:10
[...] FootballSource.net placed an interesting blog post on NY Times: 36 Hours in Pittsburgh [...]
2 Chris // Jul 10, 2008 at 15:50
The Lawrenceville regentrification is actually quite nice. East Liberty went through a similar change in ~96, it changed from a super scary neighborhood (or I was naive) to a decent little hip neighborhood. I’ve not visited it recently though so it may have reverted again
What’s wrong with the air quality?
3 todd // Jul 10, 2008 at 15:59
Chris:
Pittsburgh currently has the worst air quality in the entire US. This isn’t mostly because Pittsburgh air is getting worse, but rather that everyone else’s air is getting better at a much faster rate. See:
http://www.wpxi.com/health/16631709/detail.html
for example. Poor air quality is associated with lots more bad health outcomes, especially for kids (of whom I seem to have two). The other serious concern is that Pittsburgh having the worst air in the country is undoing two decades of public relations work around the idea that “Pittsburgh is not a sooty city any more”. This is not going to help recruitment or economic development.
4 Sonya Labs » Are We Famous Yet? Part 2 // Jul 10, 2008 at 17:12
[...] NY Times: 36 Hours in Pittsburgh (rustvalley.com) [...]
5 Dreary Ex-Steel Town Less Crappy Than You Thought // Jul 19, 2008 at 13:42
[...] Bonanza. The New York Times published an extremely positive piece about Pittsburgh (that I commented on previously. Now USA today has published two articles about Pittsburgh in the past week alone. Whoever the [...]
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