Welcome to G-20 week! If you live or work in the City of Pittsburgh, you have been warned through the media and the representatives in the city to stay away, well sort of. You can come into the city, but you can't drive and most public transportation will drop you on the outskirts of the city, or as we Pittsburghers' called it, "Dawntown." About a quarter of the city is a "restricted" zone for obvious reasons and the anarchist have their destruction plans ready to go.
So I pick up the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today and see BHO's picture on the front page and a headline that says: "Obama Calls Pittsburgh A Model For The Future."
Before I go any further I want to say that I love this city. There is no prettier side than driving through the Fort Pitt Tunnels and being greeted by the "Golden Triangle." To you left will be the new casino, the Carnegie Science Center, Heinz Field and PNC Park. Straight ahead you will see some of the most beautiful skyscrapers in this country. There's PPG Place which looks like a glass castle, the old US Steel Building (now holding the letters UPMC on top), the Koppers Building, the Mellon Bank Tower, I could go on and on. It is a beautiful city. The fountain at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers where the Ohio River starts is astounding and everyone should see it as photos does not do it justice.
The city is a great place to raise a family. The cost of living is low. The city is home to some of the greatest medical innovations known to man, from the discovery of the vaccine for Polio to the pioneering of transplants, our hospitals are some of the best in the world. For education, Pittsburgh can't be beat with some of the best Universities in the country such as The University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne University, Point Park University, Robert Morris University, LaRoche College and Carnegie-Mellon University just to name a few.
It is home to the three time Stanley Cup Champions Pittsburgh Penguins, the nine time College Football National Champions Pitt Panthers, five time World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates and the six time Superbowl Champions Pittsburgh Steelers. The city and surrounding areas have produced such notable sport figures as Dan Marino, Joe Namath, Joe Montana, Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett and a list that would fill a notebook.
The point is, this is a great city and a city that I love and could have left, but didn't.
It is not a city of the future.
It is if you consider a city of the future one that is insolvent and thirty years behind the times. I don't.
One of the problems is that the city has been run by the same party for over 70 years and while some advances have been made, the problem is that the "machine" controls everything and allot of things don't get done. We have three beautiful rivers that until recently have not been developed. It has only been in the last ten years or so that they have even started to develop the rivers resources. The "downtown" area is a mess. Recently there has been some redevelopment, but not enough to really change the make up of the city. The "Fifth and Forbes" corridor (the area in between the two major streets running through the city) needs to be redone, but politics and historical groups have stopped all progress.
While this is a great city, but just because a couple of new "green" buildings have gone up does not make it a "City of the future." The city needs to get it's house in order, lower the tax rate for businesses and workers, have another "Renaissance" that makes this city viable again for business. Less than 20 years ago Pittsburgh was home to more Fortune 500 Companies than any other city except for New York. Today, there are less than five. Allegheny County has a White Elephant 13 miles from the city known as the Greater Pittsburgh International Airport. When it was built it was one of the most beautiful airports in the country. Today it is a ghost town with three and a half of it's four concourses closed. Flights in and out of the airport as less than one third of what they were even 10 years ago. Business needs to be nurtured and brought back into the region before it becomes the city it once was.
While Pittsburgh is a great place, it is NOT sadly, a "City of The Future."
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