Former Mayor Bill Peduto Reflects on a Changing Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh’s former two-term mayor, Bill Peduto, has a guardian angel. In 1991, he asked his AIDS-stricken brother, Tom: “I want you to watch over me the rest of my life.” An hour after his 35-year-old brother died, Peduto got a call with a job offer that brought him home. He told me, “It took my brother a whole hour for me to come back.”
The Peduto brothers hail from a family that long watched over Pittsburgh. In 1923, Peduto’s grandfather, Serafino Zarroli, battled Klansmen in the streets of Carnegie. Peduto proudly recounts the century-old encounter. “My grandfather was one of the people from the town who met them on the bridge and fought them.” Nineteen years later, Zarroli helped found the United Steelworkers Union.
The Pedutos are like a Primanti sandwich of Pittsburgh’s past. A lunch-in-one, they, like the Steel City’s famous eatery, stuff the meat, coleslaw, and French fries of history between two thick slices of Italian bread. Consuming these stories was a young Peduto. “My grandfather told me these stories when I was eight years old,” he said. “Those things had a huge impact on my life.”
Ninety years after a Peduto battled the Klan, in 2013, another Peduto won the first of two terms as the city’s mayor. The youthful 62-year-old with a hipster beard and twinkle in his eye, Bill Peduto still calls himself an “Obama progressive.” In a sense, this political philosophy germinated in Pittsburgh. He told me that his beloved mother Eva, the first Zarroli or Peduto to be born in America, “is why I have a deep affinity for immigrants.” His vision for a post-industrial Pittsburgh is found in his telling of the city’s recent past. “We created air that was dangerous to breathe, water that was poisonous to drink, and the worst dichotomy between the owners and the managers of the mills and the mines and those like my grandfathers who worked in them.”
Like so many postwar Pittsburghers, the Peduto clan climbed into what Peduto called the “middle of the middle-class.” He called his South Hills home “that 1950s suburb.” A veritable Roosevelt coalition of immigrant families, the Pedutos, Goldbergs, Stolarskis, and Gryoniskis were proof positive that the bounties of Pittsburgh life went beyond the Carnegies and Mellons. The grandson of an illiterate immigrant grandmother lived next door to Lowell MacDonald, a winger on the Pittsburgh Penguin’s “century line.” He played little league with Roberto Clemente, Jr. Peduto said of those days, “I got to meet the people that were my heroes.” “All our parents struggled,” he told me, “But they were in neighborhoods where everyone was like them.” They were children of immigrants who were living their American Dream in Pittsburgh.
Born in 1964, Peduto came of age at the zenith of postwar America. To be middle class required nothing more than a work ethic, and an uncle who could get you a union job at Columbia Steel. In the decade of Peduto’s birth, 1960 to 1970, the median income for a Pittsburgh family jumped by 57%. But in 1979, Peduto’s first year in high school, the postwar era crashed when the city’s steel industry collapsed. 1.8 million lived in greater Pittsburgh. From 1980 to 1983, nearly 100,000 industrial workers lost their jobs. Unemployment spiked above 20%. “It was,” he said, “A depression, not a recession.” By the early 1980s, even the Peduto boys had left Pittsburgh.
Deindustrialization turned much of the industrial Midwest into the “Rust Belt.” Sadly, Pittsburgh was warned. University of Pittsburgh professor Chris Briem, who recently authored Beyond Steel, told me, “There’s a mythos that the 1980s came and steel went away for completely exogeneous reasons that aren’t our fault. They were all our fault.” Blessed with high quality metallurgic coal, early twentieth-century Pittsburgh was almost the only source for the coal that made steel. This resource monopoly made the “Steel City.” But technology voided this monopoly. Briem told me that experts, in 1946 and again in 1960, “Wrote a pretty scathing report on all the economic things that were going to happen, if they [Pittsburgh] don’t move away from steel.”
In 1979, these warnings came to pass. Pittsburgh’s steel industry crumbled. Deindustrialization also punched Detroit and Cleveland in the gut. For Pittsburgh, it was a roundhouse that knocked the city out cold. As Briem put it, “I can argue pretty strenuously that at the end of the day we [Pittsburgh] suffered a lot more. Just the nature of the concentration of steel.” He added: “Pittsburgh was kind of forced to be like, okay, we’re no longer an industrial city in the same way we were. But Detroit and Cleveland were able to still hold on.”
In the 1980s, Peduto, like his hometown, scraped bottom. A model high school student, he left college to follow the Grateful Dead. By 1991, he lived in Washington, D.C. Tom Peduto’s death brought his little brother home. Bill Peduto began working for underdog candidates throughout western Pennsylvania. By 1995, he served as Pittsburgh Councilman Dan Cohen’s chief of staff. Seven years later, in 2002, he won a city council seat. A dozen years on council led to the mayor’s office in 2013.
For those acquainted with Pittsburgh politics, the narrative of Peduto and the Steel City is a familiar, even a hackneyed tale, of feel-good maxims: eds and meds, the creative class, Green Pittsburgh, the Paris of Appalachia. In this telling, Peduto, a self-described “student of cities,” engineered Pittsburgh’s post-industrial renaissance with the ease of a Sidney Crosby drop shot. Briem summarized this mythology: “Everyone got together and pushed the big easy button to become a technology or whatever region. And then we’ve all been sort of happy ever since.” Peduto and Pittsburgh’s path from rock bottom was not so linear or so neat.
In 2007, Peduto pulled the plug on a mayoral run before it even started. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorialized, “He turned his back on the city, an act that will be recalled in shame.” But Peduto is never more at home than he is wandering with the Grateful Dead or the political wilderness. The time between the 2007 crash-and-burn and his successful 2013 run was spent finishing a college degree, earning a master’s, and in the words of one childhood friend, learning to “propose new ideas.”
By 2013, Peduto was a brainy technocrat with a yinzer’s touch. Friends with Richard Florida, he ran for mayor just when the Carnegie Mellon professor’s 2012 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, made Pittsburgh the model post-industrial city. This enabled Peduto to give Pittsburgh something it had not enjoyed in a generation: hope.
No longer pining for a smokestack past, Peduto offered a future. On election night, a victorious Peduto proclaimed, “We are the next great American city.” In any other Rust Belt city, such a statement would have elicited face palms; bartenders would have hidden the Iron City beer. But in Pittsburgh, Peduto’s flourish was met with cheers – and belief. This belief bonded an Obama-like coalition of college educated creative class-types with African-Americans to Peduto. “If you look at my 2013 victory and how I won,” Peduto boasted, “it mirrors Barack Obama's victory in 2008 over Hillary Clinton.”
Being a Pittsburgh mayor is not what it used to be. At 300,000 inhabitants, the city is less than half the size from its 1950 peak. The markedly smaller entity is embedded in one of the nation’s most disjointed network of boroughs, townships, and overlapping jurisdictions that makes governing hard. Added to that is social media. Allen Dieterich-Ward, author of Beyond Rust, told me, “In the pre-social media age, being a mayor gave you a platform and a credentialing with the newspapers and other media outlets.” Peduto was still expected to transform a city.
In Pittsburgh and the Rust Belt, transformation still requires jobs. As Briem views it, “I don’t think any mayor that I’m aware of has had any ability to shift any industrial shift here for a while. But they certainly have a had a big impact on building quality-of-life issues.” Riverfront development, policing, and bike lanes are more than tangible policy. They create vibes. The vibes, during Peduto’s tenure, helped Pittsburgh retain the college-educated talent that drives growth. In a city where 40% of the young adults are either in college or hold a college degree, Pittsburgh had oodles of talent. High tech companies, such as Uber, Amazon, and Seagate, set-up shop in the city and hired them. As Peduto described, “The [steel] mills never disappeared. They simply moved up to the hills, and they were called UPMC, Carnegie Mellon, University of Pittsburgh.”
By the end of Peduto’s tenure Forbes ranked Pittsburgh as the nation’s third most livable city. Pittsburgh was second nationally in its growth of creative class professionals. The city’s GDP jumped from $79 to $109 billion, a 37% leap. In 2019, the city recorded its lowest murder rates in nearly two decades. Peduto’s tenure was, by any standard, successful. Voters seemingly agreed. In 2017, Peduto won 70% of the Democratic primary vote, on his way to a commanding 96% general election win.
Beyond the numbers, Peduto gave the city an identity. As Dieterich-Ward told me, “Peduto’s establishes that the political consensus is that Pittsburgh is going to be a post-steel community.” This vision seemingly enjoyed broad support. In 2021, he had a 60% approval rating. But Peduto was a victim of his own success. Dieterich-Ward observed, “Peduto shifts that [post-steel] vision. But the conversation shifts so much during his tenure that he doesn’t stand out anymore.” Progressives, in other words, came to regard a middle-aged white technocrat as weak tea.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, protesters agitated outside the mayor’s home for more action on hot-button progressive issues. Death threats meant 24-7 security. In 2021, these highly educated progressives, along with the city’s African-American voters, rallied to Ed Gainey, to defeat Peduto in the Democratic primary. After 27 years of serving Pittsburgh, Peduto’s political career ended with a thud and whimper.
The tensions within the Peduto/Obama coalition were not merely with white progressives and Black voters. In 2019, the mayor’s stand against “cracker plants” exposed another division with the party’s remaining white working-class voters. Cheered by environmentalists, Peduto’s stance was challenged by fellow Democrats. Darrin Kelly, President of Allegheny-Fayette Central Labor Council, said, “Calling to banish an entire industry is an insult to a lot of good hard working men and women in organized labor.”
Squeezed from the progressive left and his lunch-bucket Democratic right, Peduto threaded a political needle until he did not. Dizzied by tumult and change, voters today are sour, and as Peduto told me, “I just think that people are not happy and they want to be able to show that unhappiness some way. And one of the most tangible ways of doing so is voting somebody out of office.”
By 2021, Peduto not only lost a political race, but he had also lost every member of his tight-knit family. Out of public life, the mayor is still looking out for Pittsburgh. He sees our current political woes as emanating from a toxic media ecosystem. Voters, he told me, are “choking on this information that is laden with so much emotion. And it’s like a fire hose. You can’t process it.”
Turning inward, he points to inter-faith dialogue and the Dalai Lama, who he has met twice, as guides. Peduto said of him, “The best way I could describe it was childlike … he was very animated and, you know, and just very happy and laughing. And I think there’s a way, you know, to live that life.”
To “live that life,” Peduto has added another guardian angel, Bertha. A three-year-old English Bulldog, Peduto shared, “She reminds me that, you know, take a breath and take every day, one day at a time, and live in the moment.”
As it turns out, guardian angels are not just for winning elections or governing a city. They offer wisdom for living in a tumultuous era.
