Pittsburgh's Permanent (and Incomplete) Transformation

Review: Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation by Christopher P. Briem (The Kent State University Press, 2026, 320 pp.)

Gibbs responded by reaching for a metaphor all too familiar to local readers. Pittsburgh, he said, was “now renewed,” “giving birth to renewed industries that are creating the jobs of the future.” In my family, my father had a running joke about the region’s habit of labeling every redevelopment push a “renaissance.” After so many “renaissances” that never quite arrive, he said, the thing ought to be called a “stillbirth.” The region’s understandably cynical natives have learned to be wary of such obstetric language.

Briem is an economist, but he digs through archives like a historian and has little patience for easy consolations. His table of contents reads a bit like an autopsy report: “Forever Steel,” “Denial,” “Damage,” “Beyond,” and “Leveling Up,” with an epilogue called “Paris.” The epigraph that precedes the preface, from the Russell Sage Foundation’s 1914 Pittsburgh Survey, sets the stage: “The spirit of adventure in Pittsburgh has thus far been economic.”

Briem’s own central claim is simple and, for local readers, right on the money: “Pittsburgh’s transformation is incomplete, uneven, and ongoing.” Any honest account must hold two truths at once. This is a real story, one of both abandonment and resilience. Put differently, there is the utopian green Pittsburgh of the social imagineer’s or nonprofit president’s pitch deck and the Pittsburgh of its surrounding, Fallout-like Mon Valley.

For readers of accounts of this region, Beyond Steel fills a number of gaps. Brian O’Neill wrote his whimsical The Paris of Appalachia (2009) at the height of the Great Recession, when Pittsburgh’s peculiar position in the national economy briefly made it look wise. “Pittsburgh held fairly steady,” he noted, while “other cities were hammered.” His best line, and the one that the middle-class Pittsburghers made the book a local hit have repeated ever since, is a bit of gallows humor that doubles as macroeconomic analysis: “You can't get the hangover if you were never at the party.”

O'Neill is a New York-born newspaper columnist who relocated here, and his book reads like a series of interconnected columns that refuse to stop at the fold. He makes a number of shrewd outsider observations about civic mythmaking and is sympathetic toward local hopes, sometimes to a fault. Briem, thankfully, is not in the sympathy business, and he gives us the answer O'Neill could only gesture toward: what, exactly, did the region “transition” into, and who got left on the platform after the coal trains stopped running?

Briem begins by reminding readers that Pittsburgh was never simply “a steel town.” Rather, it was the steel town, a city with an “excessive comparative advantage” in steel so large that it “shaped Pittsburgh's trajectory for more than a century.” Briem describes the city’s industrial specializations as having “imposed an almost intentional blindness to the real prospect of steel's future decline.” When the collapse arrived, it was experienced as betrayal, even though the warning signs had been visible for decades.

The early chapters also remind readers how long Pittsburgh’s environmental self-mythology has lagged reality. Briem quotes James Parton’s famous line about Pittsburgh being “hell with the lid taken off,” then adds that Parton meant it “as praise.” The praise was for its industrial vigor, for a city that looked like the future even when it looked like the underworld. Indeed, speaking as a native, this utilitarian place is still so unspeakably ugly — especially the surrounding dilapidated mill and mining towns where I grew up — that Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken’s characterization of it as “the most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye” and “human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats” remains reasonably accurate. This is doubly so if one has an unshakeable childhood affection, as I do, for those clapboard houses that still “lean this way and that, hanging on to their bases precariously” and still sport “dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks.”

If the first part of Beyond Steel is a history of brutally ugly dominance, the second is a history of refusal to evolve. Briem’s “Denial” section reads like a chronicle of the years when civic leaders acted as if the steel economy could be patched and re-started, and when the political vocabulary was full of “rebirth” talk. One of his sharpest passages comes when he describes a 1960s research project, the Economic Study of the Pittsburgh Region, that predicted the region's industrial decline with “fatalistic accuracy.” He writes that Pittsburgh had “the opportunity to alter its seemingly predestined trajectory long before it arrived,” and that the desire to forget this failure sits “muted” in local memory. That “muted point” matters because it suggests the region’s defining mistake was not simply failing to diversify, but failing to believe diversification was necessary.

John Hoerr’s magisterial And the Wolf Finally Came (1988) remains the classic account of the “breakdown in labor-industry relations” and its “destructive impact on the long-run competitiveness of the U.S. steel industry.” Briem describes Hoerr as “one of the nation's preeminent labor reporters,” “a native of McKeesport,” and someone who, late in life, wanted to write again about his hometown, “asking why revitalization and redevelopment had failed to come.”

Where Briem complicates Hoerr’s account is through his treatment of the counterfactual speculation that still circulates locally: the belief that if Pittsburgh had solved its labor problems, or modernized faster, or built the right new plant at the right moment, steel might have stayed and prosperity would have followed. Briem calls these stories, which Hoerr of course doesn’t endorse but merely considers in the course of a 700-page work, the search for “an easy button.” He offers the colder answer: “Pittsburgh's competitiveness as a location for steel production had been on the decline long before the collapse of the 1980s.” The steel industry's capital decisions were drifted away from the rivers decades earlier, and “Pittsburgh's future economic prospects had long been decoupled from the prospects of the steel industry.”

The evidence is conclusive: “No new minimill began steel production in the Pittsburgh region in the 1970s or 1980s.”  Even the region's best attempt to conjure a new steel future, the much-discussed 1994 plan to reopen the “obsolete Duquesne Works as a new minimill,” died in committee. Briem notes that “the planned redevelopment never happened.”

What follows in Beyond Steel is not the scrappy story of Pittsburgh’s comeback, but the less marketable story of its damage. That “Damage” section includes one of the bleakest comparisons in the book. In 1996, McKeesport landed a Washington, D.C. customer-service operation that brought “up to 800 jobs.” Briem reports that the much-publicized call center remained open for all of eleven years. The Duquesne Works, by contrast, had operated for ninety-nine years. The mismatch captures the entire problem of postindustrial “replacement” jobs. The region traded a century-long industrial anchor for a sequence of short-term employers with little reason to stay.

His chapter “Dorothy” examines the closure of what was once the largest blast furnace in the world: “We’re not a closing, we're a mothballing,” local were told, which proved a promise that “echoed for years in Mon Valley towns.” Such thinking amounted to a political hostage situation. Local officials could not plan for a future without steel, because steel might, in theory, return. I remember adults in the region talking that way when I was a kid — the mills and mines weren't gone, the big bosses were just waiting for the right moment. “The right moment for what, the pine box and the minister to give the eulogy?” my father used to joke.

Briem understands how that false hope shaped redevelopment priorities. When state and county officials tried to push longer-term strategies in the late 1980s, the mill towns understandably demanded something simpler: reopen the plants. In March 1988, Homestead councilwoman Betty Esper rejected an expert plan to turn part of the closed Homestead Works into an international garden festival. “We can't eat grass,” she said. The line is funny in the way people around here can be funny, but it also evokes the impatience of people asked to trade wages for urban-renewal aesthetics. There was a tragic mismatch between what the region's displaced workers needed — for most, the entirety of community life revolved around one or two core industries and their related union halls — and what the region's planners could plausibly deliver.

This is where O’Neill’s book functions as an instructive companion. O’Neill was writing during a period when Pittsburgh’s civic elite had some reason to sound confident. He praised the region's leaders for steering the economy “into its second life fairly well” even as he refused to pretend the fundamentals were entirely solved. “The main structural problem remains,” he wrote: “Population shrinkage. It’s no great mystery why it is happening. New Money is what we lack.”

Briem’s data-heavy story adds ballast to O’Neill’s observation. He notes that the Pittsburgh metropolitan area “was the first major U.S. metro to experience natural population decline” when, “in 1995,” “deaths surpassed births.” This is the brutal demographic arithmetic of a region that exports its young to other regions and replaces them with childless tech-sector carpetbaggers at an unsustainable 2-for-1 rate.

If my old man’s “stillbirth” joke sounds unduly vicious, Briem supplies the historical context that shows why it lands. Pittsburgh has been describing itself as “reborn” for most of a century. O’Neill notes that in the early 1970s, while “hot” real estate money flooded Downtown and “built a lot of what you see,” locals called it “Renaissance II,” adding in jest that “Europe still claims only one [renaissance].” Briem, less amused, points out that Renaissance II's most visible monuments were completed just as the industrial base went into free fall. PPG Place was dedicated in April 1983, “only a few months after the regional unemployment rate had risen above 18 percent.” The skyline shone a bit brighter even as the valley went dark.

Briem does yeoman’s work as he evaluates the region's post-steel political economy: what it chose to build, what it tried to attract, and what it refused to confront. His chapter “Beyond Smokestack Chasing” is a tour through the industrial-policy reflex that never quite died. He writes that even as local leaders eventually recognized that "the plant-closing crisis couldn't be solved by resurrecting old plants … the region’s efforts to attract new large manufacturers continued, and, in some cases, accelerated.” The region moved from chasing smokestacks to chasing every plausible substitute for smokestacks, sometimes with the same incentives and the same wishful math.

His treatment of Pittsburgh’s insoluble political fragmentation is equally unsparing. O’Neill had noted the absurdity, too: Allegheny County’s municipalities “multiply with a frequency [such] that amoebas split less often.” Building a coherent economic strategy, Briem argues, is hard when the region's deliberately decentralized (and impossible-to-annex) governance resembles a “quickly fading amalgam of fiefdoms,” to borrow O'Neill’s mellifluous phrasing.

Briem’s “Beyond” section is also where his measured optimism appears, apportioned out in carefully limited statements. He acknowledges that Pittsburgh’s post-steel trajectory “remains a remarkable story of resilience.” He emphasizes that “change happened and the downward spiral abated," even though "it took longer and came at a cost.”

I was working on my doctorate at Pitt — one of many returning natives drawn to Briem’s “Knowledge Town” — when some of those costs were being assessed. In the 2010s, Pittsburgh attracted national attention as a laboratory for robotics and autonomous vehicles. Briem writes that “Uber came to Pittsburgh and left too quickly,” and he uses that brief courtship as a parable about how easily “boosterism” can inflate local expectations. He extends the point: “marketing alone cannot obviate the real needs and the enduring shortcomings of regions.” A place with unglamorous problems it cannot afford to solve does not become prosperous simply because it gets flattering press. 

That is why Briem’s best chapter might be “Left Behind,” where he refuses to treat Braddock as a symbol of redemption. The town has briefly been cast in national media as a test case for postindustrial revival, partly because its towering mayor, a transplant from West Reading, made it a personal stage for his political ascent. Briem notes that Braddock drew attention as “the set of a Levi's advertising campaign,” and later as “the stage on which the then rising political celebrity of Mayor John Fetterman unfolded.”

Braddock was, Briem writes, “a place that was still losing population faster than anywhere in the region and where the costs of failed redevelopment were still piling up.” He delivers the line that should shame anyone who has ever used Braddock as a TED Talk prop: “Few places remain as left behind as Braddock and its Mon Valley neighbors." The sentence carries his larger argument: Pittsburgh's “transformation” has been real, and it has also been geographically narrow. 

At the end of the book, Briem circles back to the word “Paris.” Far from The Paris of Appalachia evoked by O’Neill, Briem uses “Paris” in regard to a more recent national argument about Pittsburgh's identity. Donald Trump’s “Pittsburgh not Paris” line, delivered when he announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, made Pittsburgh a stand-in for industrial loyalty, a gritty city invoked to justify deregulation. Pittsburgh — or at least a cartoonish caricature people feel in their hearts must have existed, yet never did — keep getting drafted into someone else’s morality play.

The book ends with a warning about the pleasures of that kind of fantasy drafting. Briem quotes Edgar M. Hoover, the regional economist who directed the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Regional Economic Studies in the 1960s and helped pioneer the field of spatial economics. Hoover's old caution that “pure boosterism is truly narcotic” arrives with predictable effects: “first euphoria, then addiction, and eventually decay.” Hoover's line is an evergreen commentary on regional leaders’ long habit of announcing renaissances and mistaking the announcement for the event.

The great value of Beyond Steel is that it refuses to let Pittsburghers outsource their understanding of their own economy to either nostalgic steel memories (where “things ain’t like they used to be and never were”) or Silicon Valley cosplay. Briem wanted to understand why the region “failed to heed the dire warnings” that had been available for decades and refuses to hand readers any comforting policy prescriptions. “There is no silver bullet,” he writes. Regions faced with rapid economic change will look for one anyway, and the result is “repeated efforts to generate a renaissance,” many of which “failed along the way.”  Such repeated failures do not necessarily make Pittsburgh a cautionary tale for other cities, the way some national journalists like to frame it. No, they merely mark Pittsburgh as a “normal” declining American metropolitan region, with one difference: the scale of its earlier dominance made its great fall much harder to deny.

If local readers want a coffee-table book that either flatters their prejudices or indulges their collapse porn fantasies, they will not like Beyond Steel. If they want a book that takes the region seriously enough to try to tell the unvarnished economic truth, they should read it alongside John Hoerr’s earlier masterpiece. Then and only then can they start asking what it would take for a live birth of something brand-spanking-new rather than the always-imminent, always-delayed "rebirth" of a past that was neither as good nor as bad as Pittsburgh lifers like me misremember.