It’s All Gonna Be Fine

OK, we’ve all been here before.  Everyone relax and keep doing what Pittsburgh is doing: moving forward to a continually brighter future.

It was just announced that US Steel Corp will not be building a new [architecturally mediocre, IMHO] headquarters in the Lower Hill.  Anyone who’s been reading the business sections recently has smelled this coming.  US Steel is no longer the leviathan of metal it once was.  In fact, it may have missed the survival boat altogether.  Larger primary metals companies have built worldwide operations, mostly via the Third World, admittedly where environmental and employment concerns are sadly less of a concern.

US Steel played their own part in this current state of affairs.  My father was a draftsman in their engineering department.  Besides working on projects from Pittsburg, California to Birmingham, Alabama to Gary, Indiana he also helped US Steel sell its project expertise [and maybe sell off its intellectual capital] to steel companies in South Korea and India and beyond.  But in the 1960s and 1970s, US Steel was invincible, right?

But back to Pittsburgh’s brilliant future.  Let’s acknowledge the future of any world class city is and has always been in “knowledge industries”.  Not to deprecate manufacturing with that statement: in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, making steel [or glass, or aluminum or ketchup] WAS a knowledge industry.  What Pittsburgh gave the world a hundred years ago was nothing short of an economic revolution on the same scale as what the Silicon Valley is doing today.  But in those lyrics of George Harrison, all things must pass away.

Alcoa took its headquarters to New York and that was a gut punch.  But there are still many hundreds on the North Shore and more importantly, many well paid high tech researchers at their suburban research center.  Mellon Bank’s purchase was almost worse in terms of local prestige.  That was truly a sell-out by an outsider [from Charlotte, of all the upstart places] who was simply climbing the Wall Street C-level ladder.  But in the aftermath of all that Pittsburgh has more BNY Mellon employees here than they have in New York City [albeit probably not on the same pay scale].  And Kraft Heinz says it will maintain dual headquarters after the merger.  Dual headquarters almost never work [unless you are Shell Oil].  What galls most about Heinz is that the Heinz name is woven into Pittsburgh’s psychic fabric.   But that speaks to my point….

It’s time to make new history; weave a new pattern.  It’s time to keep that social and economic loom working [pardon my overplayed analogy] full time to produce the cloth that will be Pittsburgh’s re-emergence as a world class city taking a prominent place among those cities located on humanity’s mental map.