The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Editor’s note: In anticipation of the Urban History Association’s 2023 conference being held in Pittsburgh from October 26 – October 29, The Metropole is making the Steel City its Metropolis of the Month for January 2023. The CFP remains open until February 20, 2023. See here for details. By David S. Rotenstein Introduction Pittsburgh is […]
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Editor’s note: In anticipation of the Urban History Association’s 2023 conference being held in Pittsburgh from October 26 – October 29, The Metropole is making the Steel City its Metropolis of the Month for January 2023. The CFP remains open until February 20, 2023. See here for details. By Drew Simpson and Dan Holland When […]
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By David S. Rotenstein There is a historic house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Anna Tito Mecca Zizza lived for almost 30 years. She cooked family dinners there and helped raise the children of her large extended family inside its walls and in its yard. Anna grew old inside the house, and she died there after […]
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By David S. Rotenstein Introduction In the summer of 2021, crews began demolishing a historic building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Strip District. The building was a monumental, windowless, concrete block onto which a later owner—a fish wholesaler and retailer—had installed a large illuminated fish. The building and its fish were popular and well-loved visual landmarks in […]
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This post is part of the Metropole’s Disciplining the Nation series, where we are spotlighting a primary source that is vital to the retelling of the history of racial state violence and criminalization in the United States. Learn more about the series here. By Charlotte Rosen “I am not under a court sentence of death. […]
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Vitale, Patrick. Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Reviewed by Alex Sayf Cummings In the 1979 cult classic The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a down-on-their-luck basketball team called the Pittsburgh Pythons is desperate for a change of fortune. They lose constantly, despite being led by the […]
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Simpson, Andrew T. The Medical Metropolis: Health Care and Economic Transformation in Pittsburgh and Houston. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kenneth Alyass The COVID-19 pandemic has made the geographies of health care systems visible in new ways, as cameras have focused on the harrowing scenes of filled-to-capacity ICUs, health care workers draped […]
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By Avigail Oren On November 16, Pittsburgh NPR affiliate WESA dropped a five-part podcast called Land and Power, about a fight for housing in the city’s historically Black neighborhood of East Liberty. In 2015, residents of the Penn Plaza apartment buildings found out they’d have to leave their homes to make way for new development. […]
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The air over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, seems different these days. The once smoky skies are brighter, and the signature view of the city is no longer the fiery and smoky mills that once lined its riverbanks. Instead, it is the gleaming downtown skyline of glass and steel office towers best seen from nearby Mt. Washington. Looking […]
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In a recent fivethirtyeight podcast, political scientist Dan Chen noted that in China the population largely distrusts local authorities’ response to the COVID19 pandemic, while placing faith in the large central government. Host Galen Druke then noted that in the United States, at least over the past few months, the reverse is true: support for […]
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