Healthcare and education. Pittsburgh is no longer Steel City. The last mill closed down in the mid-1980s and the city floundered for more than a decade until the city leaders finally realized that big steel wasn’t going to come back to save the day.
Instead, there was a concerted effort to redefine the city, and the resulting transformation included investments that moved the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Carnegie-Mellon University to positions of leadership in the nation, if not the world. Pittsburgh emerged from the destruction of its biggest industry into a leading position in some of the most stable tech industries.