The city that forged the steel that built America — where the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers converge at the Point in one of the most dramatic urban geographies in the country, 446 bridges make it the most bridged city in the world, Mount Washington's inclines carry you above a skyline of river-valley skyscrapers, and Andy Warhol's Museum holds the largest collection of any single artist's work anywhere
Pittsburgh (300,000; metro 2.4 million) is the seat of Allegheny County and the economic and cultural capital of western Pennsylvania — a city built on three rivers, 90 distinct neighbourhoods on steep hillsides, and a history so thoroughly identified with American steel production that it was simultaneously the wealthiest city per capita in the United States (1900s, when the Carnegies and the Mellons were concentrating the world's steel wealth here) and one of the most polluted (mid-20th century, when the air was so thick that street lights ran at noon). The deindustrialisation of the 1970s–…
The Point (the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers) was the strategic military objective of the French-Indian War — Fort Duquesne (French, 1754) and Fort Pitt (British, 1758, replacing it after French defeat) controlled the gateway to the Ohio Valley and the interior of North America. Andrew Carnegie (born Dunfermline, Scotland, 1835; arrived America 1848) built Carnegie Steel (1892, Homestead Works) into the world's largest steel company, producing more steel than all of Britain combined by 1900, before selling to J.P. Morgan for $480 million in 1901 (creating US Steel, then t…