About a hundred years ago the Pittsburgh region hit its peak. Nestled in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, it hosted an industrial system of world historic proportions.
The population had been exploding for years, growing by double digit percentages every decade, as workers and their families arrived to fuel the area’s mammoth steel manufacturing concerns. Growth would slow almost to a halt during the 1930s, where the first seeds of deindustrialization were sown, but at the same time, one of the most powerful unions of the New Deal emerged to redistribute some of the fruits of this economic dynamism to those on the shop floor.
Image: Pittsburgh's Jones and Laughlin Steel Works in 1967, with downtown Pittsburgh in the background (The Brookline Connection)
