Squirrel Hill Pittsburgh sits on the eastern edge of the city where the land rises above Schenley Park and the great university campuses of Oakland, a neighborhood of tree-lined streets, brick rowhouses, and a commercial district on Murray and Forbes avenues that locals call “upstreet.” It is the traditional center of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, and…
Mary Lou Williams Pittsburgh origins begin with a child sitting at a piano in East Liberty who could play anything she heard before she was old enough to read music. She was born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 8, 1910, but her family moved to Pittsburgh around 1915, when she was a…
The Pittsburgh Crawfords of the early 1930s were, by most informed assessments, one of the greatest baseball teams ever assembled. Their roster in the mid-1930s included five players who would eventually be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Their pitcher was Satchel Paige, among the most dominant and theatrical hurlers of his era. Their…
Josh Gibson Pittsburgh career ended on January 20, 1947, when he died of a stroke at the age of thirty-five. He had been in declining health for some time, his body worn down by years of catching, by a brain tumor, by the specific grief of a man who understood what was being withheld from…
On the morning of February 11, 2001, thousands of Pittsburgh residents gathered on bridges, riverbanks, and rooftops in the cold to watch a building die. Three Rivers Stadium Pittsburgh had stood at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers for thirty years, and at 8:03 a.m. a series of precisely placed explosive charges brought…
The 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates arrived at the World Series trailing in a way that should have ended their season. Down three games to one against the Baltimore Orioles, facing elimination on the road, managed by a man whose mother had died that very morning, the Pirates did something that only a handful of teams in…
In the entire history of professional sports, it is difficult to find a franchise whose story moves more dramatically from the edge of oblivion to the top of the world than the Pittsburgh Penguins. Pittsburgh Penguins history is not a straightforward rise-to-greatness narrative. It is something stranger and more interesting than that: a fifty-year chronicle…
The Pittsburgh Steelers 1970s dynasty is the standard against which every other run of sustained excellence in professional football is measured. Four Super Bowl championships in six seasons. A defense so suffocating it earned a nickname that referenced both the city’s industrial identity and the most foreboding geopolitical barrier of the Cold War era. A…
When the NFL rolled into Pittsburgh for the 2026 Draft on April 23rd, the city looked like a football carnival. The North Shore packed. Point State Park lit up. Acrisure Stadium as the backdrop for a broadcast seen by millions. The NFL reported 805,000 fans over the three days, a draft attendance record. It felt…
Italian Roots in Bloomfield (Early 1900s) Bloomfield, a neighborhood just three miles east of downtown Pittsburgh, earned the nickname “Pittsburgh’s Little Italy” thanks to a wave of Italian immigration in the early 20th century. While the area was initially settled by German Catholic immigrants (who built St. Joseph’s Church in 1886), Italians from villages in…