Current Time in Pittsburgh, United States

Pittsburgh stands in western Pennsylvania at the confluence where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio. The city is built across steep hills, river terraces and narrow valleys, a landscape that has given it more bridges than any other city in the world, along with funicular railways, staircases used as public streets and constant sudden views. Four distinct seasons bring humid summers, colourful autumns and cold, often grey winters.

About three hundred thousand people live within the city limits and more than two million in the wider region. Once the greatest steel producing centre on earth, Pittsburgh has reinvented itself around universities, hospitals, robotics, software and finance, and it is regularly ranked among the most liveable cities in the United States.

Its strategic position at the head of the Ohio made it a prize in the eighteenth century, when French and British forces fought for control of the point, and the British fort built there was named for the statesman William Pitt. Coal seams in the surrounding hills, plus rivers for transport, made the town a natural site for iron, glass and later steel. In the decades after the Civil War, industrialists including Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, George Westinghouse, Andrew Mellon and Henry Heinz built fortunes here, and hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Poland, Italy, Slovakia and beyond, along with African Americans arriving from the South, poured into the mill towns. The collapse of the steel industry in the early 1980s cost the region most of its manufacturing jobs and forced a painful transformation that has since become a widely studied model of urban renewal.

Visitors are drawn first to the Duquesne and Monongahela Inclines, which climb Mount Washington to a viewpoint over the golden triangle of downtown, and to Point State Park, where a great fountain marks the meeting of the rivers. The Carnegie museums of art and natural history, with their famous dinosaur halls, the Andy Warhol Museum devoted to the city's most famous artistic son, the Frick estate and the glass domes of the Phipps Conservatory are all outstanding. The Strip District market street, the Victorian houses of the Mexican War Streets and the historic Hill District, home of the playwright August Wilson, each tell part of the story.

Pittsburgh is passionate about sport, following its football, hockey and baseball teams with unusual devotion, and its distinctive local speech is a source of civic pride. The University of Pittsburgh, whose soaring Cathedral of Learning contains classrooms decorated by immigrant communities in their national styles, and Carnegie Mellon University, a world leader in computer science and robotics, drive much of the modern economy. It was at Pitt that Jonas Salk developed the first effective polio vaccine.

An international airport, light rail, buses and the inclines serve the region, and riverside trails have replaced abandoned mill sites.

Pittsburgh is admired as a city that rebuilt itself, combining industrial heritage, hilly beauty and genuine intellectual energy.