Name for the region in which Pittsburgh is located (York: live in, area)

[Johnny C]

^ Im much more confused now, thanks. The names are stuck in the early pioneer days when Ohio was considered a great western territory lol.

[NJ07035]

I vote for the Ohio River Valley - heck, it starts in Pgh, just as the expansion to the areas the river passes through did 200 years ago.

[aveojohn]

I believe this region is referred to as the Ohio valley, since it is between the Midwest and New England.

[ditchdigger]

Weather forecasts very frequently refer to this area as the "Upper Ohio Valley". That works for me...

[creepsinc]

Pittsburgh is contained within Appalachia, according to this map by the Appalachian Regional Commission. I don't really care if people in Pittsburgh don't like that. It's a fact. I realize that according to this map, Erie is in Appalachia, too. So, it's not a very exact map, but I don't think there's any question about Pittsburgh. Any given neighborhood resembles a small town in West Virginia, a state about 40 miles away which is located entirely within Appalachia.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by creepsinc

So, it's not a very exact map, but I don't think there's any question about Pittsburgh.

Yep, the coastal area of the Great Lakes (e.g. Erie and Buffalo) shouldn't be included, and that map is a bit overbroad around the southern tip as well. But you are absolutely correct that at least as a physiographic term, there is no doubt that Pittsburgh is in the Appalachian region. Even more specifically, we are in something called the Appalachian Plateau:

Appalachian Plateau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Even more specifically than that, we are in the unglaciated portion of the Allegheny Plateau:

Allegheny Plateau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

That is actually what gives us our "hills"--they are the parts of the plateau that haven't been carved down as much by the local streams and rivers.

Anyway, as is summed up nicely at that second link:

The Allegheny Plateau is a physiographic section of the larger Appalachian Plateau province, which in turn is part of the larger Appalachian physiographic division.

And that is where Pittsburgh is located. Again, though, used as a cultural term, calling Pittsburgh an Appalachian place is a different issue entirely.

[mwruckman]

Pittsburgh is very much like Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Gary-Hammond (IN),and Chicagoland. These cities were built by their proximity to coal, limestone and iron ore. The metal industry made this the logical site for industries needing steel so railroads, steel for fabrication of bridges and buildings, automobiles and ships were located here. When America started using other materials and quit building things needing steel all these places went into decline. A author of a book called The Nine Nations of North America called this region which includes Pittsburgh "The Foundary" others call it the "Rust Belt".

[creepsinc]

Originally Posted by mwruckman

Pittsburgh is very much like Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Gary-Hammond (IN),and Chicagoland. These cities were built by their proximity to coal, limestone and iron ore. The metal industry made this the logical site for industries needing steel so railroads, steel for fabrication of bridges and buildings, automobiles and ships were located here. When America started using other materials and quit building things needing steel all these places went into decline. A author of a book called The Nine Nations of North America called this region which includes Pittsburgh "The Foundary" others call it the "Rust Belt".

The fact that you lump Pittsburgh in with Detroit and Gary just shows that your perception of it is woefully outdated. Newsflash: Pittsburgh went into decline three decades ago. Over the past decade, it's been on the upswing. The population loss has been slowing every year since. The Economist (hardly Pittsburgh homers) just named it the most livable city in America.

[BrianTH]

The thing is that Pittsburgh has an economic history that pre-dates, and now post-dates, its participation in the "Rust Belt" economy with the Great Lakes cities. In fact, as I recently posted elsewhere, an ongoing study of local economies during the recession identified a split in the manufacturing belt:

There are two distinct "Manufacturing Belts." Economic pain is widespread in Midwestern metro areas that depend heavily on the auto industry and its supply chain. Most metro areas in Michigan and Ohio have experienced employment and output declines exceeding national averages. Several, including Dayton, Detroit, and Youngstown, began losing jobs two to three years earlier than the U.S. economy as a whole. At the same time, job losses have been more modest, and housing prices have risen slightly, in many Northeastern metro areas that have less auto-oriented manufacturing sectors (e.g., aerospace in Hartford, photonics in Rochester, plastics in Scranton).

Tracking Economic Recession and Recovery in America’s 100 Largest Metropolitan Areas - Brookings Institution

As demonstrated by Pittsburgh's relatively mild job losses as compared to the relevant cities in the Great Lakes area, it is now actually on the Northeastern side of this divide.

[Bagger]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

In several recent discussions, we have debated the issue of in which region Pittsburgh should be located. As usual, no consensus was reached, but it seems to me that there was pretty broad support for identifying a region surrounding Pittsburgh that was more closely related internally (in terms of culture, language, history, economy, and so forth) than with the surrounding regions, whether or not this was viewed as a top-level U.S. region or rather as a subpart of another top-level U.S. region. Although we need not settle the exact boundaries of this region here, it is basically going to be between the East Coast (so would not include New York City, Philly, and DC) and the Great Lakes (so would not include Cleveland and maybe not Buffalo--but that could be considered a boundary issue).

As emerged in those conversations, one of the major problems with this notion is figuring out exactly what to name this region. Two major possibilities based on current usage would be the "Pittsburgh Tri-State" and something like "Northeast Appalachia". See these links, noting the Pittsburgh Tri-State is roughly coextensive with the northeast part of Appalachia:

Pittsburgh Tri-State - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Appalachia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But one problem with the term "Pittsburgh Tri-State" is that it is obviously defined as an extension of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, making it a bit circular for our purposes (it basically amounts to saying Pittsburgh is located in the region defined as being the region around Pittsburgh). Moreover, the region in question probably includes bits of more than three states (e.g., perhaps parts of NY, PA, WV, OH, MD, and maybe even KY and VA), and in any event the name should not pre-determine these boundary issues.

In contrast, while technically accurate perhaps, it seems the most major problem with the term "Northeast Appalachia" is that many people have impressions of what "Appalachia" means such that Pittsburgh is not Appalachian. Indeed, it appears some people from the Pittsburgh area find it insulting to be called Appalachian. Personally, I think this is also in part a circularity issue. Specifically, if Pittsburgh was part of Appalachia, then it would be false to claim Appalachia did not include any large cosmopolitan cities. But if Appalachia is defined to include only rural areas and small towns, then perhaps Pittsburgh should be excluded from Appalachia by definition--and once you exclude Pittsburgh, that turns out to be accurate (meaning Pittsburgh is the only large city in Appalachia). And since these are both internally-consistent views of what "Appalachia" could mean, it is probably a dispute worth avoiding since it won't be easily settled.

So I thought I would start a thread to see if anyone has some creative naming ideas for this region. If we can find an existing term that fits, then great, but I think it would also be fine to create a new term if no existing term works well. And who knows--maybe if we do a good job we can eventually become the source for a term that enters wide usage and becomes officially recognized at some point.

A few non-binding suggestions: first, one loose convention in naming U.S. regions is to combine compass directions and major geographic features (e.g., East Coast or Pacific Northwest). So, for example, "Pittsburgh Tri-State" doesn't really fit this convention, but "Northeast Appalachia" more or less does (the Appalachians being a mountain system, and hence a geographic term).

Another suggestion would be to try to convey just a little sense of the region's culture, history, or so on, but without doing so in a way that would cause a lot of objections. So, "Northeast Appalachia" apparently does convey some cultural connotations, but not in a way that people find unobjectionable.

With all that in mind, I will start by proposing something like "Northeast Highlands".

The basic idea is to convey the location and topography of the region, following the naming convention I mentioned. By the way, when it comes to mountainous regions, a "highlands zone" is distinct from an "alpine zone" by the fact that highland zones generally are at a lower altitude and are better irrigated, and hence have thicker vegetation and more deciduous trees. Hence most of the Northeast Highlands would be properly named from a technical standpoint.

But I would also hope the use of the term "Highlands" evokes a bit of the Scotch-Irish cultural legacy in the region--which, among other things, helps explain the local dialect (e.g., yinz is a derivative of the Scottish "you ones", and the "h" in Pittsburgh comes from the Scottish "burgh" as a spelling of "borough"). Further, this region was originally a barrier to westward expansion from the coastal population centers (Pittsburgh, of course, got its start as the place where a land passage over the mountains from the East Coast met up with navigable rivers into the interior of the country), and even today it is generally more sparsely populated than the East Coast or Great Lakes, thanks to the mountainous (or "highlands") terrain. Finally, I would also hope the term would indirectly help evoke the importance of coal to the economics of the region in the Industrial Age (indeed, that was true in Scotland as well), which in turn explained why Pittsburgh became a steel town.

So that is my case for "Northeast Highlands". But I would definitely hope to get more nominations, and if people are really interested, maybe we could follow up with a poll to pick a name we could all support.

I tell folks that Pittsburgh isn't East coast or Mid-west but rather... "Mid-East"!