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The universities helped. But, I think Pittsburgh's big advantages is the unique topography and the related dense built environment. Pittsburgh is just a really unique cool city. Lots of very urban Philly/Boston-esque neighborhoods. Lawrenceville, East Liberty, Oakland, Shadyside, South Side Flats, Mexican War Streets, Strip District, Bloomfield, etc, plus a very tightly built downtown.
Cinncy and to a lesser extent St Louis has a little of it. But, compared to Pittsburgh, the flat, leafy detached home neighborhoods of Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit just aren't as urban or as interesting.
The universities helped. But, I think Pittsburgh's big advantages is the unique topography and the related dense built environment. Pittsburgh is just a really unique cool city. Lots of very urban Philly/Boston-esque neighborhoods. Lawrenceville, East Liberty, Oakland, Shadyside, South Side Flats, Mexican War Streets, Strip District, Bloomfield, etc, plus a very tightly built downtown.
Cinncy and to a lesser extent St Louis has a little of it. But, compared to Pittsburgh, the flat, leafy detached home neighborhoods of Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit just aren't as urban or as interesting.
St. Louis has just as many if not more urban neighborhoods than Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh does have a better downtown, but I don't know where people get the idea that Pittsburgh is more "urban" than St. Louis. My wife is from Pittsburgh, been there several times and I would say they are pretty much on the same level in terms of quality of urban neighborhoods. In fact, I would say that St. Louis has more consistent urban density because of it's flatter topography.
St. Louis has just as many if not more urban neighborhoods than Pittsburgh.
This is true. St. Louis was far more hollowed out by urban renewal and blight than Pittsburgh however. So even though St. Louis at its peak had a more extensive "old urban" core, today it does not.
Cincinnati is somewhat similar. I don't think the core was ever quite as big as Pittsburgh or St. Louis, but the flat zone around Downtown was the densest populated area in the 19th century outside of NYC and Boston - largely because the dominant urban form was walkup tenements rather than rowhouses. But aside from Over-The-Rhine, this typology is basically gone now.
13 pages in and still not one post that details the real answer to the OP's question.
So to the OP:
The reason Pittsburgh fared better is that unlike other rust belt cities, it is surrounded by hills that serve as natural barriers that slowed sprawl. When the rust belt cities were booming, they all consisted of metros where you had a large middle class of workers, with enough money to go build their own single family homes. Now these single family homes were often cheaply built, as that was all the middle class worker could afford, but the point was these cheap single family homes COULD be built because land was plentiful on the outskirts of these cities... except in Pittsburgh.
Unlike the other cities, land was not plentiful in Pittsburgh. You had all these rivers and hills that got in the way. Sprawl still happened of course, but because land to build on was at a premium, you saw denser neighborhoods and better quality houses built in Pittsburgh. Over time, these dense neighborhoods and better quality homes aged better than the cheaply built sprawl houses in other rust belt cities. As the cheaper homes elsewhere aged and fell apart, people moved to the suburbs. Again, this didn't happen as much in Pittsburgh because the homes were better built to begin with, and land was at a premium so there were few suburbs to move out into. This is why Pittsburgh fared better.
13 pages in and still not one post that details the real answer to the OP's question.
So to the OP:
The reason Pittsburgh fared better is that unlike other rust belt cities, it is surrounded by hills that serve as natural barriers that slowed sprawl. When the rust belt cities were booming, they all consisted of metros where you had a large middle class of workers, with enough money to go build their own single family homes. Now these single family homes were often cheaply built, as that was all the middle class worker could afford, but the point was these cheap single family homes COULD be built because land was plentiful on the outskirts of these cities... except in Pittsburgh.
Unlike the other cities, land was not plentiful in Pittsburgh. You had all these rivers and hills that got in the way. Sprawl still happened of course, but because land to build on was at a premium, you saw denser neighborhoods and better quality houses built in Pittsburgh. Over time, these dense neighborhoods and better quality homes aged better than the cheaply built sprawl houses in other rust belt cities. As the cheaper homes elsewhere aged and fell apart, people moved to the suburbs. Again, this didn't happen as much in Pittsburgh because the homes were better built to begin with, and land was at a premium so there were few suburbs to move out into. This is why Pittsburgh fared better.
I live in Pittsburgh, and this is just plain wrong. First off, although Pittsburgh had an unusually rugged topography, it was not alone in having this. Cincinnati also did. Plus there are plenty of other cities which were flat with few geographic barriers, yet still were built densely, like Philly or Baltimore.
Second off, while Pittsburgh had better housing quality than most of the Great Lakes cities (lots more brick, less frame - particularly in the flat neighborhoods) Cinci and St. Louis gave us a run for our money.
It is true that if you look at say a streetcar suburban era home, they tend to be built on smaller lots in Pittsburgh than in other rust belt cities. For example, my home was built in 1905, is fairly sizable (2,362 square feet, six bedrooms, 2.5 baths) and only on a 3,400 square foot lot. My house is detached, but the space between it and the houses on either side is so small that I can almost touch my neighbors house while still touching mine. This goes back to a unique aspect of Pittsburgh's tax structure. In the 20th century, Pittsburgh had a land tax, not a property tax, meaning you were just taxed by the square footage of your property, irrespective of what improvements were put on it. As a result, the system provided incentives to build as large of a house on as small of a plot of land as possible, because four mini-mansions on a half acre would be taxed exactly the same as one modest home.
But really, this just explains why Pittsburgh looks more dense and urban today. It doesn't explain why it didn't decline as badly, because in the mid 20th century people didn't want that dense urban vernacular. As I said upthread, why Pittsburgh didn't decline as much in the core came down to:
1. Much of the industry moving outside of the city into outlying mill towns in the early 20th century.
2. The Great Migration of black Americans ending relatively early in Pittsburgh, which meant a lot less white flight than elsewhere in the Rust Belt.
3. The concentration of all of the regions major colleges within the City of Pittsburgh meaning that the core city was the only "college town" in the entire metro worth speaking of.
Speaking of just plain wrong, you have #3. I tried to address this earlier, and got shot down. Pittsburgh is not the only rust-belt city that has a "college town" area. All the rust belt cities (which list seems to change depending on the point one is trying to make) do! Virtually all these cities have at least one nationally rated college/university, in many cases more than one, just like Pittsburgh.
Speaking of just plain wrong, you have #3. I tried to address this earlier, and got shot down. Pittsburgh is not the only rust-belt city that has a "college town" area. All the rust belt cities (which list seems to change depending on the point one is trying to make) do! Virtually all these cities have at least one nationally rated college/university, in many cases more than one, just like Pittsburgh.
Yes they do, but the number of students per-capita is much lower than Pittsburgh.
Lemme add up the total student body of the universities in Pittsburgh:
Pitt: 28,664
CMU: 13,305
Duquense: 10,363
Point Park University: 4,093
Chatham: 2,300
Carlow: 1,357
Total for the "big six" - over 60,000 students (undergrad and graduate). This is about 1/6th of the total population of the city. Obviously some students are commuters from outside of the city. On the other hand, the "college town" vibe of an area doesn't just come from its students, but faculty.
Now, let's look at Cleveland:
Cleveland State University: 17,260
Case Western: 11,340
Ohio College: 1,500
Cleveland Institute of Art: 568
Cleveland Institute of Music: 427
The total is only around 31,000 - about half of Pittsburgh. This is despite Cleveland having more people within city limits (385,000 versus only 305,000).
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