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Last Updated June 22, 2005
The Golden Triangle is the inevitable focus of Pittsburgh, the tip of land where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers come together to form the Ohio. It has been a strategic site for more than 200 years. It was there, to Fort Duquesne during the French and Indian War, that Braddock's army was heading (with George Washington helping lead the way) when it was ambushed and defeated in 1754. A few years later, the first American city west of the Appalachian chain was carved out of the wilderness here and named after the English statesman William Pitt. Pittsburgh grew rapidly in the days when most of the nation's commerce moved over water. When railroads became ascendant, Pittsburgh still did nicely, since rail lines tend to run along the riverside rather than scaling the mountains. Then came Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant working as a telegrapher for the Pennsylvania Railroad who foresaw that steel would replace iron for railroad bridges; he built a steel factory in Pittsburgh, then not much more than a rail junction but blessed with ready deposits of coal and access to iron ore from the Great Lakes. With associates like Henry Clay Frick and Henry Phipps, Carnegie built his capacity to the point that when he sold out in 1901, the resulting U.S. Steel Corporation held a near-monopoly. The Pittsburgh that Carnegie and his steel men built is one of giant mills in the bottomlands along the rivers and massive buildings downtown, such as H.H. Richardson's classic stone City-County Building. There were once 12 cable cars going up the Duquesne Incline and other routes, connecting mills with the neighborhoods above. Back then, the smog--a word used here before it was in Los Angeles--was so bad that street lights had to stay on all day downtown; a famous 1947 photograph shows a midnight-like darkness at nine in the morning. But then an alliance of local elected officials and corporate titans (including the leaders of such local Fortune 500 companies as USX, Heinz, Alcoa, and PPG) pushed through a series of forceful and visionary projects designed to improve the city's quality of life. Early on, this model produced tremendous successes: In the 1950s, Mayor David Lawrence and financier Richard King Mellon led efforts to cut air pollution, control river flooding, and construct an advanced network of highways and tunnels. They also turned a derelict industrial zone at the three-rivers confluence into Point State Park--a triangular gem that remains popular with office workers. Pittsburgh is not just a downtown; it is a city of neighborhoods, built on or beneath vertiginous hills; neighborhoods that look right next to each other on the map are in fact quite separate and distinct. There is the uptown neighborhood around Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh with its neo-Gothic "cathedral of learning"; they have helped to spur robust high-tech and medical sectors that have replaced many of the manufacturing jobs lost in previous decades. Among and atop the hills are neighborhoods as different as the predominantly black Hill District, where the famed Pittsburgh Crawfords of baseball's Negro Leagues once played, and WASPy Shady Side and Jewish Squirrel Hill, with fine mansions and fashionable shops. Artist Andy Warhol grew up in the Soho neighborhood, and the Andy Warhol museum is located on the north side. Along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh and southeast are small industrial neighborhoods and towns, like Clairton (where the classic movie The Deer Hunter was set and filmed) with less than half as many residents as a half-century ago. Local officials boast of more bridges than any other city in the world except Venice. The 14th Congressional District of Pennsylvania includes all of Pittsburgh and mostly working class suburbs to the east, south and west. There is some verdant suburbia here, but much of the district is in the Monongahela (or Mon) Valley, where the old steel mills stand or once stood, and the hills above. More affluent suburbs to the north and south are in the Republican held 4th and 18th Districts. This is a heavily Democratic district. The congressman from the 14th is Mike Doyle, a Democrat first elected in 1994. Of Irish and Italian descent, Doyle grew up in the Mon Valley town of Swissvale, worked in steel mills during summers off from Penn State, worked as an insurance agent, for a nonprofit agency and was elected to the Swissvale Borough Council in 1977, at 24. In 1978 he became chief of staff to state Senator Frank Pecora, who was then a Republican. Pecora switched parties in 1992 and briefly gave Democrats control of the state Senate--the Jim Jeffords of the Mon Valley. In 1994 Doyle, who had just switched to the Democratic Party, ran for the 18th District seat held then by Rick Santorum, who was running for the Senate; Doyle was one of seven Democrats and four Republicans to seek the open seat. Doyle was assisted by endorsements from unions and community leaders and won with 20% of the vote; the next finisher had 18%. In the general, he faced John McCarty, an aide to the late Senator John Heinz; McCarty was pro-choice and Doyle anti-abortion. Doyle campaigned for sweeping health care changes, against the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and for rebuilding the Mon Valley's industrial base. In a Republican year, he won 55%-45%. In the House, Doyle has a mixed voting record, toward the right on cultural issues, toward the left on economics. Doyle rarely seeks attention, nor does he cause much ruckus. In late October 2004, he criticized national White House security adviser Condoleeza Rice for "transparently political appearances" on behalf of George W. Bush. As a Steel Caucus member, he worked to reduce foreign imports and pushed a bill to create a national historic site at the former U.S. Steel facilities along the Mon River as part of the local Rivers of Steel program. He lives on Capitol Hill with his "family" of bipartisan House colleagues and is one of the dwindling number of members who drive home after each week's final vote. Republicans controlled redistricting after the 2000 Census, and state Senate Republicans had not forgotten Doyle's role in Pecora's party switch. But in August 2001, 14th District Democrat Bill Coyne announced he would retire. Republicans concentrated on creating a new Republican-leaning 18th District in Pittsburgh's southern suburbs; they attached Doyle's Mon Valley base to the 14th District. Doyle had reason to worry that a city-based Democrat might run for the seat, but in 2002 and again in 2004 Doyle was renominated and reelected without opposition. In the House, he settled in to build seniority on the Energy and Commerce Committee.
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