The City of Pittsburgh

Within 500 miles of more than half the U.S. population, Pittsburgh is a beautiful city whose charm flows out of confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers. The city's eclectic ethnic neighborhoods, nestled within valleys and capping hills, feature diverse accents, foods, smells, and cultures. With both a history as a working-class steel town and decades of urban redevelopment, Pittsburgh was the home of Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Nelly Bly, Andrew Carnegie, Rachel Carson, and Mister Rogers. Birthplace of the first community-sponsored television station, WQED, Pittsburgh boasts a broad spectrum of art, science, and history museums, the Pittsburgh Symphony, jazz (The Manchester Craftsman's Guild), live hip-hop, dance, theater, and many other cultural offerings. It also has a wide range of parks and Western Pennsylvania’s premier horticultural center, the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. In addition to top-tier research universities like our own and Carnegie Mellon, such schools as Duquesne University, Chatham College, and Carlow College add to the city's intellectual and cultural life. It's little wonder that Pittsburgh ranks perennially as one of the "most literate" cities in the U.S., in addition to being named the nation's "most livable" city by the Places Rated Almanac in 2007. It also boasts the most trees per capita, and the second largest number of college students per capita of any city in the country.

Apart from its general attractive features, Pittsburgh is an ideal city in which to host the Public Address Conference, because of extensive archives for conducting research. The Historic Pittsburgh Image Collections, for example, provides access to over ten thousand images taken from some thirty-eight collections housed in the city. There is also a rich archive of Western Pennsylvania, and many important documents are held in the John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center’s non-circulating collection. Moreover, individuals whose work is relevant to public address scholars have strong connections to the city. Investigative reporter Nelly Bly, who New York Journal once called “the best journalist in America,” began her journalism career at the Pittsburgh Dispatch, and writer and biologist Rachel Carson, who was born outside the city, studied at what later became Chatham College. Finally, the fact that key rhetorical documents in US history, such as the American Declaration of Independence, US Constitution, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, were penned in Pennsylvania lends the state a certain air of history likely to be appreciated by many scholars of public address.

The above photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike. It is a photo pf the Pittsburgh skyline from Station Square at Dusk, and was taken by Ronald C. Yochum, Jr. and uploaded on February 14, 2007. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/