by Richard Risemberg

"Pittsburgh: Paris of the Midwest"? It may sound like sarcasm, but I'm serious. I've been in a few midwestern cities over the years--Chicago, Lansing, Kansas City, even St. Louis, like Pittsburgh originally a French settlement; but ever since some of its denizens told me that this staid burgh, repopulated largely by Scottish immigrants after the expulsion of the French, was really, like Denver, a part of the Great American Midwest, I've come to see it as a place whose spirit outshone its reputation. There's more to Pittsburgh nowadays than cheap beer and shuttered steel mills. Downtown, especially, is a place where you can be happy to be. It may not really be Paris, but it's not just Steeltown anymore, either.

In Paris, you have the "Ile de la Cité"; in Pittsburgh you have the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers creating a similar multiplicity of waterfronts, and the light at dusk reminds me of the delicate "heure bleue" of the Parisian sky.