The Ohio River is a 981-mile-long (1,579 km) river in the United States. It is located at the boundary of the Midwestern and Southern United States, flowing in a southwesterly direction from western Pennsylvania to its mouth on the Mississippi River at the southern tip of Illinois. It is the third largest river by discharge volume in the United States and the largest tributary by volume of the north-south flowing Mississippi River, which divides the eastern from western United States. It is also the sixth oldest river on the North American continent. The river flows through or along the border of six states, and its drainage basin includes parts of 14 states. Through its largest tributary, the Tennessee River, the basin includes several states of the southeastern U.S. It is the source of drinking water for five million people.
Pittsburgh is a city in and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is the second-most populous city in Pennsylvania, after Philadelphia, and the 68th-most populous city in the U.S., with a population of 302,971 as of the 2020 census. The city is located in southwestern Pennsylvania at the confluence of the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River, which combine to form the Ohio River. It anchors the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, which had a population of 2.457 million residents and is the largest metro area in both the Ohio Valley and Appalachia, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, and the 26th-largest in the U.S. Pittsburgh is the principal city of the greater Pittsburgh–Weirton–Steubenville combined statistical area which includes parts of Ohio and West Virginia.
Appalachia is a geographic region located in the central and southern sections of the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. Its boundaries stretch from the western Catskill Mountains of New York into Pennsylvania, continuing on through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Great Smoky Mountains into northern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, with West Virginia being the only state in which the entire state is within the boundaries of Appalachia. In 2021, the region was home to an estimated 26.3 million people, of whom roughly 80% were White.
Downtown Pittsburgh, colloquially referred to as the Golden Triangle, and officially the Central Business District, is the urban downtown center of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located at the confluence of the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River whose joining forms the Ohio River. The triangle is bounded by the two rivers.
The Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) is a 150-mile (240 km) rail trail between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cumberland, Maryland. Together with the C&O Canal towpath, the GAP is part of a 335 mi (539 km) route between Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., that is popular with through hikers and cyclists.
Western Pennsylvania is a region in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania encompassing the western half of the state. Pittsburgh is the region's principal city, with a metropolitan area population of about 2.4 million people, and serves as its economic and cultural center. Erie, Altoona, and Johnstown are its other metropolitan centers. As of the 2010 census, Western Pennsylvania's total population is nearly 4 million.
The Fort Pitt Tunnel is a vehicular tunnel under Mount Washington in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It connects the West End region on the southwest side to the South Shore neighborhood on the northeast side. The adjoining Fort Pitt Bridge on the northeast end connects to Downtown Pittsburgh. The tunnel carries traffic on Interstate 376 (I-376), U.S. Route 22, US 30, and US 19 Truck. The structure comprises two bores, each with two lanes of traffic. The inbound tunnel flows onto the top deck of the double-deck Fort Pitt Bridge, opposite traffic from the lower deck using the outbound tunnel. To accommodate the bridge, the northeast portals of the parallel tunnels are vertically staggered by 30 feet. The tunnel opened in September 1960, a year after the Fort Pitt Bridge.
Greater Pittsburgh is the metropolitan area surrounding the city of Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania, United States. The region includes Allegheny County, Pittsburgh's urban core county and economic hub, and seven adjacent Pennsylvania counties: Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Lawrence, Washington, and Westmoreland in Western Pennsylvania, which constitutes the Pittsburgh, PA Metropolitan Statistical Area MSA as defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.
Wexford is an unincorporated community in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is a suburb of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area split across multiple municipalities, including Franklin Park, McCandless, Pine Township, and Marshall Township. It is named after County Wexford in Ireland. It was ranked the twenty-eighth best place to live by Money magazine in 2005, despite not being a cohesive municipality.
Area code 412 is a telephone area code in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The numbering plan area (NPA) comprises the city of Pittsburgh, most of surrounding Allegheny County, and small portions of Washington and Westmoreland counties. The area code was one of the original North American area codes created in 1947, when it was assigned to the entire southwestern corner of the state. On August 17, 2001, the numbering plan area was converted to an overlay complex with area code 878, which also forms an overlay with area code 724, in the surroundings of the 412 service area.
A large metropolitan area that is surrounded by rivers and hills, Pittsburgh has an infrastructure system that has been built out over the years to include roads, tunnels, bridges, railroads, inclines, bike paths, and stairways; however, the hills and rivers still form many barriers to transportation within the city.
The Pittsburgh Light Rail is a 26.2-mile (42.2 km) light rail system in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and surrounding suburbs. It operates as a deep-level subway in Downtown Pittsburgh, but runs mostly at-grade in the suburbs south of the city. The system is largely linear in a north-south direction, with one terminus near Pittsburgh's central business district and two termini in the South Hills. The system is owned and operated by Pittsburgh Regional Transit.
The economy of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is diversified, focused on services, medicine, higher education, tourism, banking, corporate headquarters and high technology. Once the center of the American steel industry, and still known as "The Steel City", today the city of Pittsburgh has no steel mills within its limits, though Pittsburgh-based companies such as US Steel, Ampco Pittsburgh and Allegheny Technologies own several working mills in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.
South Side Slopes is a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's South Side area. The neighborhood comprises the hills from the South Side Flats neighborhood along the Monongahela River from the Liberty Bridge (west) to beyond Josephine Street (east).
In the United States, the Hillbilly Highway is the out-migration of Appalachians from the Appalachian Highlands region to industrial cities in northern, midwestern, and western states, primarily in the years following World War II in search of better-paying industrial jobs and higher standards of living. Many of these migrants were formerly employed in the coal mining industry, which started to decline in 1940s. The word hillbilly refers to a negative stereotype of people from Appalachia. The term hillbilly is considered to be a modern term because it showed up in the early 1900s. Though the word is Scottish in origin, it does not derive from dialect. In Scotland, the term hill-folk referred to people who preferred isolation from the greater society and the term billy referred to someone being a "companion" or "comrade". The Hillbilly Highway was a parallel to the better-known Great Migration of African-Americans from the south.
Urban Appalachians are people from or with close ancestral ties to Appalachia who are living in metropolitan areas outside of the region. Because migration has been occurring for decades, most are not first generation migrants from the region but are long-term city dwellers. People have been migrating from Appalachia to cities outside the region ever since many of these cities were founded. It was not until the period following World War II, however, that large-scale migration to urban areas became common due to the decline of coal mining and the increase in industrial jobs available in the Midwest and Northeast. The migration of Appalachians is often known as the Hillbilly Highway.
The North Shore Connector is a light-rail extension opened in 2012 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The connector extends the Pittsburgh Light Rail system from its previous terminus at Gateway Center Station in the Central Business District to the new North Side Station and Allegheny Station on the North Shore by way of a tunnel under the Allegheny River. The Connector extends the light rail system's "Free Fare Zone", enabling passengers to ride to and from Pittsburgh's rapidly growing North Shore neighborhood for free.
Bellefield Boiler Plant, also known as "The Cloud Factory" from its nickname's use in Michael Chabon's 1988 debut novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, is a boiler plant located in Junction Hollow between the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University in the Oakland district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
