Pittsburgh is no stranger to lists. The city and metropolitan area appear so often on lists ranking it as both a desirable travel destination and place to live that, in 2017 — on the heels of a Vogue article titled “5 Industrial Cities Making America’s Rust Belt Shine Again” — Pittsburgh City Paper’s Alex Gordon considered our status as the “Most Listable City.”
“It seems like every other month Pittsburgh is being lauded with new superlatives and praised for its perceived renaissance,” the late Gordon wrote, contextualizing the endless listing within a larger history of American travel writing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, stretching back centuries, such coverage tends to exclude criticism, and often glosses over glaring inequity in favor of good press and modern tourism dollars. (For a powerful counter to the city’s self-mythologizing, read Damon Young’s “The Least Livable Body in America’s Most Livable City.”)
Gordon’s “Most Listable” title is, of course, a play on Pittsburgh’s best-known plaudit, the “most livable city.” As City Paper news editor Colin Williams recently pointed out, the phrase is now so ubiquitous it even appears on some city trash cans. That honor came courtesy of Forbes in 2010, in which Pittsburgh, described as a “newly revitalized former manufacturing center,” took the number-one spot based on calculations about its “art[s] scene, job prospects, safety, and affordability.”
But the origin of Pittsburgh’s lofty place on lists dates back to 1985, in the second edition of Rand McNally’s Places Rated Almanac — what Gordon called “patient zero.”
As the “Most Livable” honorific has become synonymous with Pittsburgh, the original Places Rated win felt lost to history, and CP set out to find a copy of the book that started it all. Given that so much has emanated from it — in its way, that first ranking probably influenced my own move to Pittsburgh — I imagined it as a museum piece or an out-of-print tome that would take weeks to find.
In reality, there are two copies of the yellow, 450-page almanac in the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh system. One is held in the Pennsylvania Department at the Main location, accessible by request (which did give me my special handling fix), and another is a circulating copy that I transferred to my local library branch. The circulating copy is also signed in blue ink by authors David Savageau and Richard Boyer (“Highest regards…”).
I’ll admit that, when the book landed in my hands, casually passed across the reference desk, I felt the same jolt one might get beholding a relic. After perusing the book, I found that it is just that — a work emblematic of its time. With overtones of Reagan-era crime panic, the book makes the explicit promise that you, the savvy reader and consumer armed with its ratings, can vote with your feet and move, geographically, toward safety, upward mobility, and “personal success.”
Decades before the listicle would become a journalistic mainstay, Places Rated filled the niche of what it calls “an American tradition” of ranking locales. The book’s back cover alludes to its first edition, published in 1981, going viral by the standards of its time: the “furor” it caused was covered by CBS Evening News and NBC’s “Today” for four consecutive days.
“This brand-new edition of the controversial bestseller continues the no-nonsense approach…” the back cover copy reads. “Praised in Atlanta, assailed in Massachusetts, disputed in Florida, and applauded in Pittsburgh … Some of its findings may infuriate you, some may delight you.”
As compared with a AAA TourBook of the same era, intended only to express the preferences of the organization, Places Rated has a more technocratic bent, claiming objectivity by scrupulously evaluating 329 metropolitan areas according to nine major criteria (presaging Forbes). The authors imagine the criteria as “what most people thinking of moving would deem important” and they include climate, housing costs, healthcare, transportation, crime (as measured by annual violent and property crimes per 100,000 population), transportation, education, arts, recreation, and “economics.”
Interestingly, Pittsburgh doesn’t take the top spot in any of the nine individual categories, but is part of an “elite group” with no single ranking below 200 across the board, giving it a cumulative score that boosted it to the top of the list. In 1985, the metro area’s highest marks were given for education (7), recreation (12) — Pittsburgh being a “baseball town” is mentioned in this chapter — and healthcare and “environment” (14).
However, in the book’s “Putting It All Together” section announcing Pittsburgh (which had previously ranked fourth) as the new winner, crime and housing are among the first criteria mentioned. In 1985, according to Places Rated, the metro area ranked 78th in terms of safety from crime.
“Most comparably sized metro[s] cannot approach this level,” Boyer and Savageau wrote, specifically citing Atlanta. Earlier in the book, the authors emphasize the importance of examining a crime rate — the incidence of crime per 100,000 people — rather than a total number of crimes. According to 1982 FBI crime data cited in the book, Pittsburgh had 103 incidents of murder for its population of two million (450,000 in the city proper), compared to Waco, Texas with 33 murders for 170,000 people (putting the areas’ homicide rates at 4.5 and 17.9 respectively).
“So Pittsburgh, for all its reputation as a tough steel town, is actually twice as safe from murder as the average metro area,” the authors conclude.
As a millennial, the book’s housing chapter (“Housing: Affording the American Dream”) made me laugh out loud.
“The 1980s may well be the era of making do, doubling up with parents, buying a house with several people unrelated to you, making dollhouses livable, learning creative financing tactics, budgeting up to 40 percent of your gross income for shelter costs — or, yes, simply getting used to renting indefinitely,” the authors lament following the statistic that the average American home price reached an all-time high in May 1984 of $101,000. Pittsburgh then ranked 186th for housing costs, “just under the midpoint.” (Today, though still affordable by national comparison, Pittsburgh’s median home listing price is $255,000, with those in the market facing other obstacles to buying).
In their final assessment, the Places Rated authors appeal to the notion of post-industrial renaissance that carries through to today, alongside the notes of conservatism that pervade the book.
“Many people who perhaps have a stereotyped and outdated image of a smoky, noisy blast furnace of a city may be surprised,” Savageau and Boyer wrote. “But Pittsburgh shows great strength in the social indicators … Values are traditional and simple, neighborhoods tight yet friendly.”
As Gordon recalled in CP, in 1985, Pittsburgh’s unemployment rate was nearly 10 percent, the steel industry was in crisis (in tandem with an economic recession), and residents were leaving the area by the thousands.
A New York Times article in March of that year detailed Pittsburghers’ “bemused” reaction to the number-one ranking, even noting that Places Rated author Savageau “couldn’t quite believe it himself.”
“On behalf of Pittsburgh, I demand a recount,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Peter Leo wrote. “Now we have every reason to fear a Yuppie invasion. As you know, Yuppies take lists and ratings very seriously.”
At the same time, Mayor Richard S. Caliguiri expressed pride, according to the Times, as did older Pittsburghers. A 1985 song called “Pittsburgh’s No. 1” was released (which, to today’s ears, sounds so cloying I defy readers to listen to the whole thing), with a music video featuring sweeping shots of the Point, rivers, and Cathedral of Learning. Johnny Carson even made a joke about the city’s number-one status on The Tonight Show.
Though taking a trip to 1985 largely felt like a throwback, one thing that remains unchanged is that Pittsburghers will hold court about the merits of living here. With rising costs, political shifts, and changing demographics, I think we’re unlikely to drop the “city in transition” label and accolades anytime soon.
