Pittsburgh’s miraculous turnaround from post-industrial wasteland to shiny 21st-century metropolis is a stunning example of urban reinvention. How and why did the city manage to avoid the fate of Rust Belt basket cases like Detroit? Politico Magazine’s Glenn Thrush tells the story here of a surprisingly high-tech new Pittsburgh growing for the first time since its postwar peak, of disused factories converted into urban lofts, biotech labs and robot workshops. So when President Obama visited one of the few lingering local steel plants last week—saying, “You don’t come to the Steel City without coming to U.S. Steel”—in reality he was talking about a city that no longer exists. Above, the Fort Duquesne incline, opened in 1877, chugs past “The Point” downtown at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, which flow into the mighty Ohio. James Parton, best known for describing industrial-age Pittsburgh as “hell with the lid taken off” in an 1868 article in the Atlantic, was awestruck by this view. “The wonder is,” he wrote, “not that Pittsburgh is an assemblage of flourishing towns of 230,000 inhabitants, but that, placed at such a commanding point, it is not the most flourishing and the most populous city in America.”

Mark Peterson/Redux