Many Rust Belt cities are experiencing some kind of comeback, but none has reinvented itself as completely—or as creatively—as Pittsburgh. What was once the fume-belching Steel City has become the lean and green silicon strip. Uber, Facebook, Amazon, and Google all have growing offices there. A metro area that a decade ago could scarcely hold on to its young people is now attracting entrepreneurs, artists, and geeks from around the world. In the past few years, surveys have touted the city’s surprising virtues: Zagat hailed it as the country’s best restaurant scene, and the Economist Intelligence Unit rated it the most livable metropolis in the continental U.S.

But while tech typically gets much of the credit for Pittsburgh’s turnaround, what’s been lost in this rust-to-riches story is the major role that arts and culture have played in the city’s transformation. Just look downtown. Not too long ago, Pittsburgh’s urban core was a sorry spectacle of decline. The handsome skyline—buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, a glorious neo-Romanesque courthouse by H. H. Richardson—overlooked a veritable ghost town. Commercial life was made up of porn shops and shuttered storefronts. In what is commonly referred to as the golden triangle, a slice of premium real estate framed dramatically by the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, sat a collection of landmark playhouses and movie palaces that time and neglect had turned into ruins.

Starting in the mid-1980s, when Pittsburgh was at its postindustrial nadir, a team of wealthy city leaders, led by philanthropist and ketchup magnate Jack Heinz, banded together to transform this skid row of theaters into a cultural mecca. Eventually organized as the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, the group had a vision of urban renewal through the arts. It bought and restored the buildings, creating an arts hub around the city’s crown jewel, Heinz Hall, and also converted the surrounding structures into galleries and small performance spaces. With the help of some of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest foundations—the Heinz Endowments and the Richard King Mellon Foundation among them—it poured over $500 million into a 14-block area, financed public works by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, and created permanent homes for the Pittsburgh Opera, the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. Slowly, this revitalization led to a downtown renaissance. “Beginning six years ago, growth spiked,” said Rona Nesbit, executive vice president of the Cultural Trust. “With 2 million people coming to the cultural district each year, restaurants and housing began to spring up.” Today, the district, brimming with swish boutique hotels and high-end restaurants, generates $303 million in economic activity annually. The organization’s theaters, meanwhile, are lit nearly 300 nights a year.

Emiliano Granado "Ziggy Stardust," by Mark Handforth, part of the Carnegie Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

The Cultural Trust’s rescue of downtown is an example of the kind of top-down cultural philanthropy that has a long local history. In the city’s industrial glory days, homegrown plutocrats like Andrew W. Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Carnegie fought to outspend one another as they erected ornate temples to culture to both enlighten the masses and burnish their own reputations. Carnegie not only bankrolled the city’s library system (which eventually sprouted iterations all around the world) but also created an art museum with a radical mandate: to collect “the Old Masters of tomorrow.”

Thus the Carnegie Museum of Art was founded in 1895 and became one of the first American institutions to acquire paintings by James McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, and Edward Hopper. Just a year after opening, the museum presented the inaugural Carnegie International, now the world’s second-oldest international survey of contemporary art, after the Venice Biennale. Held every five years, the Carnegie International will return in the fall of 2018. “Pittsburgh has changed so much in just the two years since I’ve moved back,” said Ingrid Schaffner, the event’s curator, who was born in Pittsburgh and returned to the city following a 15-year stint in Philadelphia, joining the ranks of so-called boomerangs. “Every day I’m knocked out by something new: an artist-led dinner series or a fabulous little printshop. All these independent initiatives are building a real community.”