At least anecdotally, there’s some evidence that that’s the case, if measured by the social attitudes associated with a younger population. Three of the five city council members elected in the fall were women. In all, four of the nine-member panel are now women, a high-water mark for female representation on the city’s legislature. And when the council organized for its new session, Bruce Kraus, its first openly gay member, was elected president, making him first in line to become mayor if a vacancy were to occur. This milestone of sorts was attended by relatively little comment and essentially no controversy. “When he was elected to council [in 2008], the headline was, ‘first openly gay council member elected.’ When he became president it was, ‘Kraus elected president,’” Peduto told me. “There’s been a shift in the culture, an acceptance … the city has shifted to a more progressive stance on social issues.”

Whether the social and economic changes drove or were driven by politics might be a chicken-or-the-egg question, but even most politicians credit the city’s new intellectual infrastructure for the fact that it has done relatively well in the years immediately before and since the financial crisis.

To be sure, the political establishment recognized and, at least at the margins, nurtured the vision of a high-tech economy in the wake of the steel industry’s devastation. At a time when earmarks were still a badge of political honor, figures such as the late Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. John Murtha, from nearby Johnstown, steered millions of federal dollars to the city’s various research coffers from their powerful perches on the Senate and House Appropriations committees. Former Mayor Tom Murphy points to his role in steering state pension funds to seed high-tech investments in the region. But, referring to a former Carnegie Mellon University president, Murphy said, “Dr. [Richard] Cyert was the one for me who was driving this conversation. He was the first person I heard who said the universities could be the economic drivers for the region.”

Murphy left office amid controversy over his financial stewardship. But while not all of his initiatives to remake the city panned out, he is credited with laying crucial groundwork for the urban amenities that have helped build the city’s newfound buzz. He attracted hundreds of millions in state dollars to build new ballparks, and he was a strong advocate of riverfront rehabilitation, including the creation of miles of bike trails that now line the three rivers. “If you look at the stuff we were doing, the riverfront trails, the ballparks, the whole focus, the urgency was: How do we create jobs, how do we create a great place?” Murphy told me. “How do we build a city [so] that people will say, ‘It’s not near the ocean, not warm, but it’s a great place’? At the time it wasn’t good politics; then it became good politics.”

“Fast forward to 2003,” Peduto says. “You have people like Richard Florida and others talking about this ‘creative class.’ The pioneers were there, [building] not only the economy but the diversity of the city itself. You see it across the board, you see it across the board in the non-profit community, in business, and it’s a much different city.”

The waning power of an old city machine was symbolized by the election of the late Mayor Pete Flaherty who, running as “Nobody’s boy,” triumphed over the Democratic establishment chosen candidate in the 1969 primary. While powerful individual figures, such as the late county Commissioner Tom Foerster, have wielded varying degrees of clout since then, the idea of a monolithic party machine has steadily faded into history.

If the old machine is gone, Murphy argues, the city’s longer-term economic heritage continues to hold sway beyond the old wealth that established the city’s universities, hospitals and foundations. Pittsburgh’s first “Renaissance,” an effort in the 1940s and ‘50s to cleanse the city’s air and water and spur redevelopment, had major successes and major failures. But the cooperative civic culture spurred by the post-World War II alliance between mayor (and later Pennsylvania governor) David L. Lawrence and industrialist Richard King Mellon endured. “We are in many ways spoiled,” Murphy says. “What we have that a lot of cities don’t have is a very successful public-private partnership. The Lawrence model is very much in our DNA.”

As he begins his term, Peduto faces issues that could fray that cooperative cord. One Pittsburgh mayor after another has tried in vain to extract more revenue from the non-profit institutions that are at the center of its turnaround. Ravenstahl, Peduto’s predecessor, was rebuffed on a proposal to tax college tuitions. Peduto inherited a lawsuit, first pursued by Ravenstahl, to challenge the non-profit status of UPMC, the region’s largest health care provider and a now-dominant jobs provider.

The city continues to operate under a form of state receivership that began as Murphy was leaving office. The enforced belt-tightening of that regime has bolstered the city’s immediate financial position—its operating budget is in the black and the city bond rating received a succession of upgrades through the Ravenstahl years—but it still faces the challenge of retiree health costs and unfunded pension liabilities of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Whether Peduto can manage to extract revenue from those “eds and meds” without battering the city’s relationship with them will be one of the main challenges of his administration. If Pittsburgh is ever to become an unqualified success—not just an uplifting reinvention story—he’ll have to find a way to make the city’s books look as good as its rivers.