Word: pittsburgh
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...could lift a locomotive with his finger, and his rival, the Slav Steve Mestrovic, who could twist 500-lb. bars of iron with his bare hands; they boiled their eggs in a Bessemer converter and combed their hair with traveling cranes. Margarac and Mestrovic belonged to legend, to Pittsburgh and to an industrial development that had its counterparts but never its equal anywhere in the world...
...Pittsburgh in the 20th Century was a noisy, grimy giant sprawled across a coal seam, gobbling up ore from Mesabi and spewing out molten steel. It squatted, black and ugly, on the hills between the Allegheny and the Monongahela, trailing mill towns up & down its river valleys. It dug the coal and fed it into fiery furnaces, and strewed the mountainous offal of its furnaces across its landscape...
...genteel 18th Century into which it was born, Pittsburgh was the essence of a frontier culture, which it has never quite managed to shake. In recent years it has been jeeringly called an esthetic abortion, a municipal hovel, a mining town on a vast scale. It gobbled up people the way it gobbled up iron ore-people with the names of Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Italy, Hungary, Yugoslavia. Some 1,000,000 of them lived and worked in the city's whole industrial complex, some 700,000 lived within the city's limits...
World of Frick & Mellon. In the 20th Century as in the 19th, Pittsburgh was ruled by money and steel, and by people bearing the names of Frick, Carnegie, Mellon. These were men who had made the city great-and who had left behind the ugly, lordly buildings in the business section, their monuments to Coal, Coke, Iron, Steel, Aluminum, who had left behind their Duquesne Club squatting beside Gimbel's department store, their mansions of monstrous Victorian architecture...
...hung with a weird jumble of oil paintings, whose cavernous halls housed Diplodocus carnegiei ("Dippy," the dinosaur) brought from a Wyoming fossil dump. Beside a ravine which belched forth the smoke of locomotives perched the Carnegie Institute. Soaring into the city's grey sky was the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning-42 stories of classrooms and offices piled one on top of another...