New book ‘City Steps of Pittsburgh’ chronicles a hilly city’s hidden staircases

Scattered around Pittsburgh, countless steps stretch across the city’s slopes. Hundreds of staircases snake up and down the hills and ravines — many weathered and eroded, hidden amongst the trees, waiting to be discovered. Laura Zurowski, co-author of the new book “City Steps of Pittsburgh,” said these stairs tell the story of Pittsburgh in the past and present.

“The city steps are just another part of that infrastructure to move people around,” Zurowski said. “What the majority of the working class and immigrant class were doing is they were walking — they lived very close, within a mile of their place of employment. In some cases, it’s not terribly different from today.”

Published last July, “City Steps of Pittsburgh: A History & Guide” characterizes the steps as the city’s first system of mass transportation, chronicling their history since their origins in the 19th century. Zurowski, along with co-authors Matthew Jacob and Charles Succop, researched each of the 739 staircases throughout Pittsburgh’s dozens of neighborhoods.

Succop, a local historian who works for Pittsburgh’s city archives and runs the Instagram account @pghthenandnow, performed historical research for the book. He pulled from archival sources to estimate that Pittsburgh’s first set of steps ran along the Bluff in the 1870s, near what is now Duquesne University. As the city grew in population and annexed surrounding communities, generations of Pittsburghers built the staircases — first wooden, later concrete — to navigate the steep slopes of the city. Succop said the steps remain instrumental in traversing the city, long after cars dominated its streets.

“Even today, trying to park a car in South Side Slopes, it’s evident that the whole infrastructure, the whole road system, wasn’t necessarily built for cars,” Succop said. “The convenience of the steps remained, I would say through the 1900s, and even in some parts of Pittsburgh, it still remains.”

Bob Regan, an adjunct professor of industrial engineering at Pitt, wrote the foreword for “City Steps of Pittsburgh.” Regan is arguably Pittsburgh’s leading expert on the city’s staircases — he’s written two books documenting the vast, labyrinthine network. According to Regan, before he moved to Pittsburgh three decades ago, there was no comprehensive city-wide effort to count and map the steps.

“Within a few days of bicycling [around Pittsburgh] I saw the steps … no one seemed to know much about them. I had a friend working at the city, and she got me a list of the steps. They had about 60 to 100, but they knew there were a lot more, but they didn’t know where they all were,” Regan said. “I still remember biking across the Birmingham Bridge one morning and looking up and seeing street lights going straight up the sides of the hills, and going ‘that’s it, I’m going to take two months off and map the steps.’”

Regan biked through every street in Pittsburgh, meticulously measuring each set of steps he found and compiling his records into a geographic database encompassing over 700 staircases — hundreds more than the city’s initial estimate. He published his findings in his 2004 book “The Steps of Pittsburgh: Portrait of a City,” and city officials still use his map to this day. 

Jacob was one of these officials — he was working for Pittsburgh’s Department of Public Works when he visited all the steps in Regan’s database and his fascination with the city steps began. Today, he runs the Instagram account @pghsteps and lent his photography prowess to the “City Steps of Pittsburgh.” He said seeing staircases in unexpected places, seemingly serving no present purpose, made him question how the city itself changed around them.

“It gets your mind thinking about, why are these here, and what was here before? Thinking of that, then you start going down a rabbit hole of investigation,” Jacob said. “The steps have intrigued me in that way, a way to explore old Pittsburgh and think about what existed before. But they’re also a great way to explore today.”

Zurowski, a technical writer at Pitt’s School of Pharmacy, stumbled upon Regan’s book after moving to Pittsburgh and began retracing his steps. She spent five years documenting the staircases one Polaroid picture at a time through her blog “Mis.Steps.” She said after essentially earning a “PhD in Pittsburgh’s city steps,” collaborating with Succop and Jacob to write “City Steps of Pittsburgh” helped her build on Regan’s foundational work.

“We wanted to have something that represents all sections of the city,” Zurowski said. “We had all kinds of new historical information that Charles [Succop] and his team were uncovering and digitizing and making available to the public.”

There are several sets of city steps around Pitt’s campus, including the steep stairs down to Panther Hollow behind Frick Fine Arts, the winding Diulus Way at the eastern extent of Dawson Street and the forested union of Frazier and Romeo Streets deep in South Oakland — one of Regan’s personal favorites. He said the co-authors of “City Steps of Pittsburgh” represent the next generation of Pittsburghers documenting and maintaining the staircases, and he hopes the book spurns interest in their upkeep.

“I really hope to God that we preserve them, keep them, repair them and keep them functional,” Regan said. “Right now, [the City] is pretty active and getting more active because there seems to be more and more interest in the steps … over the years, I’ve had hundreds of emails from people who have come to Pittsburgh to do nothing but walk the steps.”