Pittsburgh is known as the city of bridges, but it is also a city of steps. With Pittsburgh’s hilly topography, public staircases are omnipresent throughout the city’s neighborhoods — and one book is looking at this Pittsburgh fixture from a fresh perspective.
Published last July, “City Steps of Pittsburgh: A History & Guide” tells the history of Pittsburgh’s city staircases and includes a walking tour of the steps. On Jan. 18, the book’s authors held a talk at the South Wing Reading Room, and attendees packed the room to learn about the 739 staircases that lace the city’s hillsides.
Matthew Jacob, who works for Pittsburgh Water, co-authored the book with Charles Succop, an archivist for the City of Pittsburgh, and Laura Zurowski, a technical writer for Pitt’s School of Pharmacy.
One often-reproduced image from the peak of steelmaking shows workers descending a staircase to a mill that sat alongside the Monongahela River. Succop said steps became an icon of the city’s workers beginning in the 19th century.
“You would go to the mill by walking up and down the steps,” Succop said. “Then you would go home and walk all the way back down for your next 12-hour shift.”
Succop said workers living on the slopes often used staircases to reach the Jones and Laughlin steel mill, which sat on the South Side Flats. Although the mills closed in 1984, the neighborhood remains walkable thanks to the staircases built decades ago. The South Side Slopes has the largest number of staircases in the city — 68 flights in all, according to Zurowski.
Jacob said Oakland has a few notable staircases, including at the intersection of Frazier and Romeo streets in South Oakland, where two staircases meet in the forest. Frazier and Romeo are two of the 344 city streets that are at least partly made up of flights of stairs, according to Zurowski.
“Early GPS systems sometimes recognized the steps as streets,” Zurowski said. “There would be times when the GPS would tell you to take a left onto a flight of stairs.”
The new book was inspired by Pitt industrial engineering professor Bob Regan’s pioneering research on the steps. First published in 2004, his book ”The Steps of Pittsburgh” inspired a new take on the subject. Succop said research in the City Archives gives their book a new perspective on the steps’ history.
“Thanks to the digitization of the municipal record, we discovered a lot of new information about the city steps,” Succop said. “Instead of flipping through 250,000 pages of the record by hand, we can now find information with a keyword search.”
Jacob said since most staircases were originally made of wood, they deteriorated quickly over time, and people stole planks when in need of lumber during World War II, leaving the stairs more prone to accidents.
“The majority of the concrete steps in the city were built after World War II to replace wooden steps,” Jacob said. “Most of the steps today you see around the city built in concrete are going on 80-plus years old.”
With a large, aging network of concrete staircases, Jacob said the city must make decisions on which flights to repair and which ones to remove. The tax base that funded the inner-city steps’ construction has severely diminished, yet the city is still challenged to maintain the same level of infrastructure.
“When the city steps were being built in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Pittsburgh had 700,000 people living in its 90 neighborhoods,” Zurowski said. “Today we have a little under 300,000 people living in those same neighborhoods.”
While some staircases have fallen into disrepair, others have been refurbished or replaced. Jacob cited Copperfield Avenue in Carrick and the Joncaire Street steps behind the Frick Fine Arts Building as recent success stories.
“As a result of the Infrastructure Act and American Rescue Plan, the city came into a lot of federal funding for infrastructure that was not expected,” Jacob said. “Some of that money was used to repair certain staircases.”
Other staircases were recently refurbished with grants from local nonprofits — like the mosaic steps on the South Side Slopes.
While Rising Main in Fineview is the city’s longest existing staircase, there was once a flight even longer than it called the Indian Trail Steps, which ascended Mount Washington with a 400-foot difference in elevation.
Succop estimated that it took more than 1000 steps to get to the top, but the staircase was removed in the 1930s with the construction of the Duquesne and Monongahela inclines. Jacob said the extensive staircase remains a local legend.
“Urban legend has it that the inclines used to pay people to haunt the steps so people would decide to take the incline,” Jacob said.
In a city of more than 700 staircases, the Indian Trail Steps still loom large as the longest set of steps Pittsburgh has ever known. However, while the 1000-step staircase provided a full workout after a day at work, Succop said some still considered the physical effort worth it to avoid the incline fare.
“This was a free mode of transportation, just short of rock climbing all the way down,” Succop said.