I stumbled across this great description of Pittsburgh in Richard Parker’s review of new biographies on Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon in the New York Times Book review:
“… the violent, exploitative and dankly polluted world of coal-and-steel Pittsburgh, the Silicon Valley of its day.”
Never thought of it that way, but Pittsburgh was in many ways the cutting edge of the Industrial Age in much the same way Silicon Valley has blazed the path into the technical age.