>>It tried being a financial city in the 80s, then a tech city in the 90s, all the while it was growing as a medical city. You make it sound as if these trends

>>It tried being a financial city in the 80s, then a tech city in the 90s, all the while it was growing as a medical city. You make it sound as if these trends were inauthentic. I think they were, in fact, organic outgrowths of the city's strengths. As long as Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh are there, there will always be a strength in tech and medicine. I was a bit too young to be much of an observer of the 80s as they happened, but finance was most likely a strength due to Pittsburgh's prior status as headquarters for a significant number of Fortune 500 companies and banks: PNC, Mellon Bank, Gulf Oil, US Steel, Alcoa, HJ Heinz, Westinghouse... At the tail end of the postwar industrial boom, there must have been a good deal of money in Pittsburgh, ready to create a financial hub.