The Industrialist — a landmark in Pittsburgh’s ‘mini-Manhattan’

Pittsburgh’s latest boutique hotel wants its guests to know all about the city’s heritage. There’s no messing about with a name to summon up cocktails at sunset, or that promises minimalist chic. No: if you call your hotel The Industrialist, you are reminding visitors that they are coming to a city once famed for its grime (“Hell with the lid taken off,” as the writer James Parton put it in 1868) and for the so-called robber barons who made fortunes from the steel mills that produced that grime.

On an unseasonably gorgeous March afternoon — the sky almost amethyst, the sun shining silver off the city’s three rivers, the temperature in the low twenties — The Industrialist seems to be in the perfect place: right in the middle of downtown, where the scores of cafés and restaurants have tables on the pavement. In Market Square, you might almost believe you were in Europe, were it not for the number of people wearing basketball tops — the city is spilling over for the March Madness college basketball tournament. 

While downtown Pittsburgh has no lack of hotels, they tend towards the big, impersonal chain box. The Industrialist, though, occupies the Arrott Building, an 18-storey skyscraper built in 1902 and now housing 124 rooms. Those early 20th-century towers filled such small sites that it is a feat of engineering to fit a hotel into them: here, the hallways of the residential floors are cramped, but the rooms are spacious, with rainforest showers and TVs you can cast streaming services to. 

The limited space means that reception is on the first floor, and the bar/restaurant on the ground floor, but its openness to the street ensures it doesn’t have the deathliness of so many hotel bars. On my first evening, there were basketball fans preparing to head off to the tournament, and local workers sitting at the bar, making their way through some alarmingly strong beers. The food is decent, the breakfasts are terrific value and there’s also a wealth of choice nearby. The Industrialist is part of Marriott’s Autograph chain of high-end hotels, so those who wish to can collect points as well.

The real attraction of The Industrialist, though, is where it is. Viewed from the other side of the Monongahela river, perhaps from one of the restaurants at the top of Mount Washington (you can get there via the funicular railways that run up the hillside), downtown is a mini-Manhattan: a jumble of skyscrapers on a peninsula framed by the Monongahela and Allegheny converging to form the Ohio. It’s spectacular enough on its own, but it has one significant advantage over Manhattan: it’s all walkable.

Fifty years ago, The Industrialist’s location would have been less of a draw — downtown then was half-derelict, its life squeezed out by a highway-building programme that cut it off from the city. It was saved by a regeneration scheme that means The Industrialist now sits in the heart of Pittsburgh’s “Cultural District”, surrounded by gloriously restored theatres, galleries and museums. Thanks in large part to the endowments left by its tycoons, this relatively small city — population 300,000, or 2.3mn in the metropolitan area — is remarkably blessed with culture.

Within a 15-minute walking radius of The Industrialist you can visit the Andy Warhol Museum, and sit in front of his panels of Elvis as a cowboy (and you might stumble across AJ Warhola Recycling a few minutes down the street — one of his nephews’ scrap businesses). You can reach the Heinz History Center, the Carnegie Science Center, and the baseball and football stadiums. You can walk or cycle the Three Rivers Heritage Trail along the shorelines — or even, should you be so inclined, cycle more than 300 miles to Washington DC without ever sharing the trail with a car. You can reach the Strip District, where old-fashioned delis and diners survive alongside street stalls and, inevitably, tat shops. The only time you may want to call an Uber is to visit the Carnegie Museum of Art — the distance is walkable but it’s an unappealing trek. 

Pittsburgh is still coloured by its past — when you call your football team the Steelers, you’re rather inviting people to associate your city with its smokestack heritage — but it has made peace with that past. Before I visited, a rock musician friend — who has played every state and every big city in the US — told me, “It’s one of the great American cities.” It’s true. After three days there, all I wanted to do was return. Sometimes New York feels a bit much, even for those who crave the fix of an American city; Pittsburgh, though, is perfect.

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