13.2: Bill Tolan: “In Desperate 1983, There Was Nowhere for Pittsburgh’s Economy to Go but Up: A Tide of Change” (2012)

Pittsburgh was similar to many other northeastern and midwestern industrial cities in the 1950s through the 1980s. Communities that once were part of America’s manufacturing heartland became known as the nation’s “Rust Belt.” These manufacturing centers boomed during World War II when demand for their products was high, but in the post-war period the economic climate began to change. This document is an article that was published in 2012 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about a story published thirty years prior. In your notes, make a timeline of at least the three dates (1982, 2012, and now) to put this into better historical context. Always annotate your timelines with important events that happened during that time. As the document reveals, many cities were hard hit and were generally unprepared to deal with those changes and their consequences.