Picture the site of Fort Pitt, the mightiest British fort in North America. After driving the French from Fort Duquesne in 1758, General John Forbes and his army built an enormous five-sided fortification here covering seventeen acres. It was named for William Pitt the Elder, Britain's Secretary of State and the architect of the strategy that won the French and Indian War.
The fort was never taken by an enemy. Its civilian population grew into Pittsburgh, formally incorporated as a borough in 1794. The original blockhouse of Fort Pitt still survives in Point State Park — the oldest structure west of the Allegheny Mountains, built in 1764 and the only remaining piece of the original fort.
Gateway Center, the office complex that replaced the riverfront industrial district in the 1950s, was one of the first urban renewal projects in postwar America, a joint public-private effort to transform the smoke-choked riverfront into a modern commercial district. For a century, Pittsburgh's air was so thick with mill smoke that streetlights burned at noon. The Pittsburgh Renaissance that began here became a national model for post-industrial urban transformation.