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.