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Pittsburgh
The Steel City, where three rivers meet
Pittsburgh stands at one of the most strategic river junctions in the country, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio at a sharp point of land. Whoever held this confluence controlled the gateway to the Ohio Valley and the interior, which is why the French and British fought over it in the 1750s. The rivers, paired with the coalfields of the surrounding Appalachian hills, later made Pittsburgh the steel capital of the world.
The terrain is steep and folded — a city of hills, river valleys, and hundreds of bridges, more than almost any city on Earth, knitting together neighborhoods divided by water and ridge. The three rivers carried coal, ore, and finished steel, and though the mills have largely gone, the rivers and hills still define a city that has remade itself around medicine, education, and technology.