About Pittsburgh
Lots of Hills
The landscape of Pittsburgh was deeply carved into the rich Western Pennsylvania soil by the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers that run through it. These two rivers come together at Pittsburgh’s iconic Point Park and form the larger Ohio river. Together, these three waterways have created a landscape for Pittsburgh that has more hills and steeper hills than any other city in the country. In fact, Canton Avenue here in Pittsburgh is the steepest street in the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue
Walkable City
Pittsburgh was designed before the days when every family owned a car. One of the reasons that Pittsburgh is such livable city, is that it was built so that residents could walk everywhere they needed to go. At that time workers lived in the hills and walked down the stairs to the factories in the valleys. Now the factories are gone, but the hills and many of the staircases that climb them are still here.
Lots of Stairs
Pittsburgh has over 700 sets of steps, including 44,000 individual stair treads, and over 100 major stairways having more than 100 individual steps each:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steps_of_Pittsburgh
You can visit a map of Pittsburgh stairs here:
http://www.communitywalk.com/pittsburgh/pa/pittsburgh_stairs/map/444504
An annotated and more current map of the Pittsburgh stairs can be found here:
http://goo.gl/maps/Eqxkw
This list is not comprehensive but has lots of nice photos:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~rochballparks2/towns/pgh_steps.htm
