Pittsburgh\'s Time of Transition

The sprawling H. J. Heinz headquarters in Pittsburgh was turned into apartment lofts for the city’s growing creative class long ago. The famous five-story neon ketchup bottle that stood outside the headquarters has been moved to the wall of the city’s history museum.

The corporate remnant of Heinz that is still left in Pittsburgh is passing into the faraway hands of its new acquirers, Warren E. Buffett’s Nebraska conglomerate and a Brazilian investment firm. The new owners promised to maintain the offices in Pittsburgh, but Heinz has been in the process of leaving the city for a long time.

It is a story that the city knows well by now, as it has transitioned from one of the great hubs of corporate and industrial America to a new economy based on small technology and medical companies with unfamiliar names. It is only somewhat of a coincidence that on the same day as Heinz’s announcement, US Airways, which grew out of the old Pittsburgh carrier Allegheny Airlines, said it was merging wih American Airlines, a Texas-based company.

Heinz is the latest in a long list of prominent American companies that have significantly reduced, or all together eliminated, their presence in the Pittsburgh area, erstwhile giants like U.S. Steel and Gulf Oil, which were among the nation’s 10 largest in 1955, according to David Hounshell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Now there are none among America’s 100 largest companies.

But in the course of reducing it reliance on industry and big corporations, Pittsburgh has become one of the more envied stories of urban revival in the Rust Belt. The proportion of Pittsburgh’s work force in manufacturing is now actually lower than the national average, according to Christopher Briem, a University of Pittsburgh professor. But so is its unemployment rate, at 7.2 percent.

Like other historic names of the city â€" like Carnegie, Mellon and Frick â€" the Heinz brand still courses through the civic blood of Pittsburgh’s heart. Its ! name is on the local concert hall and the Steeler’s football stadium. The city still identifies with its past image as a pug-nosed, beer-swilling metropolis, even as it markets itself as a hub for technology, medicine and finance.

“We have a really diversified economy now, and yet still maintain our industrial heritage,” said Yarone Zober, the chief of staff to Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl. “Whether they make another bottle of ketchup here â€" they are still Pittsburgh.”

Henry J. Heinz was firmly in the mold of the other entrepreneurs who built Pittsburgh’s manufacturing core. He turned peddling horseradish from his mother’s garden into a factory complex on the Allegheny River. He was one of many magnates to see the transportation advantages of Pittsburgh’s three rivers.

Andrew Carnegie used the rivers and the local coal deposits to build the colossus of the Pittsburgh economy, the company that would become known as U.S. Steel. The soot churned out by steel manufacturin turned Pittsburgh into the butt of many jokes, but the industry also served as the spine of the city’s corporate economy.

The Pittsburgh machine was stumbling in the 1970s as factories came under pressure from lower-wage workers around the world. The city began to empty out and local corporations looked elsewhere. Heinz moved its ketchup manufacturing operation to Ohio and scattered the rest of its United States production. For a while it looked like the city was doomed.

But over the last two decades it has undergone a recovery that many other struggling cities in Middle America look to emulate. It has been led by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, which have built research facilities where the old mills once were. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is now the largest employer in the region and has its acronym atop the old U.S. Steel skyscraper.

The tight-knit neighborhoods and cultural institutions paid for by the old magnates have also helped it attract ! outside f! irms. Google decided in 2009 to move a big work force into an old Nabisco plant in the city.

Heinz has its corporate staff of 1,200 based mostly in the skyscraper built by another local icon, Pittsburgh Plate Glass. But perhaps the biggest Heinz influence now comes from the foundations and endowments that were set up by the heirs to the Heinz fortunes.

“The headquarters are here, and those are real jobs,” said Mr. Briem. “But in terms of the mythos of Pittsburgh as a manufacturing city, Heinz is no longer here.”