When out-of-town football fans come to Pittsburgh for the 2026 NFL Draft this week, they’ll find a patchwork of 90 unique neighborhoods, each with its own history, character and atmosphere.
The draft itself will be held in the North Shore, a riverfront area best known for the stadiums where the Steelers and Pirates play, and Downtown, seeking to reinvent itself as demand for office space has dwindled since the covid-19 pandemic.
A plethora of other neighborhoods branch off in all directions.
There’s the South Side, best known for its boozy nightlife scene. Mt. Washington offers stunning views of the cityscape. The Strip District is home to an array of local restaurants and markets. Developments tied to the city’s strong focus on education, medicine and technology are breathing new life into areas like East Liberty and Hazelwood.
Some neighborhoods — like Oakland, with its hospitals and universities, or Lawrenceville, with its bustling business district — are well known by nearly everyone in the region. Others get less attention but offer their own hidden gems. Allentown boasts unique local businesses. A ride through Manchester reveals a gorgeous historic district.
Many Pittsburghers take great pride in their neighborhoods.
They come in all shapes and sizes. Some, like Squirrel Hill, are fairly large. Others, like Esplen, are tiny slivers of land.
It all started in the neighborhood now formally known as the Central Business District, though most refer to it simply as Downtown. That’s where the historic Fort Pitt — which dates to the 1750s — was the initial heartbeat of what is now Pittsburgh. People began to spread from there, though they often clung to the rivers at first.
There are several factors that determine how Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods — their names, their shapes, their defining characteristics — came to be.
One of the big factors is topography, said Leslie Przybylek, senior curator at the Sen. John Heinz History Center. In a city divided by three rivers and plenty of steep hills, some neighborhood boundaries follow natural lines drawn by the terrain.
“You had a bunch of topographic or geologic barriers that affect the way people settled here originally,” she said. “We all joke about how you don’t want to cross the bridges or the tunnels, but in some ways, those hills and those rivers did clearly shape how neighborhoods develop.”
When settlers first built communities in Pittsburgh, traversing the terrain was much trickier than it is today, Przybylek pointed out. They navigated without the city’s modern infrastructure, cars or public transit.
That forced many communities to become self-sustaining, with people seldom wandering to other surrounding neighborhoods. And that’s why so many neighborhoods to this day have their own main streets and business districts, where residents can meet all their daily needs without venturing beyond their neighborhood’s borders, observed James Hill, assistant chief of staff to Mayor Corey O’Connor.
“They all existed as their own self-contained little towns,” Hill said.
Some neighborhoods had once been independent municipalities that were later annexed into the city. In those instances, Hill said, they often retained their names, and their municipal boundaries became the lines delineating the neighborhood.
Once-separate municipalities that have been absorbed into the city are memorialized on the ceiling of Pittsburgh City Council Chambers.
The last major annexation, Hill said, saw the formerly independent municipality of Overbrook become a Pittsburgh neighborhood in the late 1930s.
Some neighborhoods trace their roots to specific ethnic or religious groups, Przybylek said. Others popped up around factories or job centers. Some neighborhoods were formed around synagogues or churches.
Take, for example, Polish Hill, where a large concentration of Polish immigrants created a community. The East Allegheny neighborhood on the North Side still maintains the nickname of Deutschtown because it once hosted a strong community of German immigrants.
Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods weren’t formalized into the official maps and names the city uses today until the 1970s, said Nick Hartley, manager of the city’s records management division.
That’s when the Department of City Planning — with the help of the nonprofit Pittsburgh Neighborhoods Alliance — made a concerted effort to determine how residents identified with neighborhoods, Hartley said.
They conducted surveys and community meetings, crafted a series of neighborhood atlases and ultimately published new maps with specific neighborhood borders.
How neighborhoods got their names often reveals interesting insights to a community, too, Hill said.
Some are obvious. Bluff is named after the geologic feature on which the neighborhood sits. West End got its name because it’s situated on the western end of the city.
Beechview, Hill explained, was named for the prevalence of beech trees once there. Oakland similarly derived its name from the oaks.
Other neighborhood names are nods to immigrants’ homelands. Manchester, for example, was named after the English city.
Pittsburgh’s Carrick neighborhood, Hill said, was named for a town in Ireland bearing the name. The name was selected through a contest.
The Perry North and South neighborhoods were named for Oliver Hazard Perry, who led the Lake Erie fleet to victory in the War of 1812. Capt. James Lawrence — who served in the War with Tripoli and the War of 1812 — would become the namesake for Lawrenceville.
Some neighborhoods that once existed have since vanished from Pittsburgh’s modern maps, said Przybylek.
Seldom Seen had once been a tiny Pittsburgh neighborhood, though it isn’t among the 90 that now make up the city. Its name does, however, live on through a greenway in Beechview.
“We talk about it as 90 neighborhoods. This idea of neighborhoods is such a constant for Pittsburgh,” Przybylek said. “But it’s a little more fluid than we think.”
Neighborhood boundaries on a map don’t always match what people colloquially call certain parts of town.
What most Pittsburghers refer to as the Hill District, Hill pointed out, actually is composed of neighborhoods like Crawford-Roberts, Middle Hill and Lower Hill.
Oakland on an official city map is split into North Oakland, South Oakland, West Oakland and Central Oakland. There’s no East Oakland.
Today, cars and modern infrastructure make it far easier to get from one neighborhood to the next. Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods are much more interconnected than they were when they first formed.
“Yet some of those neighborhoods remain really distinct,” Przybylek said.
She said that could be because some people still opt to live largely within the confines of specific parts of town.
It can also be chalked up, at least in part, to the strong sense of culture or community prevalent throughout many neighborhoods.
“We have a deep respect for our history and a deep pride for our city,” Hill said. “Those little nuggets are all part of a city’s character.”