I can’t quite remember the first time I heard about the Pittsburgh steps, but I’m 80% sure that it happened during an afternoon at the Boston Public Library in 2018, when I was doing research for my first hiking guidebook. As I pulled tattered paperbacks off the shelf, leafing through them in a somewhat urgent manner (I had to document 76 New England hikes in less than six months), I noticed an especially weathered spine whose title caught my name. Pittsburgh Steps: The Story of the City’s Public Stairways. Why was this book by Bob Regan in the hiking section, flanked by books about mountains and forests? And why were Pittsburgh’s staircases so noteworthy?
Well, for a start, there are a lot of them.