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Bob O’Connor has been pretty lucky. Downtown development has gained serious momentum, and now the Steeler’s victory threw the city into the national spotlight. Today’s victory rally, however has brought to light the mistakes of the past and, through poor planning has thrust the troubles of our downtown (namely the Fifth-Forbes corridor) into the national spotlight.

Instead of choosing a route that would lead the Steelers through a revitalized areas that could really show off the city, the organizers lead the thousand of fans and countless tv cameras along Fifth Avenue, past real estate signs and vacant, boarded storefronts. Today we saw the best of the city and the worst of downtown.

Why couldn’t the route have gone from the Civic Area past Mellon Park, to Fort Duquesne Boulevard or perhaps Penn Avenue? Unfortunately today’s parade likely served to reinforce an incomplete and negative image of downtown Pittsburgh to television viewers. If I were watching from another city the downtown I saw today probably couldn’t be distinguished from one in the late 70s. In fact, there are even seeminly fewer stores today.

On the good side, the thousands (I’ve heard numbers as high as 200,000) folks who went downtown for the day undoubtedly saw real changes in downtown Pittsburgh for the first time. Unfortunately television viewers couldn’t get that sense. To them it’s the same old steel town, and when the crowd goes home to Cranberry, the same old forlorn downtown Pittsburgh.

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