From SuspireWiki
It’s odd to find a rare gem in the World of Darkness but it’s not impossible: Pittsburgh is one of these gems. The city streets are clean; the people are employed and well able to take care of themselves. Built from the bones of the old steel factories, the city now consists mostly of a white-collar heaven. The majority of jobs are based in healthcare, education, technology, robotics, fashion, and financial services.
Despite Pittsburgh’s current success there are still those who remember the decline during the 1970s after steel left and before technology took its place. While older generations have the Great Depression to speak of, citizens of Pittsburgh have the recession of ’72. It’s mostly due to those rough times that Pittsburgh is the city of today. The politicians started pouring money back into the city to develop and draw in companies. The bad neighborhoods were cleaned up and the unwanted were forced to the city’s myriad suburbs.
Now the Pittsburgh government continues to pump money into keeping the inner city developed, clean and welcoming to big businesses. Most of the surrounding suburbs and small towns are purposefully left out of the city’s purvey as a distancing tactic; the city of Pittsburgh doesn’t want it’s diamond to be marred by those they worked so hard to get rid of.
Kindred of Pittsburgh
In Kindred terms, Pittsburgh is a young city. Even throughout the steel boom in the latter half of the 19th century, there were only a handful of Kindred in the city. Almost all of them were Ventrue, of the line Castor and descended from the patriarch Ciahl O’Neill. In the early 1900s other Kindred started to drift into the city but were faced with the stranglehold the Castors had on the local economy. It wasn’t until the decline of steel in the 1950s that the Castors started losing influence.
With the loss of influence came the loss of the ability to keep other Kindred out, as the 50s turned to the 60s and the 70s, more and more Kindred came with the population growth. A coterie of five Carthians entered the city in the early 1970s and quickly integrated themselves into the local government. If asked, they’ll take full responsibility for the social reforms the city went through during that time period. It was this springboard they used to appoint their own Prince.
Nonetheless, the city stays small: gems of cities do not make good homes for Kindred. The occasional exsanguinations are looked at closer; corruption in local politicians is rallied against. While safe for mortals, the Kindred who do exist there are forced into a far deeper Masquerade than those in other cities. This causes many nomads who come hoping to score in the good economy to just keep moving to more friendly cities such as nearby Cleveland or Richmond.