In Pittsburgh, where I worked for two months in 1986, I breathed clean air.
The steel mills along the rivers leading into town were mottled with rust. The Steelers still played in Three Rivers Stadium in those days, but it was the glass towers of PPG Plaza — originally the headquarters of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company — that symbolised the city’s future: clean, energy-efficient, and sparkling in the sunlight.
All of this was a far cry from the 1940s, when sunlight rarely penetrated the dome of smog over Pittsburgh, so much so that the streetlights stayed on during the day

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