NFL Draft at Pittsburgh a Signal of Renewal for Steel City

PITTSBURGH — Despite having moved away for nearly 20 years, when you’ve called Pittsburgh home for any length of time, two things often happen: You want to come back to raise your children, and you want to be part of something, big or small, that makes it better.The chief executive of PNC Financial Services, Bill Demchak wanted to do both, and he had the ability to make a big impact. Since returning in 2002 to the city where he grew up, he has been doing exactly that, quietly and consistently.It was the fall of 2022, and the city was struggling to recover from Covid-19, poor governance, a growing homeless encampment that continued to expand despite efforts to house its residents, and a police force still reeling from the effects of the defund-the-police movement. Together, those forces fueled an exodus of people, businesses and hope from the city’s downtown core.The county executive then, Rich Fitzgerald, said the Pittsburgh Steelers’ president, Art Rooney II, approached him about organizing a meeting around an ambitious idea: bringing the NFL draft to Pittsburgh. The challenge was that it would require civic leaders to raise the money needed to make a serious pitch to the NFL and improve Pittsburgh’s chances of landing the event.Mr. Fitzgerald brought into his office the Steelers’ executive vice president, David Morehouse, representatives from Visit Pittsburgh, and the Steelers’ vice president of business development, Dan Rooney III. They all knew that pulling it off would require millions of dollars and more than a year of planning just to persuade the NFL to bring the draft to Pittsburgh. Yet the payoff would be worth it: four days in the international spotlight and a chance to remind outsiders that Pittsburgh is not just a place to visit but a place to live, call home, and even start a business.The first person to open his checkbook did not hesitate. Mr. Demchak was all in, pledging $5 million. Business circles still tell the story that Mr. Rooney was so surprised by how quickly he agreed that he joked he should have asked for $10 million. Mr. Fitzgerald said Pittsburgh is very fortunate to have Mr. Demchak, along with his predecessor Jim Rohr, at the helm in the region.“They have always been civic-minded and always step up,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.Mr. Demchak was raised in suburban Pittsburgh, though his father’s work as a salesman moved the family around for several years before they finally settled there when he was in grade school. After college and a successful run at JPMorgan, he returned to Pittsburgh in 2002 to join PNC as chief financial officer.It wasn’t looking all that good when he first got here.“When I first came to the city in 2002, I was living in an apartment somewhere downtown, and I remember leaving work at 8:30 and thinking I wanted to grab a beer and a burger and watch the Pirates game,” Mr. Demchak said.He described a scene many Pittsburghers will remember well: There was nothing there.“It was absolutely empty, no restaurants, no nothing, and scary as hell,” Mr. Demchak said.By the time he was named chief executive 11 years later, the city had remade itself, thanks in part to leaders including him. It was the culmination of a long transformation that began in the late 1980s and was finally bearing fruit. Pittsburgh now had a new baseball park bearing PNC’s name, Heinz Field, a LEED-certified convention center along the Allegheny River, and a new NHL arena uptown. Its economy still carried its steel identity, but it had also grown into a financial center led by PNC, a hub for research and robotics anchored by Carnegie Mellon and Pitt, a center of healthcare power with Highmark and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and the beneficiary of an energy boom few had anticipated.The network of bike and hiking trails around the city, which can carry riders all the way to Washington, became part of Pittsburgh’s crown jewels. As businesses sprang up to match the renewed energy in the city’s core, urban living also became a real option in a way it never had been in earlier decades.It was all going well until it wasn’t. The Covid pandemic and the unrest that followed George Floyd’s death unraveled much of that progress. As employees stayed home, restaurants shuttered, and vagrancy, petty crime, the drug trade and homelessness all grew. Encampments began stretching for miles along trails that had once been beloved, and the city started to feel frightening again.Mr. Demchak was seeing the decline firsthand as he worked in the city every day, and he responded by stepping up. PNC Financial Services donated $10 million to help build a downtown homeless shelter, First Avenue, a commitment that helped spur additional support from Highmark Health, which gave $6.75 million, and UPMC, which contributed $1.75 million.“We went hard at this homeless situation and identified available beds and identified affordable housing and worked with the governor on Section 8 vouchers and cleared and got the homeless encampments cleared out,” Mr. Demchak said.The problem was, the city felt really empty, not at all that different than when he first arrived in 2002.“We went through this whole process of figuring out how to reimagine the downtown, so we worked with the Allegheny Conference on getting more residential buildings, more parks, more connectivity to the rivers, and redoing Market Square,” he said.Yet they also needed a way to showcase it, not just for residents but basically for the world, and the NFL draft was just the kind of big stage he believed would do it.Mr. Demchak said the national spotlight will be on the city, and there is no denying that Pittsburgh is a beautiful postcard city from afar. Yet a strong showing from the city’s leading companies, including PNC, UPMC, Highmark, PPG, and U.S. Steel, will be essential to selling Pittsburgh’s future.“As an individual, I take certain pride in it with respect to our company,” Mr. Demchak said. “It’s about our employees. I can’t be in all the communities we operate, but Pittsburgh in particular, because it’s our hometown, it has to be a fun place for our employees to want to come do their job and live and raise their families.”PNC has deep roots in Pittsburgh, tracing its origins to 1845 and formally to 1852 with the founding of Pittsburgh Trust and Savings Company. In 1983, the merger that created PNC united Pittsburgh National Bank with Philadelphia’s Provident National. By the end of 2025, PNC Financial Services Group employed at least 55,000 people and operated about 2,200 branches, along with a large ATM network across the country.“You want to have a certain amount of pride, not just where you work in terms of the company, but in the region you work and what’s happening in your region,” Mr. Demchak said.“The whole reason the city held together in the ’70s was because of the Steelers. They lifted the city up while the city was economically imploding,” he said of the era when half of the city’s population left for jobs elsewhere when manufacturing collapsed.Back then, the Steelers were the only thing in Pittsburgh that seemed to be winning.“When Art (Rooney) called and said ‘Hey, we need your help on this,’ we were in immediately,” he said. “We put up $5 million to underwrite the corporate commitment to the thing.”What made it even more meaningful to Mr. Demchak was that the draft dates lined up with so much of the work underway to remake downtown, from Market Square and Arts Alive to the renovation of the Point.“It’s going to be pretty cool,” he said, clearly excited for the kickoff, when not only the draft but also many of the city’s cultural landmarks will finally be finished and ready to shine. “It’s a ton of work.”Mr. Demchak clearly has a deep love for the city. He spoke about how eager he is for the country to see Pittsburgh at its best, from his own company’s headquarters at the Tower at PNC Plaza to Highmark, the U.S. Steel Tower, and the striking Neo-Gothic postmodern design of PPG Place.“We have some very distinct architecture that people will see that work for PNC or work for whoever, and when those moments happen, they’re like, ‘Hey, I work there. That’s my company. That’s my city,'” he said.The 2026 NFL draft in Pittsburgh, scheduled for April 23 to April 25, is expected to draw between 500,000 and 800,000 attendees over the three days, with daily crowds of roughly 100,000 to 200,000. Organizers believe the numbers will surpass attendance at recent drafts at Detroit and Green Bay, Wisconsin.Pittsburgh is a football town, and the name of its NFL team, the Steelers, is a tribute to the people of the steel industry who built the roads, bridges, buildings and highways that made this country.The event will show the world just how much the city has diversified economically. Steel remains an important industry, but robotics, energy, AI, finance and health care are now also major drivers of growth and job creation.People will also see the cultural institutions that make Pittsburgh so distinctive. From the Warhol Museum to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to the Roberto Clemente Museum, the city offers something for everyone, along with a first-rate symphony, ballet, opera and theater district. Mr. Demchak said that is why he immediately said yes. The city is ready to shine, he argued, and now it is time to show that to everyone else, and to ourselves as well.Creators.com

NFL Draft at Pittsburgh a Signal of Renewal for Steel City

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