Pittsburgh, "Steel City" ready for G20 Summit

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Pittsburgh city officials have been working overtime to promote the three-rivers town famously known as the "Steel City" for the G20 Summit. When it was first announced the Group of Twenty leading countries in the world would be meeting in Pittsburgh, the reaction was mixed.

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has being inundated with requests to explain why Pittsburgh was chosen to host this important international financial summit.

Luke Ravenstahl, Pittsburgh Mayor, said, "Right now those are unfamiliar with Pittsburgh, often times refer to it as an old town, a smokey town, a dirty town and what they'll see when they visit Pittsburgh this week is the fact that that's changed. We are now a green town, we are a clean town."

The White House said it picked Pennsylvania's second largest city to showcase its recovery from the collapsed center of the steel industry in the late 1970s... to a modern city. Unemployment in the city is lower than the national average. There's a thriving healthcare industry, and it boasts a number of green industries.

Stu Hoffmann, PNC Financial Services Chief Economist, said, "If you look at Pittsburgh today in 2009 and its industrial structure and its base if industry and compare it to say 1979 and obviously it is dramatically different."

If the economy poses some tough challenges at the conference, so does security.

Thousands of police were busy erecting security barriers along the streets around the convention center, the site of the gathering, on the Allegheny River. Most of the city's downtown was to be closed to traffic on Thursday and Friday, as were the city's three rivers.