(Pardon the digression) There's actually quite a few jazz musicians of the golden age, and since, who came from Pittsburgh. Perhaps the most significant is Billy Strayhorn. On saxophone, both Stanley Turrentine and Leo P (no really) were/are from Pittsburgh. Of course most musicians had to go on the road or to New York for a career.
The jazz music scene of Pittsburgh was probably really hurt by one of those "urban renewal" tragedies - in the late 1950s/early 1960s, the city took the area that was the business/cultural center of the major Black neighborhood (the Hill District) by eminent domain, and demolished it to build a sports and music arena.
I grew up in Pittsburgh (I haven't lived in it for a long time, although I am there right now) and in say the 1970s-80s, people would talk about that as an injustice done, but it was the kind of bad decision that can't be unwound.
Really interesting, Thanks. I visited there a few times in the 80's and I really liked the town. Almost went to Carnegie-Mellon...would have been quite happy had I, actually...
I have had a few Pittsburgh natives as friends in my life, liked the heck out of them all. Stanley I got to see twice, live, and both times he mentioned he was a Pittsburgh native, indeed.
That story you mention is a tragedy which repeated itself nationwide in the 60's-70's. Ostensibly under the guise of 'removal of urban blight'... but seen through the sociologist lens, hindsight 20/20...really these were racist public policies attempting to displace minority populations from swaths of real estate which developers could ca-ching on. No real "for the Public Good" about any of these.
Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"...an absolute watershed study/analysis about exactly what was going on there. I recommend it highly, most of what she wrote became in the 80's-today guiding principles of the Livable Cities Movement, and many principles adopted by even the most conventional Urban Planning college programs from the 80's-2000.
This happened in most major cities I can think of - NY, SF, LA, parts of CHI, Philly, Baltimore, some sections of Atlanta, St. Loo, and New Orleans, certainly parts of DC, and in the PacNW, etc. - and even more sadly done during the period of Architectural Modernism, so what replaced those vibrant neighborhoods were often very sterile and lifeless urban landscapes which were antithetical to creating community (and oftentimes ended up being significantly more dangerous areas than what they claimed to be a Rx for; certainly far more lifeless as far as human vitality goes).
The most glaring examples I know of, personally, having lived in both places for decades, would be the Fillmore District in SF, and as a jarring visual example apropos to mentioning on a Sax Forum - look at before-and-after pics of the famous 'boulevard of Jazz" 52nd St in NYC (although a LOT of neighborhoods in NYC were wiped out in similar fashion - this one fell swoop literally took out most of the most storied clubs in NY history, and although folks can argue with merit that NY is STILL THE place for Jazz, there has never since been a strip remotely approaching what that had been).