Featured Place to Live

Arguably the city’s most interesting neighborhood – and undoubtedly its most densely populated and complex – Oakland is also the state’s third-largest employment center, after downtown Philadelphia and Pittsburgh’s Downtown. Home to Carnegie Mellon University and the ever-expanding University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, as well as smaller Carlow University, Oakland is the city’s dominant academic and medical center. With the Carnegie Library’s main branch -- “Free To the People” -- as well as the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, the neighborhood’s cultural center of gravity is almost inescapable. North Oakland has great prewar apartment buildings and new developments, but it’s South Oakland’s deep nooks and crannies that fascinate. Rich in recent and past immigrants, as well as so many Pittsburghers’ coming-of-age-stories, South Oakland has incubated both football great Dan Marino and pop artist Andy Warhol -- plus local band We’re Wolves, who have taken the title of their current song from a sign in a neighborhood park: “Welcome to the Childhood Home of Andy Warhol and Dan Marino.”