As a result of all these things the growth of the city has been uneven and erratic. Down on the narrow spit of flat-land at the junction of the two rivers that go to make the Ohio--a location exactly corresponding with Manhattan island below the City Hall and of even less area--is the business center of metropolitan Pittsburgh--wholesale and retail stores, banks, office buildings, railroad passenger terminals, hotels, theaters and the like. The same causes that made the skyscraper a necessity in New York have worked a like necessity in the city at the head of the Ohio. So it has come to pass that no one lives in Pittsburgh itself, unless under absolute compulsion. The suburbs present housing facilities for the better part of its folk--Sewickley and East Liberty vie for greatest favor with them and there are dozens of smaller communities that crowd close upon these two social successes. "We can never get a decent census figure," growls the Pittsburgh man, as he contemplates the size of these outlying boroughs that go to make the city strong in everything, save in that popular competitive feature of population. And that very reason made the merging of the old city of Allegheny a popular issue, indeed. The fact that Pittsburgh men live outside of Pittsburgh goes to give her the fourth largest suburban train service in the country. Only New York, Boston and Philadelphia surpass her in this wise. Even San Francisco has less. One hundred and fifty miles to the northwest is Cleveland, the sixth city in the country and outranking Pittsburgh in population. There is not a single distinctive suburban train run in or out of Cleveland. From one single terminal in Pittsburgh four hundred passenger trains arrive and depart in the course of a single business day and ninety-five percent of these are for the sole benefit of the commuter. So congested have even these railroad facilities become that the city cries bitterly all the while for a transit relief and experts have been at work months and years planning a subway to aid both the steam roads and the overworked trolley lines. At best it is no sinecure to operate the trolley cars of Pittsburgh. Combined with narrow streets, uptown and downtown, are the fearful slopes of the great hills. It takes big cars to climb those hills, let alone haul the trailers that are a feature of the Pittsburgh rush-hour traffic. When the New Yorker sees those cars for the first time he looks again. They are chariots of steel, hardly smaller than those that thread the subway in his daily trip to and from Harlem, and when they come toward him they make him think of locomotives. The heavy car gives a sense of strength and of hill capability. But the company staggers twice each day under a traffic that is far beyond its facilities--and it staggers under its political burdens.