Baby-Faced Mayor Takes Over an Aging Pittsburgh
By IAN URBINA
PITTSBURGH, Sept. 7 — At 26, many people haven’t even decided on a career. Luke Ravenstahl is already the mayor of Pittsburgh.
In the four short years since he left college, Mr. Ravenstahl has mastered the art of being at the right place at the right time, and last week he became the youngest mayor of any major city in the country, after the previous mayor, Bob O’Connor, died of a brain tumor.
But now comes the hard part. As he strives to be taken seriously and take charge of a city only recently back from the brink of bankruptcy, the baby-faced Mr. Ravenstahl said that even the smallest decisions felt weighty.
What to wear to the Steelers game? Stick with his standard blue jeans and football jersey or don a button-up polo and black slacks, setting a more serious tone at his first public appearance since Mr. O’Connor was buried?
“I guess I’m taking it one decision, one day, at a time,” Mr. Ravenstahl said Thursday before heading to the game, having chosen the awkward hybrid of football jersey tucked neatly into pressed suit pants.
Mr. Ravenstahl is a young man taking over an old steel town that has lost all its mills, nearly half its population and much of its downtown commercial district in the last several decades. Having just ascended from being City Council president, he now faces difficult contract negotiations with city firefighters and has to draft a city budget with approval from two state oversight bodies that have been mandated.
Shy and business-minded, Mr. Ravenstahl, a Democrat who said he averaged 12 Diet Pepsis a day, also follows on the heels of one of the most popular and gregarious politicians in the city’s history.
“Ravenstahl is a perfect storm of ambition, political pedigree and luck, and it has taken him far,” said Morton Coleman, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh. “But it has also left him with a lot to prove.”
For Mr. Ravenstahl, whose résumé consists largely of playing football in college and working as an account manager for a courier service, the first challenge may be to loosen up.
“With our mayors, Tom Murphy was the guy who wouldn’t know what a tailgate party was if he got invited to one, O’Connor was the guy throwing the tailgate party, wearing the chef’s hat, and Ravenstahl is the guy nursing a beer in the corner and trying to decide whether it’s safe to double dip that chip,” said Sean Cannon, a political writer for Carbolic Smoke Ball, a satirical Web site and the city’s equivalent of The Onion.
Asked if he is nervous, Mr. Ravenstahl looked at his Steelers jersey before offering an impish grin.
“He’s a young guy too, you know,” Mr. Ravenstahl said, pointing to the number 7 and referring to Ben Roethlisberger, the 24-year-old Steelers star who last year became the youngest quarterback to win a Super Bowl ring. By his side, Mr. Ravenstahl’s press secretary — a white-haired man at least 30 years his elder — nodded quietly.
Mr. Ravenstahl, who got a $40,000 raise, to $94,157 a year, by going to mayor from councilman, has yet to develop an agenda of his own, but he is eager to strengthen the city’s economy.
“The rap on Allegheny County, where we are located, is that it’s the second-oldest county in the country,’’ he said. “But Pittsburgh has 50,000 college students, and our challenge is to figure out how to retain them and to increase downtown development.”
Mr. O’Connor was known for taking weekly strolls through different neighborhoods and chatting up residents about potholes and the city budget. His face is plastered on billboards everywhere that read “Let’s Redd Up Pittsburgh” — a campaign intended to straighten up (or, in Pittsburghese, “Readying up”) the city.
Mr. O’Connor’s brief tenure corresponded with a sense of renewed hope in this city of 325,000. Shortly after he took office in January, the Steelers won the Super Bowl for the first time since 1979. Then, in July, the city was the site of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, which attracted thousands of tourists.
“The biggest problem with Luke right now is all the uncertainty surrounding him,” said Doug Shields, who was elected the new City Council president on Tuesday. “He’d be a fool not to use O’Connor’s playbook. At the same time, he is going to need to establish himself as his own man.”
One of the biggest uncertainties is how long he will remain in office. The city’s lawyers have said that, according to the city charter, Mayor Ravenstahl’s term will not expire until November 2009.
Other lawyers, however, including the chairwoman of the city Democratic committee, have argued that Mr. Ravenstahl must face the electorate next year, and the matter is likely to be decided by the courts. Mr. Ravenstahl, who under the charter had the option to turn down the mayor’s office after Mr. O’Connor died, said he intended to run, regardless of when the election was held.
Fate has played a role more than once in Mr. Ravenstahl’s political rise.
Last December, after rival City Council factions deadlocked over who should be president, Mr. Ravenstahl emerged as the compromise candidate, becoming the city’s youngest council president ever. That put him in line to succeed Mr. O’Connor.
In 2003, Mr. Ravenstahl cashed in on his family’s political name (his grandfather was a state representative and his father is a widely known district judge) and toppled a seasoned incumbent.
Growing up on the city’s North Side in Observatory Hill, a neighborhood of firefighters and police officers, Mr. Ravenstahl attended one of the area’s most prestigious Roman Catholic high schools. He graduated in 2002 from Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pa., where he was a star kicker for the football team. After college, he married (his wife, Erin, is a beautician) and he worked for a courier service before running for a City Council seat.
“Luke is very mature and doesn’t make the same mistake twice,” said John Banaszak, a former Steelers defensive lineman who coached Mr. Ravenstahl in college.
Mr. Banaszak recounted a game early in Mr. Ravenstahl’s career when he was told to kick a squib kickoff toward the sideline in hope of keeping possession, but instead he kicked it down the middle. The opposing team recovered the ball and ran halfway up the field with it.
“I chewed him out, and he never disobeyed an instruction the rest of his career,” Mr. Banaszak said, adding, “I think he takes that same wisdom with him in politics in that he knows when he is getting good advice and he follows it.”
Jim Motznik, a councilman and an ally of Mr. Ravenstahl, said concerns about Mr. Ravenstahl’s age would dissipate once the city saw his work ethic.
“Luke’s age will come up,’’ Mr. Motznik said, “but you will see it’s just a temporary question. It came up with the presidency role, but those questions went away very quickly.”
Mayors elsewhere have been younger. Jeff Dunkel was 18 in 2001 when he was elected mayor of Mount Carbon, Pa., a borough of about 100 residents in Schuylkill County. Small towns in New York, North Dakota and elsewhere have also elected teenagers as mayors.
But, according to the United States Conference of Mayors, Tallahassee, Fla., is the only other city with a population over 100,000 that has had a mayor as young as Mr. Ravenstahl — Scott Maddox, who was 26 when he was elected in 1995. Detroit, Cleveland and Dearborn, Mich., have had mayors who were 31, the conference said.
Mayor Ravenstahl said he was still coming to terms with the challenge he faced.
“Last night at the wake I was very emotional,’’ he said, “and that’s when it hit me that this is real. I only then started to think that this was actually happening and I will be leading the city.”
At City Hall, the mood remained somber. On Friday city crews finally took Mr. O’Connor’s name off the double-glass doors to the mayor’s office and began painting on Mr. Ravenstahl’s — a move purposely delayed until the day after the funeral, even though Mr. Ravenstahl has officially been mayor for a week.
At the Third Avenue Deli, a sandwich shop frequented by City Hall regulars, the owner, Jimmy Cvetic, said he was withholding judgment on Mr. Ravenstahl.
“I call him Cool Hand Luke,” Mr. Cvetic said. “He’ll be all right, but he’s going to need a cool hand to get through this.”
Sean Hamill contributed reporting.
