Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
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connected by “ample streets” to separate “districts for retail and wholesale trade, manufacture and commerce.” This modernist framework designed for the automobile was also the defining characteristic of New York engineering czar Robert Moses’s 1939 Arterial Plan for Pittsburgh. Moses’s proposal, funded by Howard Heinz, Ernest Weir, R. K. Mellon, and the region’s other elite planning enthusiasts, went so far as to advocate scrapping the city’s iconic trolleys in favor of buses and urged that “traffic science—not emotion or aesthetics should govern improvement decisions.” Taken together the two reports formed the guiding framework for the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association (PRPA), a group headed by financier Mellon that subsequently served as the planning arm of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.12
The shock of the Great Depression and concerns about the postwar transition to a peacetime economy forced some among the conservative economic elite to rethink their opposition to direct government involvement in urban redevelopment. On the state level, the Pennsylvania legislature followed New York and Massachusetts by creating a Post-War Planning Commission in 1943 to coordinate the transition from war to peacetime among the various state departments. That May, PRPA director Wallace K. Richards and Robert E. Doherty, president of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, sponsored a “Citizens Conference on the Postwar Situation for Allegheny County” aimed at fostering a successful transition to a peacetime economy and “the resuscitation of a devitalized and deteriorating metropolitan area” through comprehensive, coordinated planning. Soon renamed the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, the group received the backing of Mellon, who served as Pittsburgh’s spokesperson on the state commission. In December 1945, Mellon’s support in turn enabled the Allegheny Conference to secure recognition as the primary voice of the private sector in public policy formulation for southwestern Pennsylvania.13
Earlier business-sponsored civic organizations in the Steel Valley had a narrow view of the role of government, but the industrialists and financiers at the helm of the Allegheny Conference shifted to a limited endorsement of public sector intervention. This position reflected a growing acceptance among business groups nationally of government’s role in areas traditionally viewed as the private domain. In St. Louis, for example, a new generation of corporate executives joined urban politicians, civic organizations, and construction unions in a program to stem industrial flight from the city through expanded use of eminent domain to clear “blighted areas,” implementation of smoke control legislation, and increased public works spending on highways and physical infrastructure. Pittsburgh attorney Arthur Van Buskirk, who served as deputy administrator of the Lend Lease program during World War II, was typical of this new generation of civic-minded business leaders. “A Republican, he was nonetheless in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania, a liberal,” recalled Leland Hazard, an attorney and a fellow member of the Allegheny Conference’s executive committee. Buskirk “could live with the New Deal when others in his era spent their time in futile fulmination.”14
The success of the Pittsburgh Renaissance was due to the nature of the city’s economic and political structure, a strong partnership between business elites and municipal officials, and the ability to present the group’s program as serving the public interest. By the end of the 1940s, the Conference’s executive committee included the presidents and chief executive officers of the region’s major commercial, financial, and manufacturing interests. Members reached decisions by consensus, with the result that policies, when decided upon, had the backing of the bulk of the business community. Between 1943 and 1947, the group developed a program, endorsed by the region’s largest corporations that focused mainly on rebuilding and stimulating investment in downtown Pittsburgh. Public officials agreed with this approach, believing that the corporate offices and other business in the “Golden Triangle” furnished a tax base that supported the remainder of the city and anchored the region’s manufacturing interests. Before urban infrastructure redevelopment of any kind could take place, however, both the Lawrence administration and the leaders of the Allegheny Conference had to face the environmental consequences of industrialization in a city with a dismal national reputation and little record of successful coordinated action. Indeed, when noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright surveyed Pittsburgh in 1935 while at work on Edgar Kaufmann’s iconic Fallingwater, he declared caustically “This is a disappearing city; it would be cheaper to abandon it.” In short, as Lawrence later put it, “the city’s rescue was a close thing.”15
Smoke and Water
The new public-private partnership, symbolized by the pragmatic relationship between R. K. Mellon and David Lawrence, united a strong political base behind many of the environmental initiatives first proposed decades earlier. As early as 1907, Pittsburgh’s Chamber of Commerce had appointed a Flood Commission that urged “the expenditure of no less than $20,000,000 in the construction of [storage] reservoirs in as near a future as possible,” only to face thirty years of disappointment. Five years later, another report found that the smoke problem was “the greatest single obstacle to progress.” But it was not until 1941 that the city passed a meaningful abatement law, only to have it put in abeyance by the onset of World War II. Clearing the skies and damming the rivers became powerful markers of the region’s commitment to postwar revitalization and important tools for mobilizing residents behind subsequent public policy decisions. Without addressing these issues, Lawrence explained, “it was clear that the economic revival of the city could not be accomplished.”16
It has become a cliché that the dominant interpretation of smoke in industrial America was, as James Parton put it, “a blessing” that indicated economic vitality. However, for a brief period in the late nineteenth century, natural gas overtook bituminous coal as Pittsburgh’s main fuel source and many residents bemoaned the return of smoky skies when the local gas supply ran out in the early 1890s. Over time, skilled workers voiced republican demands for smoke reduction as a benefit of their position, while some professionals, retail merchants, and other property owners complained of the negative effects of smoke on property values and urban consumer culture. In the wake of the landmark 1912 Pittsburgh Survey, reform-minded businessmen and women’s club members often accepted the need for environmental cleanup even as they reacted defensively against working-class demands for better hours, wages, and conditions by focusing on the effects of smoke on the health of women and children.17
Even by the 1890s, the city of Pittsburgh began to specialize in corporate administration, financial services, higher education, and other economic sectors that, while intimately related to heavy industry, provided an economic foundation separate from the production process itself. Though the elite Mellon family invested early in Frick’s coke empire and controlled the Pittsburgh Coal Company, for example, they also oversaw oil, aluminum, and banking interests that extended far beyond the Steel Valley. This partial detachment from the region’s iron and steel industries, coupled with the family’s investments in downtown real estate, meant that the Mellons had a financial stake in pursuing smoke abatement. As a consequence, the family was among the region’s most important advocates for smoke control through their sponsorship of the University of Pittsburgh Mellon Institute Smoke Investigation (MISI) beginning in 1911. In the twenties and thirties smoke actually became somewhat less of a concern in Pittsburgh, owing in part to the industrial contraction of the Great Depression, with relative gains compared to St. Louis and Cincinnati. But the pollution problem roared back with the buildup to World War II, and in 1941, the year smoke control legislation finally passed, Pittsburgh received only one-third as much sunshine as nearby areas and had the highest rate of pneumonia of any city in the nation.18
Much of the smoke problem in the city itself came not from industry but from domestic sources, and so the major problem confronting the postwar public-private partnership was how to force changes in individual fuel use behavior in the name of the greater public good. Despite the support of Mellon and the Allegheny Conference, Lawrence thus took a major political risk when he agreed to support an ordinance requiring the substitution of “smokeless” coal and furnaces for domestic use beginning in October 1947 due to the potential hardships it imposed on low-income families. The implementation of smoke control regulations set the model for the city’s future public-private partnerships, with an emphasis on volunteerism and cooperation, and arrests “kept to a minimum.” Despite these measures, Lawrence recalled a dramatic