Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
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as the basis for the Pittsburgh Renaissance. The twin problems of smoke and water had long been concerns of the civic elites that would form the nucleus of the Allegheny Conference. It was only after the Great Depression and World War II that a broad consensus emerged about the particular mechanisms by which these issues would be addressed. The construction of dams could only occur because of the expansion of government authority and the public-private partnerships that also made possible smoke control and the urban redevelopment of the Golden Triangle. Just as corporations needed the natural resources of the metropolitan hinterland in order to supply their massive mills, so too did the urbanized river valleys need to control natural processes originating far from their borders in order to strengthen the overall regional economy and provide the stability necessary for remaking the urban core. With regional plans in place, Pittsburgh’s public-private partnership turned to revitalizing the metropolitan core and remaking the city’s image as a grimy mill town.
The Golden Triangle
The heart of Pittsburgh’s postwar Renaissance was the redevelopment of the tongue of land at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, known as the Point, into a state park and collection of office towers dubbed the “Golden Triangle.” Originally the spot of French Fort Duquesne and British Fort Pitt, by the early twentieth century the area was a densely developed, bustling area crisscrossed by dozens of railroad tracks and packed with aging and crowded tenements. As early as 1911 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., called for revitalizing the “forgotten and disregarded” downtown riverfronts by establishing “a landscape area to be known as Point Park.” “It is here” Olmsted declared, “that all the most inspiring aspirations of the city are chiefly concentrated. Poetically, this spot, at the meeting of the rivers, stands for Pittsburgh.” However, the political wrangling that had hampered public works improvements throughout the first half of the twentieth century also prevented any movement on the redevelopment of the area through end of World War II. The Point, as historian Robert Alberts put it, “was blessed by the fortunate failures of those who had sought to develop it in decades past.” For better or worse, it was a blank slate on which the city’s public-private partnership was “free to attempt to design and build the most beautiful of city parks.”26
The razing and recreation of the Point, spearheaded by the Allegheny Conference and the Lawrence administration, required radical rethinking of an urban landscape that had developed over the course of nearly two hundred years. For decades, proposals to remake the area ran into conflicts between engineers concerned with the flow of vehicular traffic over two heavily traveled bridges, historians who wanted to reconstruct the original forts, and government officials mainly concerned with public buildings. The only solution that the planning team commissioned by the Allegheny Conference deemed appropriate was to move the bridges farther from the tip of the Point, a prohibitively expensive proposition that would also require the demolition of numerous commercial buildings and the relocation of miles of railroad track. Pennsylvania’s Republican governor agreed to the plan and in October 1945 Secretary of Forests and Waters James Kell wired Allegheny Conference chairman Robert Doherty asking the group to “take steps to carry forward Governor Martin’s program for Point Park development.” The project overcame its final political hurdle when, in a surprise announcement, Lawrence also declared his support shortly before winning election as mayor with a margin of only 14,000 votes.27
The development of the Golden Triangle prompted an institutionalization of the relationship between government and business that blurred the line between public and private interests. The state government, which controlled Point Park and the adjacent highway, shared responsibility with the Allegheny Conference and municipal officials, who partnered in creating a nearby cluster of high-rise corporate offices. Local boosters soon secured an agreement with the Equitable Life Insurance Company to construct the twenty-three-acre Gateway Center on land that would be cleared by eminent domain. This was made possible by the establishment of the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh with David Lawrence as chairman, the Allegheny Conference’s Arthur Van Buskirk as vice chairman, and Lawrence’s secretary John P. Robin as executive director. The official recognition afforded the Allegheny Conference by state and local governments provided a vehicle to harness private funds behind a unified urban and economic development program, while Lawrence ensured the necessary political clout to ensure cooperation from elected officials and local constituencies.28
The rise of the Golden Triangle in the 1950s went hand in hand with a concerted effort to sell the Pittsburgh Renaissance to a national and international audience as well as to the region’s residents. Work on the redevelopment program began in 1946, with some sixty major new structures built in the area by 1967. John J. Grove, the Allegheny Conference’s assistant director, worked to cultivate and maintain public support, a project he undertook in collaboration with members of the local press, such as Pittsburgh Press editor Edward T. Leech, who ensured generally favorable reporting of redevelopment projects. Conference and municipal officials traveled widely selling “The Pittsburgh Story,” as they called it, and hosted dozens of out of town delegations, with the result that the city gained a reputation as a model for urban redevelopment with a host of conscious imitators, including the Wheeling Area Conference on Community Development, the Greater Philadelphia Movement and St. Louis’s Civic Progress, Inc. Conference leaders were careful also to maintain elected officials as the face of their partnership with the city and state in order to defuse potential criticisms of using government authority in the service of private interests. Deflecting this opposition was an ever-present concern of the conference and municipal officials who faced a series of court challenges during the late 1940s and 1950s over the use of eminent domain to transfer property from one private landowner to another. “David Lawrence took his political life in his hands when he collaborated with the mostly Republican establishment in urban renewal,” explained Leland Hazard, a member of the Conference’s executive committee. “But he was clever. He always took the credit and R. K. Mellon, who disliked publicity, was happy for him to have it.”29
The razing and redevelopment of the Golden Triangle literally erased the previous century of industrialization in favor of the symbolism of a nostalgic frontier (in the form of a partly reconstructed Fort Pitt) and of the modern metropolis (the gleaming skyscrapers of Gateway Center). Reversing the imagery and infrastructure of the Smoky City was also the key to a planned Center for the Arts that would replace a hundred acres of “blighted” housing east of the Golden Triangle with a civic arena, auditorium, theaters, offices, and luxury apartments. Local officials originally considered building a new municipal arena in the upscale Highland Park area, but abandoned the project in the face of opposition from neighborhood residents, including R. K. Mellon’s uncle Robert King. Planners then turned their attention to the Hill District, a mixed-use neighborhood with a lively nightclub scene, high poverty rate, deteriorating buildings and a high percentage of the city’s black residents. Allegheny Conference officials and the Lawrence administration envisioned recreating the social and economic makeup of the area between the Golden Triangle and the university community of Oakland into a “cultural acropolis” that would dispel “the lingering conception of Pittsburgh as a ‘milltown’ that is bereft of any beauty and grace” and form “the true regional capital of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.” The centerpiece of the Lower Hill development was the colossal, $22 million Civic Arena that opened in 1961. Celebratory articles portrayed the structure, with its distinctive retractable roof, as a symbol of industry in the service of culture and an indicator of the city’s improved quality of life. “Can you spot the men on the scaffolding?” asked a 1960 ad for U.S. Steel. “They’re putting a stainless steel skin on the retractable roof covering Pittsburgh’s new civic area—one of the new engineering wonders of the world.”30
The construction of the Civic Arena highlights the symbolic metamorphosis of the Pittsburgh Renaissance as well as the compartmentalization of land use at the core of its regional vision. The passage of state and federal housing laws in 1949 paved the way for demolition of the Lower Hill by subsidizing more than two thirds of the cost of property purchase and clearance. “I think you will agree that no greater service to slum clearance could be provided anywhere in the United States than in the redevelopment of the lower Hill,” declared the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s John Robin in 1950. “Nor, could the State’s funds be used anywhere in the Commonwealth