Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
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model of environmental protection that seemed to privilege industrial production over clean air and water.5 Universities and other nonprofit organizations in Pittsburgh demanded a larger voice in decision-making at the Allegheny Conference, suburban residents battled over highways and regional planning initiatives, and in the countryside conservationists and others faced off against coal companies and their supporters over the issue of surface mining. The catastrophic collapse of basic industry in the 1980s brought these tensions to a head, as residents, many of whom looked with hope to possibilities for re-industrialization, battled over how best to reclaim huge swaths of riverfront land opened up by mill closures for the first time in more than century. A reinvigorated public-private partnership in the central city set out to infill suburban-style commercial parks by clearing these “brownfield” sites, even as new highway construction allowed dilapidated river towns to reimagine themselves as burbs of the ’Burgh.6
While this expanded Renaissance coalition sought once again to impose a new order on an unruly landscape, proponents of riverfront revitalization, the conversion of abandoned rail corridors into bicycle trails, and the historic preservation of buildings began to articulate an alternative vision for economic development forged by adapting rather than erasing or ignoring the built and natural environment. From their perspective, community renewal would emerge from nurturing a sense of authenticity that could attract new residents even as it empowered neighborhoods left devastated by industrial decline. This is the Steel Valley as it entered the twenty-first century, with industrial, modernist, and what we might call postmodernist identities all jostling for control of a shared geography. At each stage of its development, Pittsburgh served as a model for other metropolitan regions—it was first among large industrial cities, first to face economic collapse, and, perhaps, first to emerge from its obsolescence into a vibrant new form. In the end, its history can help us better understand the tensions in our contemporary world as they have played out on the scale of everyday life.
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This is the story of an iconic American landscape told from a regional vantage midway between the local neighborhood and the national polity. The intensity, complexity, and endurance of Pittsburgh’s relationship with its hinterland requires an approach that synthesizes neighborhood-focused histories with a broader regional model that has largely been the province of geographers. Key studies of the nineteenth century emphasize that urban growth manifested not only as changes within the city or in the expansion of residential landscapes but also in far ranging linkages between metropolitan centers and rural peripheries. The rise of industrial cities could only happen as residents from throughout expanding economic regions used urban capital to exploit rural areas even as they centralized control of those natural and human resources into city centers. On the other hand, narratives of the twentieth century have focused largely on the decentralization of resources, population, and political power from the central cities to suburbs. Recent studies adopting this intellectual framework have carefully examined the transformation of urban and suburban communities, while paying close attention to the interaction between battles over the control of local spaces and federal policies that have reshaped class and racial boundaries since World War II. The push and pull of these broad centrifugal and centripetal forces provide the structural stage upon which the drama of the “metropolitan region” is acted—leave out either one and the story is necessarily incomplete.7
This book provides a new model for writing about metropolitan regions that combines the scope and analytical framework of existing regional studies with the emphasis on metropolitan political economy, social movements, and spatial inequality that has defined urban and suburban history since the 1980s. There are important practical and theoretical reasons why historians have avoided writing this type of community study set on a regional level. Few archival repositories include materials from throughout metropolitan regions, census divisions and state boundaries often do not line up with less tangible borders, and conceptions of regional communities vary widely over time and among local residents and institutions. Furthermore, the tensions between community bonds and the cultural, geographic, and political boundaries dividing an area require a flexible concept of the metropolitan region that is both historically and analytically contingent. In this story of metropolitan Pittsburgh, for example, I have chosen to emphasize the city’s smaller neighbors downriver, particularly the Steubenville, Ohio-Weirton, West Virginia and Wheeling, West Virginia-Martins Ferry, Ohio areas, not only because of their significant historical linkages but also in order to explore the evolving limits of those regional bonds imposed by state boundaries. Similarly, case studies of the Egypt Valley Mine and Ohiopyle State Park on the region’s southwestern and southeastern fringes, respectively, reveal a common set of decision-makers, institutions, networks of capital, and assumptions about the uses of rural space that inextricably link the sites to each other and to the drama of the central city.8
While broadly representative of manufacturing areas more generally, from the 1890s to the 1980s the Steel Valley featured two distinctive attributes—a high degree of specialization in basic manufacturing and the domination of a few very large, multidivisional industrial corporations—that together set the stage for its meteoric rise and subsequently hampered efforts at economic diversification. Paralleling work on other North American manufacturing areas, Pittsburgh scholars have charted the expansion of this industrial region in southwestern Pennsylvania. Beyond Rust pushes this framework both forward in time, as economic bonds began to loosen in the mid-twentieth century, and across state boundaries to incorporate a regional hinterland that formed a continuation of the heavy industrial concentration upstream. Pittsburgh was the closest big city to Wheeling and Steubenville, which were not able to support the same range of universities, theaters, professional sports teams, and business services found in their larger neighbor. Retail, wholesale, and other sales districts generally extended throughout the area, while mail delivery and the number of telephone calls from the Ohio Valley to Pittsburgh far surpassed the volume to any other city. At the Steel Valley’s industrial peak, residents from throughout the metropolitan region shared a common culture, experienced a similar environment, participated in the same labor pool, and relied on a single set of economic advantages irrespective of political and administrative boundaries.9
The unraveling of the coal, steel, and rail nexus at the Steel Valley’s economic heart holds the key to understanding the origins of America’s industrial crisis. Pittsburgh reached its economic peak relative to the rest of the nation just after World War I, long before concerns materialized about foreign competition, the New International Division of Labor, robots on the assembly line, or the ossification of labor-management relations. Over subsequent decades, metropolitan population growth slowed as manufacturing and mining employment stagnated and began to decline. This deceleration reflected national trends, such as the substitution of petroleum and natural gas for the area’s bituminous coal, the shifting of capital to Detroit and other newer industrial centers, and the substitution of machines for human labor. At the same time, Pittsburgh lost the advantages of location and natural resources that undergirded its rise to dominance. The region continued for decades as an important supplier of coal, plate glass, metals and other basic goods, but its population maxed out in the early 1960s—well before the cataclysmic collapse of the steel industry beginning in the late 1970s. This early decline in overall population stood in marked contrast to other large urban districts where postwar losses in the central city were more than offset by suburban growth, a fact that made the Steel Valley an important bellwether for other North American industrial regions.10
As a result, the story of Pittsburgh and its hinterland provides a model for a more nuanced analysis of “deindustrialization” and its geographical auxiliary, the Rust Belt. Political and civic leaders increasingly saw gains in the service sector, including education and health care, as a way to offset stagnating employment in the area’s traditional heavy industrial base. By the 1970s, a new set of regional bonds had gradually emerged connecting the Golden Triangle’s skyscrapers and Pittsburgh’s universities to highway-oriented research and industrial parks that looked a lot like the high-tech growth areas associated with Boston’s Route 128 Corridor as well as the so-called “Sun Belt” that stretched from the Research Triangle of North Carolina to the aerospace complexes of Texas to California’s Silicon Valley. However, these processes never fully compensated for the continuing loss of industrial jobs, nor were employment