Beyond Rust
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Beyond Rust chronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of metropolitan Pittsburgh, an industrial region that once formed the heart of the world's steel production and is now touted as a model for reviving other hard-hit cities of the Rust Belt. Writing in clear and engaging prose, historian and area native Allen Dieterich-Ward provides a new model for a truly metropolitan history that integrates the urban core with its regional hinterland of satellite cities, white-collar suburbs, mill towns, and rural mining areas. Pittsburgh reached its industrial heyday between 1880 and 1920, as vertically integrated industrial corporations forged a regional community in the mountainous Upper Ohio River Valley. Over subsequent decades, metropolitan population growth slowed as mining and manufacturing employment declined. Faced with economic and environmental disaster in the 1930s, Pittsburgh's business elite and political leaders developed an ambitious program of pollution control and infrastructure development. The public-private partnership behind the «Pittsburgh Renaissance,» as advocates called it, pursued nothing less than the selective erasure of the existing social and physical environment in favor of a modernist, functionally divided landscape: a goal that was widely copied by other aging cities and one that has important ramifications for the broader national story. Ultimately, the Renaissance vision of downtown skyscrapers, sleek suburban research campuses, and bucolic regional parks resulted in an uneven transformation that tore the urban fabric while leaving deindustrializing river valleys and impoverished coal towns isolated from areas of postwar growth. Beyond Rust is among the first books of its kind to continue past the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1980s by exploring the diverse ways residents of an iconic industrial region sought places for themselves within a new economic order.
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BEYOND RUST
Series Editors: Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue
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Following the collapse of the Renaissance partnership in the early 1970s, the struggle of business leaders, executives at non-profit organizations, and municipal officials to deal with changing local, state, and federal attitudes toward urban renewal made Pittsburgh an important laboratory for public policy innovation. Between his election as the city’s mayor in 1969 and his selection as deputy attorney general by President Carter in 1977, Peter Flaherty severed institutional connections with the Allegheny Conference, scaled back urban renewal projects, and directed a larger portion of municipal spending away from downtown. Faced with dramatic cuts to federal spending on aid to cities, Flaherty set the standard for a new wave of fiscal populism among liberal Democratic mayors through cost-saving measures, the elimination of public sector jobs, the reduction of some city services, and an increased reliance on community-based organizations that would play a pivotal role in subsequent urban development. Outside city government, a partnership between conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife and the nonprofit Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation led to the creation of Station Square, a festival marketplace designed to showcase the economic viability of a privately financed, heritage-based commercial district.18
Out of this context, a revived public-private coalition gradually emerged, based on a pragmatic model for growth that adapted the earlier Mellon-Lawrence partnership to fit the changing political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s. In his last year in office before leaving for Washington, D.C., Flaherty’s stance toward the Allegheny Conference softened considerably as his staff sought ways to encourage the expansion of university-related employment and cautiously advocated the selective use of eminent domain to assemble land for commercial uses. The subsequent administration of Richard Caliguiri (1977–1988) embraced these priorities and launched a major downtown revitalization program dubbed Renaissance II. Unlike the top-down decision-making of the postwar era, however, fiscal constraints on both the government and corporate sides forced the inclusion of a broader range of voices and required that the city’s primary role in urban development be in arranging incentives, such as tax increment financing, to private investors. The success of Station Square and its symbolic inclusion in Renaissance II also highlighted the increasing role of foundations and community development corporations (CDCs) not only in funding projects but also in conceiving and nurturing new approaches to urban development that relied less on direct government oversight, overt public financing, and the use of eminent domain.19
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