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CHAPTER 3

The Pittsburgh Story

In late October 1948, an incident in Donora, Pennsylvania, twenty-five miles up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, crystalized all that was wrong with the environmental, economic, and political framework that had held sway in the Steel Valley over the previous half century. The massive industrialization and urbanization of the river valleys combined with the steep surrounding escarpments to trap particulates, sulfur dioxide, and other chemicals from burning coal, particularly when cold air prevented the smoke from rising. Donora frequently had problems due to U.S. Steel’s Donora Zinc Works, its American Steel and Wire Plant, and other smaller sources, but the 1948 incident was quite severe—lasting five days, killing twenty residents, and sickening thousands more. “You couldn’t see to step off the curb or to the end of your hand,” recalled Charles Stacey, who was an equipment manager for Donora’s football team in 1948. During the game that week, people and players were sent home from the field early. “One of the players, Stan Sawa, went home and found that his father had died.” For its part, U.S. Steel never acknowledged responsibility for the incident, calling it a “freak weather condition” that trapped “all of the smog coming from the homes, railroads, the steamboats, and the exhaust from automobiles, as well as the effluents from its plants.”¹

Despite an illusion of industrial dominance promulgated by business leaders and residents alike, few mills opened or expanded in the Steel Valley after 1920, while dismally smoky skies and a devastating flood in 1936 contributed to the growing sense of unease. In Pittsburgh itself, the Republican dynasty that had dominated municipal and county politics since the nineteenth century collapsed during the mid-1930s to be replaced by Democratic leadership under David Lawrence. At the same time, real estate assessments in the city declined by more than $250 million between 1938 and 1944 alone. Few corporations, it seemed, were willing to invest in the region’s aging infrastructure, particularly in the growing sectors of chemical production, electronics, automobiles, and consumer goods manufacturing. “At worried board meetings,” reported one magazine article, “there was more and more talk of ‘leaving Pittsburgh,’ and no plans for postwar expansion lay on executive desks.”²

As a result, the Donora Smog, as it became known, was a moment of truth for civic and political leaders who sought to attract new investment by changing the industrial imagery of the “Smoky City” into that of a modernist “Renaissance City.” Pittsburgh seemed an unlikely candidate for revitalization on such a grand scale, but by the late 1940s a powerful pro-growth consensus had emerged between the Lawrence administration and the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, which was backed by financier Richard “R. K.” Mellon. The city’s new public-private partnership combined an effective leadership structure with an attention to public relations that made it a national model for postwar urban renewal. At the heart of the Pittsburgh Renaissance was a regional vision for a modernist, functionally divided, and thoroughly engineered landscape that combined air pollution controls, a series of massive dams, and new parks with the construction of a modern highway system, the encouragement of residential suburbs, and the transformation of Pittsburgh’s mixed-use central business district into the high-rise skyscrapers of the Golden Triangle.

Indeed, thanks to the implementation of its landmark smoke control law, by 1948 the city easily weathered the conditions the caused the Donora Smog without even having to “turn on its downtown streetlights in the daytime.” The real legacy of the Renaissance, however, was more complicated and in key ways reflected a continuation of earlier patterns of political economy and ecology rather than the clean break from the past described by the region’s boosters. After all, the same executives at U.S. Steel and the region’s other industrial corporations who celebrated the blue skies now visible from their offices in the Golden Triangle also depended on profits gained from the ongoing pollution of mill towns like Donora. Similarly, the construction of dams and rural parks relied on the projection of urban political power in much the same way that urban capital had already rearranged rural landscapes in the form of mines and coking ovens. Nevertheless, the clear successes of Pittsburgh’s public-private partnership established a new framework for metropolitan development in the 1950s and 1960s that helped compensate for the continued stagnation of the Steel Valley’s industrial economy even as it privileged new commuter suburbs and select urban neighborhoods.³

Steel Valley in Crisis

The economic forces that had drawn German immigrant Valentine Reuther to the Steel Valley were shifting even by the 1920s to growing industrial centers in other areas. When Reuther’s son Walter left for Detroit in 1927, he was making forty-two cents an hour at the Wheeling Corrugating Company. Walter and his friend Leo Hores reached Detroit on the last Saturday in February 1927 and were met by family friends, his brother Victor later recalled. On Sunday they found a boarding house and on Monday afternoon they were hired at Briggs Body Works in Highland Park. Within a few months Walter secured a job as a tool and die maker at Ford Motor Company making $1.05 an hour by using the skills he had gained as an apprentice in Wheeling. While his parents, older brother Ted, and younger sister Christine remained in Wheeling for the rest of their lives, Walter’s two younger brothers soon followed him to Detroit, where they were instrumental in the formation and rise of the United Auto Workers union.⁴

The decision of the three Reuther brothers to leave Wheeling highlighted the region’s growing economic and environmental problems. Production in the mills did not falter during the 1920s, but the rate of growth in the heavy manufacturing sector, both nationally and in Pittsburgh, slowed following the boom period of the early twentieth century. There are multiple reasons for the region’s decline from industrial preeminence, including technological change that lessened geographical advantages, increased competition from other areas, and reduced demand for the types of products in which local firms increasingly specialized. The production of steel ingots and castings in southwestern Pennsylvania, for example, rose by over 450 percent between 1890 and 1910, but this rate of increase slowed to only 17 percent during the subsequent two decades. As a percentage of total national production, steel ingot capacity in the four-county Pittsburgh Industrial Area declined from 24.1 to 20.8 percent between 1920 and 1940, while its share of plate glass production collapsed from 54.9 percent in 1928 to 27.2 percent in 1940. One indicator of this loss of competitive advantage during the 1920s was the low growth rate for the total product value added by Pittsburgh manufacturers (6.6 percent) compared to the national average (27.1 percent), the total increase in the 33 largest industrial cities (29.6 percent), and the increases for Cleveland (27.2), Detroit (28.6), and Chicago (52.6). While the expansion of other industries such as window glass, electrical equipment, and food production offset losses in basic manufacturing to an extent, the Steel Valley was clearly losing ground to competitors.⁵

The region’s over-specialization in a relatively few heavy industrial products and a concentration of the labor force in large mills distinguished it from other areas of the country. Because of the lack of flat land amid the rugged terrain, it also contained some of the nation’s most extensively developed factory sites, with many examples of continuous occupancy, even by a single firm, for several generations. In short, this meant that a disproportionate number of workers in the region were employed by a relatively small number of corporations operating increasingly aged facilities. This was not necessarily a problem in and of itself. Weirton Steel, for example, aggressively adopted new technology, moved into new product lines, and increased employment even as new records in ingot production kept it among the nation’s most important heavy industrial firms. At the much larger U.S. Steel, however, management’s business model focused on maintaining stable and fixed prices on steel through monopolistic practices, such as pools and a “gentlemen’s agreement” to respect competitors’ territory. When chairman Elbert Gary forced out president Charles Schwab, formerly one of Carnegie’s top lieutenants, U.S. Steel lost an important connection to its roots in Pittsburgh even as the company broke ground in 1905 on an enormous new integrated mill near Chicago that would soon bear Gary’s name. Population figures for the metropolitan core paralleled this loss of relative industrial power during the 1920s and 1930s, as Allegheny County expanded by a meager 19 percent compared to 33 percent in Cook (Chicago), 71 percent in Wayne (Detroit), and 197 percent in Los Angeles counties.⁶

Rural communities in the Steel Valley, too, faced serious economic problems that were also intimately related to environmental degradation. The region’s mines encountered increasing competition from oil and natural gas as well as the development of new coalfields in southern West Virginia and Kentucky. Broader changes in agriculture made already precarious small farms increasingly untenable, even as mining companies systematically replaced humans with machines allowing higher output with fewer miners. Between 1904 and 1944, Joseph Joy, founder of Pittsburgh-based Joy Mining Machinery, filed 106 patents on various types of mining equipment, from cutting and loading machines to drills and conveyers. As a consequence, mining employment in southwestern Pennsylvania dropped from a high of 82,000 in 1914 to only 46,000 in 1940. The decline in the need for workers also came from the rising use of surface mining, with technological advances in excavating equipment that dramatically increased the ability to reach deeper coal seams even as they left behind overturned and unproductive fields, enormous cliffs known as high walls, and a variety of other environmental problems. The United Electric Coal Company began using two electric power shovels in a mine near Steubenville in 1913, and five years later six surface mines were operating near the city. The world’s largest electric shovel began mining in the area in 1935, and between 1921 and 1945 coal stripping in twenty-two eastern Ohio counties affected nearly thirty thousand acres.⁷

The Great Depression was longer and harsher in the Steel Valley than in other regions as falling demand and the economies of scale on which the coal and steel industries depended produced a glut in the national market. The nation’s steel mills ran at only one-third capacity by 1933, with the result that U.S. Steel did not have a single full-time employee anywhere in the country. When companies idled workers and scaled back corporate welfare programs, the uneasy peace between labor and management that had dominated industrial relations since the 1890s began to falter. The election of Progressive Republican Gifford Pinchot as Pennsylvania governor in 1931 and President Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 further diminished the ability of employers to completely dominate the social landscape. The United Mine Workers (UMW) under John L. Lewis, whom Roosevelt appointed to his Labor Advisory Board in 1933, was the first to take advantage of the new situation. The union gambled on a massive membership drive with the slogan, “The President wants you to join the UMW!” and regained nearly 300,000 members within a few months.⁸

This rebirth of a unionization movement that had been severely weakened on the local level since the failure of the Homestead Strike and then devastated by the Great Steel Strike of 1919 had major ramifications for both labor and municipal politics. When the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) arrived in the Steel Valley in 1936, the ground had already been prepared by three years of organizing activity in the region. Despite nationwide resistance by employers, the CIO soon demonstrated its ability to halt production at a major corporation with a sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint led by Wheeling natives Walter and Victor Reuther. U.S. Steel president Myron Taylor invited Lewis, who was also head of the CIO, to begin secret negotiations in January 1937—a process that initiated a top down approach to organizing that would define the subsequent relationship between the company and union leaders. The formal pact between U.S. Steel and its workers was signed on March 17, 1937, and led directly to a host of other labor agreements in the steel industry that continued without serious challenge for the next forty years.⁹

On the other hand, Ernest Weir’s ability to control both the community and the company that bore his name demonstrated the continuation of the earlier pattern of industrial relations into the postwar period. As many as 10,000 Weirton Steel workers also struck in fall 1933, but Weir countered the threat of unionization with the same combination of corporate benevolence and violence against organizers used during the strike wave of 1919. When laborers at U.S. Steel and other companies “were happy … if you would get two or three days pay in two weeks,” Weir raised his wage scale by 15 percent and the company continued to produce at nearly full capacity. A “Security League” was created in 1935 to reinforce the company-controlled Employee Representation Plan (ERP), support management, and oppose the CIO, even as Weir increased wages to five dollars a day in 1937 to match similar rates in U.S. Steel’s new contract. Members of the Security League fostered community support through a series of parades designed “as an open protest against outside interference” by labor organizers who also faced continuous red-baiting. “WE DON’T WANT LEWIS OR HIS CIO,” proclaimed league-distributed placards. “WE ARE STEELMEN NOT MINERS. WE ARE SATISFIED AND SECURE. LET US ALONE.” Weir’s success in thwarting the union movement demonstrates the power of corporations to dominate the local political economy in the multitude of mill towns where they were the largest landowners, taxpayers, and employers.¹⁰

Conversely, the relative success of labor unions in the 1930s came in tandem with the collapse of the Republican power structure in Pittsburgh. Democratic politicians had long reconciled themselves to minority party status in much of the region, even agreeing to deliver votes for Republican candidates in exchange for a share of the patronage spoils. The 1920s were a low point for the city’s Democrats and their chairman David Lawrence, with defeat following defeat in local elections. The trauma of the Great Depression, however, shook workers’ faith in the city’s machine politicians, as Father James Cox of Pittsburgh’s Old St. Patrick’s Church led an “army” of the unemployed on a march to Washington, D.C., in January 1932 seeking unemployment assistance. Political infighting among the Republican candidates as well as federal patronage garnered after Roosevelt’s victory later that year allowed Democrats to win the city’s mayoral race as well as all five open positions on the city council. Republicans carried only seven wards—their worst defeat ever and an embarrassment from which the party would not recover. Lawrence, who played an important role in Roosevelt’s nomination, later had a meteoric rise in the party, serving as mayor from 1946 to 1959 and Pennsylvania governor from 1959 to 1963. “For Pittsburgh’s Republicans,” historian Bruce Stave concluded, “the advent of the New Deal signified ‘the Last Hurrah’; for the city’s Democrats it sounded the first Hallelujah.”¹¹

World War II was a boom time for Steel Valley communities, but as residents began to make their plans for the future, the troubling trends of the late 1920s and 1930s appeared set to continue into the postwar period. Despite a wartime industrial resurgence, between 1940 and 1960, a period when the nation as a whole grew by 35 percent, Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) and Jefferson County (Steubenville) gained only 15 percent and 1 percent respectively, while Ohio County (Wheeling) actually lost more than 6 percent of its population. In confronting these problems, the nascent coalition between Pittsburgh’s Republican businessmen and Democratic politicians was part of a broader trend toward community planning that emerged from Progressive-era attempts to scientifically manage the urban environment. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., for example, saw in his 1910 redevelopment proposal, Pittsburgh Main Thoroughfares and the Down Town District, an opportunity to demonstrate “practical city planning” in a community that would be divided efficiently into “healthful … residence districts” 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 scene from the 1949 mayoral primary, when his challenger “told the voters that I had become too friendly with the Mellon interests, too neutral in labor matters and that I was pressing the smoke program on them and that it was going to be expensive.” “It was a close shave,” Lawrence concluded, and if he had lost, “the political constellation which had developed the new Pittsburgh would never have become a reality.”¹⁹

The support for regulation by politicians and industrialists was based on the assumption that smoke abatement would not exact significant costs to businesses and would, in fact, provide further economic opportunities. Between 1946 and 1955, smoke in the city was reduced by nearly 90 percent. “Statistics and the shirt collar both proved that Pittsburgh had become as clean as the average American city,” Lawrence proclaimed. “The victory over smoke [was] the signal for a concentrated attack on the entire range of community problems. It was Pittsburgh’s breakthrough from the landing beaches; the other triumphs came in an accelerating rush.” However, there are limits to this triumphal narrative. First, coal operators and miners based their support for smoke control on projections that new technologies for creating smokeless coal would actually expand markets for bituminous coal. Backers of the smoke ordinance were thus able to gain the acquiescence of both Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal and local UMW president Patrick Fagan. In reality, low priced natural gas piped in from the American Southwest increasingly became the dominant fuel for domestic use even as emissions regulations hastened the ongoing switch to diesel engines by the railroads. Consequently, smoke control actually contributed to the severing of Pittsburgh’s economy from that of its rural hinterland, and, theoretically, exacerbated unemployment in the region’s bituminous coal mines.²⁰

FIGURE 3. View of Downtown Pittsburgh, c. 1945. The South Side is on the far right and the North Side on the far left. The University of Pittsburgh Cathedral of Learning is visible at the center top, separated from downtown by the Hill District. Smoke Control Lantern Slide Collection, ca. 1940–1950, AIS.1978.22, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.

The debate over extension of smoke control laws to Allegheny County suggested that the economic calculus that facilitated broad support for regulation within Pittsburgh did not necessarily extend to the Steel Valley as a whole. While regulating domestic users had been the primary concern in the city, controlling industrial polluters was the key in the rest of the region. The railroads were the largest consumers of bituminous coal in the region and the Steel Valley’s trains hauled more tons of coal than any other product. The largest rail lines were transitioning to more efficient and less polluting diesel engines, but the attempt to create enabling legislation for a countywide ordinance raised objections from the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had a strong voice in state politics. Delaying actions by the railroad’s lobbyist in Harrisburg threatened legislative authorization for a county smoke control ordinance and required the direct intervention of R. K. Mellon, a Pennsylvania Railroad director, and U.S. Steel president Benjamin Fairless. While the railroad eventually backed down and allowed state authorization for county smoke regulation to pass, the episode foreshadowed decades of conflict over air pollution in the region.²¹

In short, the political economy that allowed Pittsburgh elites to mobilize successfully around a vision of regional prosperity based on clean skies in the metropolitan core was in part dependent on continued pollution in the regional periphery. Outside downtown Pittsburgh, industrialists were more concerned about keeping production costs low than about real estate values and quality of life issues. Wheeling residents, for example, were unable to muster the political will to tackle the smoke problem in even a preliminary way until the mid-1950s. As public concern about air pollution gradually extended beyond mere smoke control in the wake of the Donora Smog and other events, the volunteerist model favored by the public-private partnerships of the Pittsburgh Renaissance broke down in favor of a stricter regulatory framework that depended less on the argument that clean air was actually good for the economy. By the early 1970s, citizens groups, often indirectly associated with Pittsburgh’s universities and hospitals, aggressively sued industrial polluters in southwestern Pennsylvania to force emissions cuts. At the same time, Steubenville gained a national reputation as “America’s Dirtiest City” as its steel corporations and coal-fired electrical power producers lobbied forcefully on the state level to prevent the implementation of stricter national standards.²²

If air pollution was the Steel Valley’s most pervasive problem on the eve of World War II, periodic flooding constituted its most potentially devastating environmental concern. The Pittsburgh Renaissance and especially the redevelopment of the downtown Golden Triangle could not have happened without the confidence of investors that urban real estate would be protected from flooding. As with smoke, it is important to understand for whom floods were a problem and how those groups mobilized in a way that made effective flood control possible. The region’s first recorded inundation occurred in 1762, with 115 additional significant floods between then and 1936. Nevertheless, the principal concern over the region’s rivers remained making the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio navigable at Pittsburgh. It was not until three major floods in 1907–1908, which caused $6.5 million in losses, that the Chamber of Commerce created a flood commission with industrialist H. J. Heinz as president. The commission, closely associated with the city’s elite-led reform organizations, eventually recommended construction of seventeen reservoirs above the city on the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and their major tributaries, without which “the relief from the destruction caused by floods would be only partial and local.”²³

Flood control required a massive exertion of political control by urban interests to reshape the environment of rural areas far from the cities themselves. Between 1936 and 1953, the Army Corps of Engineers completed eighteen flood control reservoirs on the tributaries of the Ohio River that reduced peak flood levels by more than ten feet. The building of the Youghiogheny Dam south of Ohiopyle, for example, started in 1939 with five hundred men working around the clock, though the project stalled after U.S. entry into World War II. The main purpose of the dam was flood control, but the Corps of Engineers listed the added benefits of “discharge regulation for industrial and domestic water supply and for pollution abatement,” a clear acknowledgment of the serious problem of acid mine drainage. The same prominent voices that lined up behind smoke control also lent their support for dam construction. One type of public works was a “must” on any construction program, proclaimed the Pittsburgh Press in a 1943 editorial that shared the page with a column on the economic benefits of smoke control. “Build These Dams!” When workers completed the Youghiogheny Dam later that year, the Press declared, “Today the great dam stands as a monument to the ingenuity of Army engineers.”²⁴

The development of federal and state flood control programs had major repercussions in the rural communities in which they were built. As with surface mining, justifications for dam construction often emphasized the low value of the Steel Valley’s steep hillsides for agricultural production. The construction of the Youghiogheny Dam resulted in the seizure and complete destruction of a local landscape, including farms, the river itself, and two small towns, Somerfield (population 142) and Selbysport (population 150), to serve the distant interests of urban capital. While prices paid for properties were relatively low ($55 to $100 an acre for farmland, $35 for woodland, and $600 for town lots), the financial exigencies of the Great Depression meant that many residents quickly sold out and left. On the other side of the region, the creation of Piedmont Dam north of Barnesville, Ohio, in 1936 was the first big blow to the farming hamlet of Egypt Valley, which later was subsumed by an enormous surface mine. Unlike the Youghiogheny Dam, however, there is evidence of resistance to the forced eviction of Egypt Valley residents, perhaps due to the higher quality of local agricultural land. Emma Major was nicknamed “The Lady of the Lake” because of her strident opposition to the forced abandonment of her farm in the Piedmont flood area, for which she was offered only $1.97. Though many rural residents fought the sale of their homes, with the waters lapping at their door, they had little choice but to leave. “They drowned me out,” Major’s son John later recalled. “You couldn’t live in the water. In there were people farming. They had raised corn you know and had it cut up in shocks and the first thing I remember [was] that water coming up in their shocks of corn. They were floating on top of the water.”²⁵

As with smoke abatement, dam construction revealed the environmental control over distant rural areas required 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 to greater advantage for decent housing, improved living standards, and better public health and morals.” In reality, low-cost housing was never an important factor in the Lower Hill’s redevelopment or in the Renaissance as a whole. By 1966, more than five thousand families had been displaced by urban renewal in Pittsburgh, while less than two thousand new dwelling units (mostly high rent) were built or under construction. “The Lower Hill district … was an area of dense slum with the worst housing in the city,” Lawrence explained. “Now it’s gone. That the community was willing to spend so much for recreation and amusement is as sharp a break with its past as pure air and clean rivers.”³¹