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Introduction. The City and Its Region

When I was a kid growing up on a southeastern Ohio farm, I remember most about the hour and a half drive to downtown Pittsburgh the moment when our family car burst from the darkness of the Fort Pitt Tunnel into the sunlight dazzling off the swath of skyscrapers suddenly spread before us near the point where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers meet. As I now travel west on the turnpike from my home in central Pennsylvania, the city reveals itself more gradually. The first billboards promoting “Pittsburgh and Its Countryside” begin to appear at about the point where the highway merges with Interstate 70 for the rugged journey through the Allegheny Mountains. If I am driving in winter, the forecast may well be “Seasonable with a 100% chance of fun,” a prediction highlighting the ski resorts of the Laurel Highlands just ahead. A little farther along, it’s “Exit 91 for Whitewater Fun!” at Ohiopyle State Park during the summer, while signs for the Carnegie Science Center roboworld™ exhibit assert the city’s status as a high-tech hub.

The route we are traveling is itself a lingering testament to Pittsburgh’s industrial power, originally blasted through the mountains by Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and Cornelius Vanderbilt in their war with the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad. Heading up the miles-long ascent to the Eastern Continental Divide, a roadside sign just before the entrance to the Allegheny Mountain Tunnel marks the boundary between the Chesapeake Bay and Ohio River watersheds. Shortly after this geographical transition, I know for certain I have arrived on the edge of metropolitan Pittsburgh when the six enormous wind turbines of the Somerset Wind Farm come into view along the southern ridge. As a symbol of the region’s vaunted economic transformation, however, this vision of a “clean energy future” set in verdant pasture land is complete only when it includes the defiant billboard placed deliberately in the foreground, which declares that “Wind Dies. Sun Sets. You Need Reliable, Affordable, Clean Coal Electricity.”¹

Understanding the evolution of this quintessential manufacturing region is essential for unraveling national debates on topics ranging from energy and the environment to highways and heritage development. Pittsburgh’s contemporary situation is, of course, mirrored in other metropolitan areas. All central cities have intense and complicated relationships with their hinterlands, but the particular nature of the Steel City’s rapid rise to industrial preeminence, unusually severe decline during the middle part of the century, and uneven revival since the 1970s lays bare the structural limitations imposed by localities and residents left unaccounted for in a “post-industrial” society.² During its heyday between 1880 and 1920, a regional community emerged in the Upper Ohio River Valley out of an environmental and social ethic intimately connected to the vertically integrated industrial corporation. Steel mills and coal mines reshaped the topography, communities turned their backs on polluted rivers, and the air was filled with smoke that became a clichéd signature of economic prosperity. In this metropolitan region, which I will call the Steel Valley, industrialists and financiers bound distant nodes of production into a unified economic whole through a dense web of railroad lines as Pittsburgh rose to economic dominance over an area stretching across southeastern Ohio, northern West Virginia, and southwestern Pennsylvania. While their relationships with one another and Pittsburgh itself ebbed and flowed with the broader economic tides of the twentieth century, the fate of mill towns and small cities from Wheeling and Weirton, West Virginia, to Martins Ferry and Steubenville, Ohio, to Homestead, McKeesport, and Washington, Pennsylvania, was bound to that of the broader Steel Valley.³

FIGURE 1. The Pittsburgh Metropolitan Region.

On the other hand, the area’s rugged topography and multi-state nature coupled with the ethnic diversity of hundreds of thousands of new blue-collar residents and the ability of corporations to manipulate municipal boundaries resulted in an early twentieth century political configuration that was as fractured as the economy was integrated. This community fragmentation, though certainly not unique, was particularly pronounced in the Steel Valley, which makes Pittsburgh’s second act as the American archetype of a successful public-private partnership all the more remarkable. Following World War II, the Republican business elite and Democratic political leaders developed an ambitious program of pollution control and infrastructure development aimed at overcoming regional industrial stagnation and maintaining the central city’s status as a corporate headquarters. In addition to implementing pollution control measures that cleared the notoriously smoky skies, a collaboration between the business-backed Allegheny Conference on Community Development and the administration of Mayor David Lawrence made possible the razing and rebuilding of the central business district’s “Golden Triangle,” which became a national model for downtown revitalization in the 1950s and 1960s.

The growth coalition behind the “Pittsburgh Renaissance,” as advocates branded it, pursued nothing less than the selective erasure of the existing social and physical environment in favor of a modernist, functionally divided landscape: a conceptual goal other aging cities widely copied. Emboldened by new downtown skyscrapers, hilltop commuter suburbs and highways blasted through rough terrain, the Allegheny Conference and its local, state and federal allies also sought to refashion the broader region into a form they felt would be more attractive to corporate investment and white-collar workers. By the 1970s, the Renaissance partnership increasingly touted universities, hospitals, corporate research campuses and suburban industrial parks as the foundation for a more diversified economy. Beyond Rust thus scales the story of urban renewal up to the regional level where it becomes clear that the political and economic capital necessary to clear mixed-use urban areas for industrial projects, institutional expansion and modernist high-rise housing had parallels in the far-flung construction of enormous flood control reservoirs, coal surface mines, and public parks on the rural periphery.

However, the social and physical landscapes of the industrial age formed an integrated framework that proved impossible for political leaders and business executives to fully overcome on a regional level. This failure owed both to the sheer difficulty of the task and the internal tensions in a public-private partnership that sought to encourage new economic growth while maintaining the profitability of existing heavy industries. Unable to fully offset overall economic declines, the Renaissance elite instead superimposed their vision on the Steel Valley’s still-stagnating mill towns and rural mining areas: an uneven transformation that laid the foundation for the social bifurcations still evident in metropolitan Pittsburgh today. Between 1960 and 1980, limited employment opportunities resulted in a nearly 4 percent drop in the region’s population during a period when the nation grew by a quarter and metropolitan areas increased more than 40 percent. Out-migration was particularly pronounced from the region’s smaller urban centers, which were largely unable to match the powerful public-private partnerships and enormous outside investment required to repeat downtown Pittsburgh’s transformation into a center of service sector employment.⁴

The inherent instability of this region of contrasts resulted in a series of challenges to the Renaissance partnership that both drew from broader social movements and helped shape public policy debates on the state and national levels. Beginning in the early 1960s, African American and other community activists contested an urban renewal order based on the wholesale removal of existing neighborhoods and rejected the voluntarist 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.

* * *

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 gains distributed equally throughout the region. Consequently, older cities and towns, especially in the river valleys and on the rural periphery, became increasingly isolated from areas of suburban growth. This was especially the case for the Ohio and West Virginia communities on the western edge of the Steel Valley, where a lack of postwar highway construction resulted in the partial severing of transportation links with the metropolitan core.¹¹

Reframing economic development at the scale of the metropolitan region reveals a great deal of agency at the local level that simply cannot be explained away by a simplistic Rust Belt/Sun Belt divide. The obvious economic distress of blue-collar mill towns in the Monongahela, Allegheny, Beaver, and Ohio River Valleys hastened calls in the 1980s for connecting areas of high unemployment to suburban growth centers through worker retraining and the construction of new roads. This suburban strategy, which also included the transformation of abandoned riverfront mill sites into highway-oriented industrial parks, required a shift that was as much about identity as it was about infrastructure. During the 1990s, highway improvements and the completion of a new bridge across the Ohio River, for example, allowed Steubenville to re-imagine itself as a “Burb of the ’Burgh” in much the same way local boosters had branded themselves in the industrial era—a small town with easy access to big city amenities—even as the community remained a junior partner in the process and residents largely abandoned its original downtown. Exploring post-steel development strategies in the nation’s most iconic industrial region thus provides an essential case study for interpreting larger trends whereby struggling communities throughout North America sought places for themselves within a new economic and spatial order.¹²

* * *

The Pittsburgh Renaissance was the prototype for a public-private partnership transforming a city from a manufacturing to a service base; understanding its successes and failures is essential for explaining the broader narrative of postwar urban renewal as well as the evolving constellation of market-oriented public policies scholars have dubbed “neoliberal urbanism.”¹³ “The Pittsburgh Story,” as boosters described it, began with an exposition of the Steel Valley’s political incapacity, physical degradation, and economic decline in the 1930s. Following World War II, David Lawrence, the local boss of the Democratic Party, partnered with the Allegheny Conference, backed by financier Richard King Mellon, in implementing an ambitious renewal program. While business leaders touted the Golden Triangle as a privately financed venture, beginning in the mid-1950s the Keynesian expansion of federal funding underwrote both urban revitalization and suburban growth. Eventually opposition grew from neighborhood residents threatened by the advance of the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, especially in the largely African American Hill District, and the political coalition behind the Renaissance unraveled in the late 1960s. As in other cities that copied Pittsburgh’s model, postwar revitalization left an ambiguous legacy of demolished neighborhoods, modernist superblocks incompatible with inner-city densities, and a general distrust of the power of eminent domain wielded by aggressive municipal officials.¹⁴

Narratives of urban renewal, like this one, can be oddly placeless—set in a spatial vacuum where the archetypal battles between neighborhood groups and city hall seem disconnected from the fate of the metropolitan areas in which they took place. This scholarly myopia is troubling, because, as in Oakland, St. Louis, Detroit, and other North American cities, the public-private partnership behind the Pittsburgh Renaissance always understood its mission as improving the overall economic competitiveness of the region. Business executives and political leaders at local, state, and federal levels pursued costly smoke and flood control efforts, highway construction, a system of rural parks, and urban renewal projects, including the corporate skyscrapers of the Golden Triangle, within an overall framework of attracting and maintaining population and business investment. However, to an extent unmatched among American cities, efforts to encourage economic transformation took place against a backdrop of extreme political fragmentation, with Allegheny County alone containing nearly 130 independent municipalities. Even when the Renaissance partnership managed to coordinate among the handful of Pennsylvania counties surrounding Pittsburgh, such as in the promotion of highway construction and regional park creation, the political and cultural barriers to including the communities of Ohio and West Virginia in a shared regional vision proved virtually impossible to surmount.¹⁵

Turning our attention to Pittsburgh’s regional hinterland underscores the fact that, as in the rest of the nation, the residents of the Steel Valley’s smaller cities were not merely passive victims of Rust Belt deindustrialization. During the early 1950s, organizations modeled on the Renaissance partnership began cropping up throughout the region, including the Wheeling Area Conference on Community Development, which launched local infrastructure development programs with varying degrees of success. However, Pittsburgh had advantages in terms of administrative capacity, political connections to state and federal agencies, and economic power that the smaller cities in the region could not duplicate. Time and again, hinterland communities developed ambitious proposals for their own little Renaissances, only to fail either from lack of political will or from the inability to attract new employers downtown. From Steubenville, Ohio, to Monessen, Pennsylvania, all the Steel Valley’s older cities ended the 1970s with deteriorating downtowns, continued dependence on a handful of large industrial employers, and increasingly elderly and poor populations. In turn, impoverishment in and outmigration from peripheral areas placed structural limitations on the overall economic transformation envisioned by the Allegheny Conference even as residents in neighborhoods slated for clearance questioned the benefits of urban renewal in Pittsburgh itself.¹⁶

This expanded view of the Renaissance also provides an avenue for exploring the public policy decisions that laid the foundations for the nation’s “technoburbs” emerging most famously in Northern California’s Silicon Valley, Boston’s Route 128 Corridor, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Initially, Pittsburgh’s public-private partnership conceived of the suburbs in primarily residential terms complementing jobs-oriented urban renewal projects. However, beginning with the 1949 opening of the Bettis Atomic Research Laboratory, run jointly by the federal government and Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and the Pittsburgh International Airport in 1952, the development of a series of corporate research campuses and publicly subsidized industrial parks over the next two decades provided a springboard for the growth of high-tech and service sector employment in the suburbs. Back in the city, the Lawrence administration’s support for urban renewal allowed several major campus expansions at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt); affiliation with the state in 1966 led to a massive expansion of its size and the scope of its research activities. Over the next three decades, the connection between and among the city’s high-tech suburbs, Pitt, and Carnegie Mellon University became an increasingly important component of the public policy response to industrial decline, culminating in the creation of high profile, publicly funded research and development centers in the early 1980s.¹⁷

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

Beyond Rust thus places the ideas that scholars associate with the emergence of the “neoliberal city” since the 1970s, such as the privatization and dismantling of public services, the increasing use of tax credits and other novel financing instruments, and the expanded role of public-private partnerships within a longer historical trajectory as well as a broader metropolitan framework.²⁰ Certainly, the decline of federal funding for urban development coupled with the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s forced the region’s political leaders to embrace market-driven solutions that often did little to address the problems of inner city poverty. However, many of the features urbanists ascribe to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s had long been part of the Renaissance model. The Allegheny Conference and local politicians created many of the key institutional players involved in Pittsburgh’s reinvention of the 1980s and 1990s, including the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, decades earlier. Similarly, the successes of newly formed CDCs could be traced to the basic pattern of public-private cooperation established during the redevelopment of the Golden Triangle and modified during the community backlash of the late 1960s. By contrast, the region’s smaller cities, such as Wheeling, West Virginia, where a public referendum abolished the city’s Urban Renewal Authority in 1973, again struggled to assemble the political and economic capital necessary to forge effective public-private partnerships in the even more complicated context of rapid deindustrialization. The Steel Valley thus provides a key opportunity to explore the etiology and divergent outcomes of neoliberal urbanism as it developed in an older industrial region attempting to stimulate new growth.

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Metropolitan Pittsburgh’s strong sense of regional identity emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the deep interconnections between natural and built environments. The rugged, mountainous topography separated and distinguished the Steel Valley from other areas, while the Ohio River and its tributaries were a constant presence whether commuters were on bridges, miners were loading coal onto barges, residents were dealing with water pollution, or boaters were enjoying a sunny day on the water. On the other hand, there was nothing natural or fundamental linking the communities of the Upper Ohio Valley—the mountains and rivers, after all, served equally well as barriers to regional unification depending on the time, place, and context. Instead, each stage in the area’s social and political evolution required a cultural reimagining of the relationships between and among humans and their surroundings, which, in turn, produced a range of material changes. Over time, the imprint of these land use patterns never fully disappeared, but instead existed as layers in the landscape that constrained and directed the region’s subsequent evolution.²¹

Whether on the scale of the nation-state or the metropolitan region, a strong case can be made for adopting an environmental history approach in understanding the formation of “imagined” communities.²² Pittsburgh’s rise to prominence was based on the rationalization of natural resources into a production process that sought to eliminate waste and create efficiencies of scale. Even as residents celebrated the image of the shirtless, blue-collar laborer that defined civic identity, the massive assertion of power over the physical landscape went hand-in-hand with ubiquitous and sometimes violent efforts to control workers. Corporate executives proved adept at securing employee loyalty on the shop floor and in communities, eliminating or coopting political opposition, and weakening industrial unions, especially after the failure of an infamous 1892 strike in the mill town of Homestead.²³ On the other hand, air, rivers, mountains, and natural processes presented a host of formidable challenges that raised costs, hindered institution building, and constrained development. The region’s bituminous coal, which formed one of the foundations of its industrial growth, also created notoriously smoky skies and those with means attempted to escape the problem by establishing wealthy enclaves upwind from the factories. By the early twentieth century, Steel Valley communities that had once begun at the water’s edge increasingly turned their backs on rivers that became ever more unappealing, unsanitary, and inaccessible to residents.²⁴

Pittsburgh’s story allows us to push this exploration of social and environmental history forward in time to examine the complex connections between urban renewal regimes, suburban highway construction, and rural resource extraction in the countryside during the latter half of the twentieth century. As environmental costs mounted and the industrial base failed to keep pace with population growth, the public-private partnership behind the Pittsburgh Renaissance presented the revitalized Golden Triangle as a symbolic and material hub. Gleaming skyscrapers connected to new suburban residential areas by modern highways rose above a new state park that replaced a congested rail yard and tenement houses with a scene of bucolic tranquility. This symbolic erasure of the nineteenth century landscape echoed in the development of both large coal surface mines and public recreational areas on the rural periphery. Strip mines and parks, while seemingly on opposite ends of the environmental spectrum, shared important structural similarities, including the consolidation of enormous tracts of land, the application of massive amounts of outside capital to local communities, and the blurring of lines between nature and artifice. They also provided necessary ingredients for the Renaissance: profit for corporations, employment for workers, and leisure activities seen as necessary for attracting and retaining middle class residents. As with urban renewal, residents of rural “sacrifice zones,” areas that shouldered a disproportionate burden of negative environmental effects so that other communities could prosper, divided in complicated ways among supporters and opponents of local projects that became flashpoints in state and national battles.²⁵

By the mid-1980s, an increasing number of residents and community leaders saw in the Steel Valley’s industrial heritage and newly cleared riverfront brownfields an organizing framework for revitalizing communities devastated by urban decentralization and the collapse of heavy industries. Unlike the long-standing Renaissance vision of razing the messy urban/industrial landscape in order to build a modernist cityscape, historically themed sites, heritage-based building rehabilitation, and riverfront trails sought to nurture a sense of community identity, revitalize “authentic” neighborhoods, and enhance the area’s reputation among the highly educated professionals that Richard Florida later called the “creative class.” Pittsburgh mayor Tom Murphy (1994–2006) reimagined most fully the nineteenth-century city as an economic development tool, championing the conversion of abandoned rail lines into recreational trails, pouring municipal resources into the remediation of polluted brownfield sites, and advocating for new office buildings, museums, theaters, and sports stadiums that embraced rather than ignored the rivers. Drawing inspiration from Pittsburgh, local officials and preservationists in Homestead and Wheeling secured designation as National Heritage Areas and achieved some success in remaking their declining downtowns.²⁶

Metropolitan Pittsburgh’s evolution into a national model for postindustrial transformation thus emerged, in part, out of neighborhood and environmental activism that sought to adapt and reuse rather than erase or ignore the region’s working landscape. As a result, its story provides important lessons on the uses of public history for community revitalization. As Murphy found out during his sometimes heavy-handed attempts to foster economic development, the very neoliberal municipal politics he rode to electoral victory meant that elected officials seeking to reorganize the urban fabric had to contend with a wide variety of preservationist, community development, and environmental organizations with their own visions for the future. During the 1990s, activists, politicians, and business leaders throughout the region worked to control not only economic and political resources but also the sites and symbols of public memory. With the skies cleared, the rivers cleaned, and many of the mills demolished, the process of interpreting, reenacting, and symbolically consuming the “Steel Valley” helped forge new connections between communities and among residents. At the same time, however, the obvious inequities of celebrating a lost blue-collar world through participation in a service-driven economy called into question the sustainability of a post-industrial Pittsburgh.²⁷

When employees first erected the Homestead Works’ mammoth 12,000-ton forging press in 1903, they stood at the heart of the world’s greatest steel-producing area. Though built upon an earlier foundation of riverine cities including Pittsburgh, Wheeling, and Steubenville, by the early twentieth century heavy industry formed the core of the region’s civic, cultural, and political life. After being rebuilt in 1944, U.S. Steel’s 12,000-ton press went on to produce armor plates for the great shipbuilding program of World War II and later for the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. During the 1950s, however, the fortunes of Pittsburgh’s steel industry had already begun to decline, and in the late 1980s Cleveland-based Park Corporation began demolishing the once fabled Homestead Works and selling its equipment for scrap.

In 1991, the press, still standing in the same spot, was left exposed to the elements, presiding over the economic and environmental problems left in the wake of steel’s collapse. But this is not solely a tale of decline. In 1997 a private development corporation announced plans to remake the site along the Monongahela into an upscale riverfront shopping mall. The Waterfront, as its developers dubbed the site, catered to metropolitan Pittsburgh’s middle-class consumers, many of whom worked in universities, hospitals, and other service sector industries. By the end of the century, the refurbished 12,000-ton press had once again assumed a position of prominence, with its hulking mass and freshly painted exterior serving as a backdrop of industrial heritage for the shoppers milling at its base.²⁸

This story of rust and renaissance is an apt metaphor for the broader transformation of metropolitan Pittsburgh during the course of the last century. Mills and malls both became integral parts of the area’s social and physical environment, though continuing tensions over competing land uses reveal the simultaneous existence of multiple regional identities and geographies. At its core, then, Beyond Rust is about understanding the ways in which Americans interpreted common social and physical landscapes, mobilized local and nonlocal resources to reshape their regional environments, and conceptualized themselves in spatial and historical terms. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Homestead’s press no longer stood at the center of the nation’s steel industry, but its presence continued to provide meaning, whether for the tourist snapping a photograph, the former steel worker toiling at a retail job in its shadow, or the software engineer bicycling by on her way home from work.