Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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      BEYOND RUST

      POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA

      Series Editors: Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue

      Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

      BEYOND RUST

      Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America

      Allen Dieterich-Ward

       PENN

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Dieterich-Ward, Allen, author.

      Beyond rust : metropolitan Pittsburgh and the fate of industrial America / Allen Dieterich-Ward.

      pages cm — (Politics and culture in modern America)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4767-1 (alk. paper)

      1. Urban renewal—Pennsylvania—Pittsburgh—20th century. 2. Pittsburgh (Pa.)—Economic conditions—20th century. 3. Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area (Pa.)—Economic conditions—20th century. 4. Community development—Pennsylvania—Pittsburgh. 5. Urban renewal—United States—Case studies. 6. Community development, Urban—United States—Case studies. I. Title. II. Series: Politics and culture in modern America.

      HT177.P5D54 2016

      307.3′4160974886—dc23 2015017684

      CONTENTS

       Prologue

       Introduction. The City and Its Region

       PART I. THE STEEL VALLEY

       Chapter 1. Building the Region

       Chapter 2. Mines and Mills

       Chapter 3. The Pittsburgh Story

       PART II. A REGION OF CONTRASTS

       Chapter 4. Live on the Hills and Work in the City

       Chapter 5. We’re Appalachia, But We Don’t Need to Be

       Chapter 6. The New Metropolis of the Plateau

       Chapter 7. No Development Beyond This Point

       PART III. POST-INDUSTRIAL PITTSBURGH

       Chapter 8. Rust Belt and Roboburgh

       Chapter 9. Burbs of the ’Burgh

       Chapter 10. Rivers of Steel

       Epilogue

       Sources

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      PROLOGUE

      This book is about a working landscape and its people, in which more than a century of hard use has eroded the distinction between the natural and the man-made. It began as an attempt to reconcile two competing visions from my childhood on the edge of metropolitan Pittsburgh. I often heard stories from my paternal grandparents about Egypt Valley, a nearby farming hamlet in the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio where they were raised. Their memories of bountiful harvests and social ties forged through the local church, school, and Grange Hall stood in sharp contrast to the area I knew from the 1980s, which had been largely abandoned by its inhabitants and deeply scarred by Consolidation Coal Company (Consol)’s enormous Egypt Valley Mine that opened there in the mid-1960s. This was now a landscape of cliff-like highwalls that rose more than a hundred feet above scrub-grass plains; of spoil banks and strip pits interspersed with the ghostly remnants of crumbling farmhouses, rusting machinery, and a hilltop cemetery around which former residents still gathered for yearly reunions.

      I found out later that the fate of Egypt Valley was bound up with that of Pittsburgh, where Consol was headquartered, and that the city and its suburbs had their own landscapes to interpret. In fact, at the same time the mining company was rearranging Egypt Valley’s social and physical topography, some of its executives and largest shareholders were partnering with civic leaders to do the same thing downtown. In place СКАЧАТЬ