Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ the separate City of Allegheny across the Allegheny River in 1906. In 1919, Wheeling, too, consolidated its control over the eight adjacent municipalities including Fulton, Woodsdale, and Elm Grove.³⁷

      Despite the successful campaigns of the early twentieth century, Progressive reforms as a whole largely failed to alter the Steel Valley’s underlying political and social structure. Though William Magee adopted some of the proposals put in place by the Guthrie administration, the pragmatism required by machine politics ensured a watering down of more “inspiring ideals” for slum improvement, smoke control, sanitation regulation, and comprehensive planning. When the Olmsted plan appeared in 1911, local officials observed that while “there is no doubt that Mr. Olmsted is an expert engineer and a fine gentleman,” his plans were not “practical.” In Wheeling, city politics remained chaotic with effective municipal programs and public works spending limited by lackluster support on the state level. Indeed, the lack of alternative means of funding led many officials to conclude that, despite their illegality, it was better to regulate rather than eliminate “the vices of gambling, prostitution, etc., for revenue, and that this was really required by the financial customs of the city.” Such open acceptance of and financial dependence on criminal activity for the basic functioning of the region’s communities did not bode well for reformers interested in creating modern cities capable of attracting outside investment.³⁸

      The early twentieth century also represented the high point of annexation campaigns, particularly in Wheeling, where boosters were limited not only by municipal boundaries, a wide river and rough terrain, but also by a state line dividing the city from its hinterland in Ohio. Neither Pittsburgh nor Wheeling proved effective in further consolidating their authority in the face of a metropolitan backlash that continued into the postwar period and through the end of the century. While the 1906 referendum on Pittsburgh’s proposal to annex Allegheny City passed easily, nearly two-thirds of voters in the smaller community opposed consolidation. Anger over this type of forced annexation prompted other municipalities to organize in 1911 the League of Boroughs, Townships and Cities of the Third Class of Allegheny County to fight further consolidation. Wheeling, of course, as one booster publication pointed out, would never be able to “be made legally one [with] our strong and aggressive neighbors in Ohio” in the same way Pittsburgh was able to merge with its satellite communities across the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. That said, following the 1919 annexation in which all but one of the smaller communities opposed consolidation, Wheeling had no better luck than Pittsburgh in expanding substantially its southern, eastern or northern borders despite periodic attempts. As a result, metropolitan Pittsburgh remained one of the nation’s most fragmented regions, ensuring that the underlying political framework established during its period of industrial growth would not be seriously challenged even as the economic conditions that gave rise to the Steel Valley began to shift in favor of areas to the south and west.³⁹

      The infrastructure superimposed on the natural landscape formed the prism through which residents and visitors alike crafted a regional identity for the Steel Valley. Profits from the mills were at the core of the region’s prosperity; however, their products should be measured not only by the metric ton of steel produced, but also in ways equally important to understanding the region. “The pulsating whang of steel-making plants and rolling-mills” was ever-present, observed Rueben Gold Thwaites on his epic voyage down the Ohio River, making even “the air tremble.” Workers carried in their bodies the burden of working in difficult conditions, where a decade of hard labor left men “only fit for the boneyard.” Of course, waste from the mills manifested itself in many ways—flowing into the water or creating an atmosphere thick with smoke. By the 1890s, Thwaites declared, the region’s riverbanks were already primarily used as the dumping ground for cinders, slag, and “rubbish of every degree of foulness.” “Sometimes for nearly a mile in length,” he concluded, “the natural bank is deep buried out of sight; and we have from our canoe naught but a dismal wall of rubbish, crowding upon the river to the uttermost limit.”⁴⁰

      Taken together, the cultural, social, and physical development of the region created an integrated framework that resisted change even as residents faced a series of economic and environmental problems rooted in the very fabric of community life. Even by the beginning of the twentieth century, the Steel Valley exhibited a host of environmental and social problems, which extended from the sewage filled rivers that gave Pittsburgh the nation’s highest rate of typhoid fever to the smoke-belching furnaces that kept many of the region’s communities engulfed in a perpetual twilight. Indeed, the role of heavy industrial corporations in metropolitan Pittsburgh’s economic and political life actually grew after World War I as glass, pottery, cigar making, and other traditional employers began to decline. Whether in the mill towns dominated by large industrial employers, small cities such as Wheeling or Steubenville that proved incapable of overcoming ethnic and class differences, or Pittsburgh of the Magee-Flinn era, however, regional politics generally impeded collective action to remediate these problems. It was not until after the jarring dislocations of the 1930s that a new public-private partnership emerged that held out the promise of urban and regional revitalization.⁴¹

      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 СКАЧАТЬ