Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ