Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

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