Beyond Rust - Allen Dieterich-Ward Politics and Culture in Modern America

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strong attachment to their region. I came across many heroes in my travels throughout this area, but even after dozens of oral histories and many years spent in the archives, I have found few clear-cut villains. This is not to say I agreed with all of the ideas espoused by the figures in the following pages, not by a long shot. But my personal and professional background has perhaps made me more sympathetic to a wider range of perspectives than might be the norm. In order to finance his dream of owning a farm, my father went to work as a coal miner, which provided the economic base on which I, an ardent environmentalist, went to college. For their part, my grandparents enjoyed a comfortable retirement after selling the coal rights to their property in the 1980s, which they were able to continue farming thanks to more stringent reclamation laws passed, in part, due to the public outcry over the Egypt Valley mine. The histories of urban renewal and suburban expansion require a similar level of nuance; for every project completed or thwarted, those on both sides were often full of good intentions.

      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

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      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

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