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that you’d find anywhere,” an Executive Committee member said in the mid-1980s. “There is camaraderie among CEOs that, I’m told, is quite lacking in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco. The CEOs of giant corporations in those other cities have no common discourse, they’re too busy, they’re not interested.”⁶⁰ In Pittsburgh, to the contrary, between 1968 and 1985, a Mellon Bank or Pittsburgh National Bank executive served as chairman of the Allegheny Conference, and the presidents and CEOs of U.S. Steel, Dravo, Koppers, Gulf, Alcoa, Heinz, and Pittsburgh Plate Glass were executive committee members. In 1977 alone, twenty-one of the twenty-six members of Mellon’s board of directors were also Allegheny Conference members, including James Higgins, who was at the time president of both Mellon Bank and the Allegheny Conference. Pittsburgh National Bank chairman Henry Hillman, Dravo CEO Robert Dickey, III, and Pittsburgh Plate Glass CEO L. Stanton Williams all served as Allegheny Conference chairmen or presidents; Higgins’s successor at Mellon, J. David Barnes, and U.S. Steel CEO David Roderick were vice presidents.⁶¹

      The CEOs who guided decisions about regional disinvestment and plant closures were also instrumental in determining the urban and economic development agenda of the city’s growth partnership. The Allegheny Conference was a “long range kind of organization,” according to Pease. “There are no miracles in what we do day by day,” he said. “Some people, because of the early myth of what we did—you know, the Conference waved the wand and the smoke blew away—they sort of had the attitude that if the steel mills closed, the Conference would solve that issue.” On the eve of his retirement, Pease dismissed the notion that the organization he helmed could have done more than it had. “There is no way that any organization, even government, can solve an economic issue which is the result of global change,” he insisted, “and that’s what Pittsburgh faced in the mid-1970s and 1980s.”⁶²

      While the Allegheny Conference in the 1970s did not wield the nearly unlimited power to control the physical development of the city that it held in its 1950s heyday, its influence remained significant. The Executive Committee members retained unparalleled access to the city and state governments and to Pittsburgh’s corporate decision-making structure. Executive Committee members typically sat on the boards of directors of Pittsburgh-based corporations and community development organizations. Williams, for example, was a board member at Dravo and Mellon Bank, a Carnegie Mellon trustee, and a board member of the Regional Industrial Development Corporation (RIDC) and Penn’s Southwest. Carnegie Mellon president Richard Cyert was on the Allegheny Conference Executive Committee, a member of both the RIDC and Penn’s Southwest, and on the boards of Heinz, Allegheny International, Koppers, and First Boston.⁶³

      Representatives of local foundations, tied to corporate elites through board memberships, worked with Pease and the Allegheny Conference staff to achieve the growth partnership’s goal of creating new cultural institutions. Caliguiri targeted the development of a cultural district adjacent to the Golden Triangle as a way to attract additional downtown investment, appeal to executives considering locating their companies in Pittsburgh, and create a regional cultural center to capture a share of the money spent on leisure activities by suburbanites. Because cultural development was part of their institutional missions, Pittsburgh-based foundations such as the Carnegie, the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust used their funds to offset the public cost of developing cultural institutions that Caliguiri hoped would attract new residents and tourists.⁶⁴

      The participation of CDCs, on the other hand, allowed Caliguiri to claim broad-based public support for the growth partnership’s plans. In return, neighborhood-based groups were able to influence and in some cases control development within their neighborhood boundaries.⁶⁵ Caliguiri expanded Flaherty’s neighborhood planning efforts, in no small part because neighborhood-based organizations were eligible to receive federal community development funds as well as newly available national and local foundation funding. Leaders of the historic preservation and neighborhood organizations that had fought the city’s urban renewal plans a decade earlier understood that to secure political support—and public and local foundation funding—for their own agendas, they needed to ensure that their development plans were compatible with the growth coalition’s vision for the city. Neighborhood groups legitimated the economic development plans of other organizations but were excluded from making meaningful contributions to the city’s physical and economic development agenda.⁶⁶ The largely privately funded CDC network channeled citizen participation in such a way that it delegitimized other forms of civic protest, including protests by groups of unemployed workers. The CDCs did not challenge the growth coalition’s visions for postindustrial Pittsburgh, and neighborhood groups’ activities—historic preservation, commercial district business development, infrastructure improvement, and housing rehabilitation—were largely compatible with the growth partnership’s focus on quality of life issues.⁶⁷

      Caliguiri’s neighborhood stabilization goals became increasingly dependent on the ability of CDCs to acquire funding from philanthropic organizations and from state and federal sources, making neighborhood institutions central to privatization and decentralization on the ground in Pittsburgh in the way Carter had intended in his urban policy. The North Side’s Mexican War Streets provided Caliguiri with an especially instructive example of how neighborhood-based organizations might contribute to redevelopment without extensive public expenditures. As urban renewal projects tore apart the North Side’s social fabric and residents moved to the suburbs in the early postwar years, the neighborhood’s buildings fell into disrepair, and its Victorian homes were subdivided into rental properties. In the mid-1960s, the City Planning Department targeted the neighborhood for demolition. Local residents, the Mexican War Streets Society, and the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation (Landmarks) worked together to challenge the urban redevelopment plans and ultimately convinced the city to abandon the project. Local residents began to purchase and rehabilitate the homes with financial assistance from Landmarks, and by 1972 philanthropies such as the Heinz Foundation underwrote redevelopment activity in the neighborhood.⁶⁸

      The lesson Caliguiri took from the Mexican War Streets was that neighborhood-based redevelopment could occur without extensive financial or institutional commitments from the city government. The reduction of state and federal community development funds in the 1970s, particularly for housing, meant that the nonprofit sector and CDCs would have to play an increasingly important role in planning, developing, and securing financing for neighborhood-based housing, recreation, and commercial district improvement projects. Caliguiri invoked the rhetoric of partnership and self-help that was becoming increasingly prominent in national discourse about cities under the Carter administration when he informed residents that the city’s future depended on “the individual” and that “the job is far beyond government alone, it requires a partnership.”⁶⁹

      Pittsburgh’s research universities also played an important role in Renaissance II. The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon partnered with the state government and local industry to attract advanced technology enterprises. Such partnerships helped state and local officials realize their desires to establish high-tech industry while advancing the universities’ expansion plans and bolstering efforts to improve their national rankings. Entrepreneurial university presidents—Carnegie Mellon president James Cyert and University of Pittsburgh chancellor Wesley Posvar (both longtime Allegheny Conference members)—encouraged their institutions to provide services-for-hire to both the public and private sectors.⁷⁰ Under Cyert and Posvar, both universities collaborated with local firms to take advantage of state funding for advanced technology research and to attract federal funds for such undertakings as a robotics institute, software design center, and supercomputing site.⁷¹

      Like the redevelopment partnership forged by Lawrence and the Allegheny Conference in the urban renewal era, Caliguiri’s growth partnership became an international model for postindustrial urban regeneration at the end of the twentieth century. In 1988, Pittsburgh hosted a conference on “Remaking Cities,” which brought together public officials, developers, and civic leaders from the United States and the UK to share their strategies for confronting industrial restructuring and creating postindustrial cities.⁷² In the 1980s, Bilbao’s public officials invited experts from Pittsburgh to Spain to discuss their experiences with industrial restructuring.

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