Such were the conditions that elected officials and civic leaders faced at midcentury. Despite long-standing economic diversity in both Pittsburgh and Hamilton and hints of the change to come in ensuing decades, both cities were popularly perceived as smoky, decaying steel towns. It was that association mayors and civic leaders set out to shed, first through urban renewal and later through postindustrialism. At the scale of the metropolitan region, establishing public-private partnerships through which to offer a range of subsidies to private developers was the most important indicator of growth coalitions’ ability to do so. In Pittsburgh, the exceptional degree of public-private cooperation after World War II had deep roots in regional planning efforts dating back to the 1920s.42 In this context, in 1944, Pittsburgh’s civic leaders formed the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (Allegheny Conference) to revitalize the city after postwar reconversion. Banking scion Richard King (R.K.) Mellon helmed the organization, which formed an archetypal redevelopment partnership with Democratic Mayor David Lawrence and the Allegheny County Commissioner to direct Pittsburgh’s urban development for the next fifty years. The press-shy and exceptionally private Mellon served in both World Wars and spent a year and a half at Princeton before dropping out to take a position at the family firm. He was the longtime chairman of the banking dynasty founded by his grandfather in the 1860s and expanded by his father, Richard, and uncle, Andrew, in the early twentieth century.
Pittsburgh was home to several prominent industrialists, but none was so nationally important as Mellon, who, with his sister Sarah Mellon Scaife and his cousins Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, was heir to one of the largest family fortunes in the United States. In 1957, Fortune listed the four Mellons among the eight richest people in the nation, estimating the family’s combined wealth at $3 billion—just a few billion shy of J. Paul Getty, the richest man in America. While Mellon’s better-known cousin Paul rejected the family business, relocated to Virginia, and, with wife Bunny, became a well-known philanthropist, R.K. lived most of his life forty miles from Pittsburgh on an estate in pastoral Ligonier and took an active role in regional civic affairs.43
Under Mellon’s leadership, the Allegheny Conference’s institutional structure concentrated power in the hands of corporate elites, who ensured that it had the financial resources and political influence to carry out their development plans. The organization had more than a hundred members, but a smaller Executive Committee set an agenda carried out by an executive director and permanent staff. The Allegheny Conference’s bylaws required Executive Committee members, typically the directors of Pittsburgh’s largest corporations, to be physically present for meetings and prohibited them from delegating their responsibilities to subordinates. Allegheny Conference members had strong ties to the state legislature and city government, and the organization worked closely with groups such as the Pennsylvania Economy League and the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association (PRPA). The Allegheny Conference was also instrumental in establishing and then directing the activities of Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, a quasi-public corporation authorized by the state of Pennsylvania in 1946 to carry out urban renewal activities; the Regional Industrial Development Corporation (RIDC), formed in 1955 to attract industrial investment to the Pittsburgh region; and Penn’s Southwest, created in 1972 to market Southwestern Pennsylvania.44
Mellon and Lawrence’s efforts to remake Pittsburgh reflected the shared concerns of political and corporate elites that Pittsburgh’s reputation as a smoke-filled industrial city would slow its postwar growth and deter new investment in the city and region, worries common to mayors and businessmen in aging manufacturing centers around the world.45 Most visibly and most importantly, projects undertaken by the city’s redevelopment partnership improved Pittsburgh’s environmental conditions through smoke, pollution, and flood controls.46 Lawrence touted Pittsburgh’s partnership as a possible model for other cities at national conferences. “This is a new kind of blending of public and private enterprise,” he told the National Association of Housing Officials in 1951. “It has novelty. It has untried phases. It has pioneering…. It is the most promising and rewarding program in our public life today.”47
The primary goal of the Renaissance was to revitalize Pittsburgh’s central business district, known as “the Golden Triangle,” and “blighted” areas nearby. Private sector partners added office space to the downtown business district through skyscraper construction, while city officials undertook massive slum clearance projects and used public funds to subsidize Jones & Laughlin Steel’s expansion within the city limits. An industrial district at the Point, the confluence of the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers, was reborn as Point State Park. The extent to which Pittsburgh’s massive urban renewal program benefited city residents was highly dependent on their race and class. The largely African American Hill District was partially destroyed to make way for a new convention center. On the city’s North Side, a working-class white ethnic neighborhood was torn apart for commercial development and a new sports stadium.48
The Renaissance produced uneven development between Pittsburgh and steel- and coal-producing towns in its metropolitan region, as well between neighborhoods within city limits. Lawrence once described urban renewal as “another kind of soil conservation,” in which “the soil is the fantastically valuable kind that is measured in square feet instead of square miles—the heartland of our cities—the areas where we concentrate the population, the wealth, the productive capacity, and the leadership of our Nation.”49 His analogy may have resonated with Pittsburgh’s industrialists and financiers, but it surely confounded workers in the strip mines in Pittsburgh’s hinterlands. By the early 1960s, Pennsylvania’s coal miners were permanently out of work and riverside factories stood empty.50 Even as the PRPA praised the growth coalition for facilitating “a significant rearrangement of functions” within the city itself, in 1963 its planners issued a dire economic forecast for the region. In coming decades, the PRPA warned, increased corporate investment, job training programs, and additional government intervention and planning would be necessary to manage a coming economic transition from manufacturing to service and finance industries. That transition, they (correctly) predicted, would be more difficult in the Pittsburgh region than in other areas of the country because the regional economy and labor force were shaped “to an exceptional extent” by coal and steel specialization. “Nineteenth century industrial development patterns,” the PRPA cautioned, had to be jettisoned to make Pittsburgh more appealing to a postwar populace with greater spending power and more leisure time.51
The PRPA study anticipated the economic transition that Daniel Bell described a decade later in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Pittsburgh’s regional planners forecast that, faced with international competition, manufacturing in general and primary metals in particular would continue to decline in importance in the regional economy. In response, they contended, Pittsburgh’s public officials and business leaders needed to diversify the regional economy by attracting jobs in light industry, advanced manufacturing, and commercial services. Certainly, planners were not so prescient in the 1960s that they sought to redevelop the Strip District’s warehouses as live-work space, nor did they imagine that the South Side, then primarily home to steelworkers, would some day house the financial district’s young, white-collar workforce. Instead, planners predicted in general terms the types of economic activity that would come to dominate the urban and regional economy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. They offered suggestions in broad strokes for moving away from development patterns associated with industrial cities toward a spatial organization of social and economic functions that would attract service, finance,