ection>
BEYOND RUST
POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA
Series Editors: Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue
Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.
BEYOND RUST
Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America
Allen Dieterich-Ward
PENN
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dieterich-Ward, Allen, author.
Beyond rust : metropolitan Pittsburgh and the fate of industrial America / Allen Dieterich-Ward.
pages cm — (Politics and culture in modern America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4767-1 (alk. paper)
1. Urban renewal—Pennsylvania—Pittsburgh—20th century. 2. Pittsburgh (Pa.)—Economic conditions—20th century. 3. Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area (Pa.)—Economic conditions—20th century. 4. Community development—Pennsylvania—Pittsburgh. 5. Urban renewal—United States—Case studies. 6. Community development, Urban—United States—Case studies. I. Title. II. Series: Politics and culture in modern America.
HT177.P5D54 2016
307.3′4160974886—dc23 2015017684
CONTENTS
Introduction. The City and Its Region
Chapter 1. Building the Region
Chapter 3. The Pittsburgh Story
PART II. A REGION OF CONTRASTS
Chapter 4. Live on the Hills and Work in the City
Chapter 5. We’re Appalachia, But We Don’t Need to Be
Chapter 6. The New Metropolis of the Plateau
Chapter 7. No Development Beyond This Point
PART III. POST-INDUSTRIAL PITTSBURGH
Chapter 8. Rust Belt and Roboburgh
Chapter 9. Burbs of the ’Burgh
PROLOGUE
This book is about a working landscape and its people, in which more than a century of hard use has eroded the distinction between the natural and the man-made. It began as an attempt to reconcile two competing visions from my childhood on the edge of metropolitan Pittsburgh. I often heard stories from my paternal grandparents about Egypt Valley, a nearby farming hamlet in the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio where they were raised. Their memories of bountiful harvests and social ties forged through the local church, school, and Grange Hall stood in sharp contrast to the area I knew from the 1980s, which had been largely abandoned by its inhabitants and deeply scarred by Consolidation Coal Company (Consol)’s enormous Egypt Valley Mine that opened there in the mid-1960s. This was now a landscape of cliff-like highwalls that rose more than a hundred feet above scrub-grass plains; of spoil banks and strip pits interspersed with the ghostly remnants of crumbling farmhouses, rusting machinery, and a hilltop cemetery around which former residents still gathered for yearly reunions.
I found out later that the fate of Egypt Valley was bound up with that of Pittsburgh, where Consol was headquartered, and that the city and its suburbs had their own landscapes to interpret. In fact, at the same time the mining company was rearranging Egypt Valley’s social and physical topography, some of its executives and largest shareholders were partnering with civic leaders to do the same thing downtown. In place of the messy, mixed-use, and increasingly shabby neighborhoods that had emerged over the previous century, the region’s economic and political elite envisioned a modern, rational, and productive environment that could compete with other regions. As in the countryside, the urban and suburban architecture, infrastructure, and, yes, the rivers, air and ground itself revealed the political struggles over community control, of changes in technology and transportation systems, of shifting national and international economics, and of the vagaries of natural processes. It was clear that, whether viewed from the center city looking out or from the countryside looking in, telling the story of metropolitan Pittsburgh required embracing the full panorama.
As the title Beyond Rust suggests, this book begins with the origins of metropolitan Pittsburgh as the world’s most important industrial center and ends by extending the story past hulking ruins of steel mills, mine tipples, and abandoned rail lines that formed the backdrop of my childhood. Working landscapes and the communities they nurture, after all, seldom simply disappear either in the face of environmental degradation or job