Planning and the Industrial City

ON OC TOBE R 25, 1945, Pennsylvania governor Edward Martin announced that the state legislature had officially authorized the creation of a state park in the city of Pittsburgh, at the “Point,” the historic confluence of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers. In less than a month, Pittsburgh’s political and business leadership, led by the city’s banking tycoon and civic luminary Richard King Mellon, mobilized the city’s planning community and leveraged the state’s modest $4,000,000 park appropriation into a joint public-private tour de force hailed as the “Pittsburgh Renaissance.” Mellon’s figure dominated this epic moment in Pittsburgh history. A pre– World War II stalwart of the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association (PRPA), who as a colonel during the war headed Pennsylvania’s Selective Service Administration, Mellon helped found the Allegheny Conference on Community Development in 1943. After the war Republican Mellon teamed with Democratic political machine boss David Lawrence to make Pittsburgh the bellwether of American postwar city planning. Lured by Mellon’s overtures and by the state’s 1947 Redevelopment Authority Act authorizing local authorities to employ eminent domain powers for urban development purposes, New York’s Equitable Life Assurance Company consented to risk millions of dollars on Pittsburgh’s downtown redevelopment scheme. The Mellon-Lawrence plan featured the city’s sixty-acre Point, in 1947 an ugly mélange of railroad yards and seedy buildings, as the urban renaissance centerpiece. An early model showed Point State Park as part of a much broader Golden Triangle extravaganza that included the gleaming chromed steel towers of Gateway Center. Pittsburgh, once America’s quintessential smoky, industrial city and branded “Hell with the Lid Off,” now seized the national and international spotlight as America’s premier renaissance city. A large crowd of spectators assembled on May 18, 1950, amid the crumbling warehouses, the junk-filled rail yards, and a small cluster of moldering ancient row houses that tottered unobtrusively and tremulously in the shad-