political and economic elites interpreted Flaherty’s campaign slogan, “nobody’s boy,” as a rebuke not only to the Democratic machine but also to the Allegheny Conference, its Republican members, and the Mellon family in particular, whom Flaherty believed had too much influence over local politics and urban development. He brought in a new city planning director from Philadelphia, Bob Paternoster, rather than appoint someone from within the existing ranks.15 He reassigned some Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) staffers to the City Planning Department and imposed a series of professional indignities, such as mandatory Friday afternoon meetings, on those who remained.16 Not long after Flaherty took office, he evicted the Allegheny Conference from the URA-owned Civic Building, where city planning and the URA also kept offices. Flaherty cancelled the lease and gave the Allegheny Conference sixty days to clear out; Executive Director Robert Pease described the move as part of Flaherty’s strategy, in concert with appointing new heads of planning and the URA, to restrict the Allegheny Conference’s influence over public agencies.17
The URA, in particular, raised Flaherty’s hackles. Established to implement urban renewal programs, the URA from the outset carried out public undertakings (such as seizing property through eminent domain) in support of privately planned renewal schemes, typically at the behest of the Allegheny Conference. By 1970, the URA’s loyalties were divided between the Allegheny Conference and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Flaherty saw the funds funneled through the URA as a mechanism for the state to foist the social consequences of highway construction on the city and was suspicious of the continued close relationship between that agency and the Allegheny Conference. “So we had to kind of change the position of the URA and a lot of the people, and change the people in Planning Department,” Flaherty recalled.18
Flaherty appointed his executive secretary Bruce Campbell head of the URA and replaced the corporate elites who had dominated the URA’s board since the agency’s inception with what he described as a mix of “downtown, political, and neighborhood people.” Jack Robin, long-time Democratic political boss and chairman of the URA first under Mayor David Lawrence and again under Flaherty’s successor Richard Caliguiri, accused Flaherty of trying to destroy the agency. In Robin’s recollection, Flaherty came to office “thinking that we were all engaged in some terrific conspiracy.”19 Flaherty and Campbell “did their best,” Robin charged, “to denigrate, to loot and remove the powers of the Authority.” Pease remembered that mayors traditionally attended Allegheny Conference meetings and stopped by to “just talk,” but Flaherty delegated that responsibility to Campbell. When Pease asked Campbell to tell Flaherty to let the Allegheny Conference know if he needed anything, Campbell scoffed, “He’ll never call you.”20
The success of Flaherty’s attack on the URA and the Allegheny Conference rested in part on residents’ widespread dissatisfaction with the redevelopment partnership at the heart of the Pittsburgh Renaissance.21 While he undoubtedly would have liked to retain the federal-funding largesse of the 1960s, Flaherty’s belief that the city’s redevelopment partnership had removed too much power from the people aligned with Nixon’s devolutionary policies and with public opinion in Pittsburgh. Flaherty wanted to return power to the neighborhoods in much the same way Nixon wanted to restore autonomy to state and local governments. As part of his campaign to weaken the relationship between the city government and corporate elites, Flaherty reoriented the attentions of the URA and planning department toward neighborhood development and away from the Golden Triangle. Through the “more equitable distribution” of URA funds and tax revenue, Flaherty channeled more money and energy into the neighborhoods than any previous administration, “especially the small business areas and so forth,” he recalled, “to try to perk them up so they wouldn’t have the ghost-like quality of boarded up little neighborhood commercial centers.”22
Most significantly, Flaherty redirected at least half of the city’s federal aid—primarily community development block grant money—into the neighborhoods. Flaherty also implemented a series of neighborhood-based programs: he installed new street lights as a crime reduction measure, provided low-interest home improvement loans in low-income areas, and reduced taxes through a balanced budget and surpluses in the city coffers. “I think the previous mayors had been ‘downtown-oriented,”’ Flaherty reflected. “Nothing wrong with that, but to be a bit too much ‘downtown-oriented’ was perhaps a mistake.”23 Pease agreed, saying that, by the time Flaherty took office, the city was “exhausted” by the redevelopment that had taken place over the previous two and a half decades.24 To ensure that Pittsburgh’s planning process focused on residential neighborhoods, Flaherty established a Community Planning Program in the City Planning Department in 1971, which institutionalized a citizen participation process through neighborhood-based advocacy planning.25 Pease disparaged the community planning boards that developed in response as “pseudo-city planning,” and the Allegheny Conference made little effort to cooperate with them.26
Flaherty’s focus on neighborhood planning did not, however, mean that he ignored large-scale projects, particularly those that would help remake industrial spaces for other kinds of uses. In fact, in the early 1970s, Flaherty’s Planning Department proposed many of the redevelopment projects that gained traction under his successor. Most prominently, planners sought ways to encourage the expansion of medical and educational complexes in Oakland and advocated using eminent domain to assemble land for industrial or commercial uses on the South Side, Herr’s Island, and in the Strip District, all sites that subsequently became centers of activity for Renaissance II.27 Flaherty and the city planners had not yet abandoned heavy manufacturing uses within the city limits, but projects already underway pointed to historic preservation as a mechanism for redeveloping remnants of the industrial era for uses compatible with visions for a postindustrial city. By shifting his focus away from Golden Triangle construction projects toward decentralized and neighborhood-based development, Flaherty laid the groundwork for Caliguiri’s more ambitious city-wide vision for a second Renaissance. Flaherty’s fiscal austerity also created the budget surplus that made it possible for Caliguiri to contemplate such an undertaking. As Flaherty’s city treasurer, Joe Cosetti, recalled, “the Caliguiri administration never would have been able to get off a dime had Pete not gotten rid of the load of patronage. If that same payroll was there when Caliguiri became mayor, he would have gone under.”28
Flaherty softened toward the Allegheny Conference in his second term. By 1976, the last year of Flaherty’s tenure, economic conditions in the city had deteriorated to the extent that he could no longer afford to sideline corporate leaders. That year, the Planning Department noted that the city government “in many ways feels helpless to alter the overriding national economic trends that negatively affect the City,” prefiguring the mantra of city, county, and state governments in the 1980s that they were impotent in the face of national economic problems and sectoral collapse. The Planning Department identified sustaining strong links between the city government and the corporate sector, maintaining a favorable tax climate, and supporting continued growth in the Golden Triangle and Oakland as the city’s key economic development concerns. The planners were likely reacting to recently released population data that suggested predictions based on the 1970 census had been inaccurate: the four-county region experienced 4 percent employment growth, but the city lost 9 percent of its jobs between 1960 and 1975, a figure the planners believed obscured “even more dramatic shifts by sector and geographic area.” In response, Flaherty established the Mayor’s Economic Development Committee, an advisory board he described as a coalition between business and government, to review and coordinate economic development efforts in the public and private sectors. The Economic Development Committee represented the first step toward reviving the public-private partnership that had been central to Pittsburgh’s postwar urban development.29
Flaherty’s second-term priorities were very much in line with the pro-growth agenda articulated under Lawrence and Barr. They heralded the emergence of policy instruments associated with devolution and privatization that took shape first under Nixon and accelerated as the Carter and Reagan administrations increasingly withdrew federal resources from
