urban problems because they did not perceive other politically viable options.57 Caliguiri, for instance, was undoubtedly influenced by events in New York, but he and his allies in the Allegheny Conference did not set out to use Pittsburgh’s revived partnership to break unions, gut pensions, or roll back the welfare state as MAC had. Instead, the city’s redevelopment partnership retooled to contend with the changing political and fiscal conditions that accompanied industrial restructuring and federal retrenchment. If New York City and Pittsburgh’s growth partnerships’ intentions were different, the outcomes were similar. Pittsburgh’s postindustrial redevelopment under Renaissance II, like New York’s rebirth in the same period, produced hollowed-out manufacturing zones, gentrification of blue-collar neighborhoods, university expansions and new medical complexes, and the perpetual rebuilding of downtown as its role shifted from managing production to managing services and finance.
In Pittsburgh’s growth partnership, partners coordinated different aspects of redevelopment that had been centralized through the Allegheny Conference in the first Renaissance, and each shared or adopted Caliguiri’s postindustrial vision as a means to further its own institutional interests. “In Renaissance I the government got its ideas from the private sector, and commitment from the private sector was very important,” Robin remembered. “In Renaissance II, I think the government had learned how to sell the projects, which it originated, to the private investors. That was a major change.”58 The imprimatur of junior partners in voluntary organizations, universities, and local foundations legitimated particular aspects of the postindustrial transformation envisioned by the primary partnership of local government officials and corporate elites. The growth partnership also reflected the mix of institutions the Carter administration hoped to see engaged with urban development. Yet only the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which like most U.S. states became increasingly involved in economic development in the 1970s, achieved a level of influence over development decisions commensurate to the role of the city government and local corporate elites.
Caliguiri’s redevelopment plans remained heavily dependent on corporate participation, and the Allegheny Conference, as it had been during the first Renaissance, was the city’s most important partner. After R. K. Mellon’s 1970 death, Pease shaped both the vision and the programmatic activities of the Allegheny Conference. For much of that period, Pease ran the organization’s day-to-day operations from a corner office on the forty-fourth floor of the U.S. Steel Building, a position that hinted at the real power behind the Allegheny Conference. Pease was not a Pennsylvania native; raised in Nebraska, he arrived in Pittsburgh after World War II to attend Carnegie Mellon University (then the Carnegie Institute of Technology). After graduating with a civil engineering degree, Pease initially worked for the university on its postwar physical expansion, and in 1953 he went to work for the URA, where he oversaw a controversial urban renewal program in the city’s African American Hill District. Five years later, thirty-three-year-old Pease was named URA executive director, and in 1968 Mellon tapped him to helm the Allegheny Conference.59
Until Pease’s 1991 retirement, the Allegheny Conference Executive Committee, composed of the city’s most powerful corporate and financial leaders, set the organization’s agenda based on his recommendations. The organization’s structure reflected a dense web of interrelationships between local and regional development organizations and Pittsburgh’s corporate elite. “I think that we have one of the finest spirits of cooperation and orientation toward community benefits in the Allegheny Conference 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,
