place. Most of Hamilton’s residents were Canadian-born of British or French descent. Its small population of recent immigrants, primarily from western and southern Europe, tended to live near and work in the North End industrial area. Canada eased immigration restrictions in the 1960s, and, by 1996, a quarter of Hamilton’s residents were foreign-born; still, the majority of residents were white, with only 14 percent classified as “visible minorities.” Only 2 percent of those were black.35 Pittsburgh in 1950 was more heterogeneous. The city’s African American population more than doubled between 1900 and midcentury, from around 5 percent to 12 percent. Far fewer African Americans moved to Pittsburgh during the Great Migration than to other northern industrial centers such as Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, cities whose black populations increased from under 2 percent in 1900 to between 14 and 16 percent in 1950. By 1990, only a quarter of Pittsburgh’s residents were African American, compared to 39 percent in Chicago, nearly half in St. Louis, and three-quarters in Detroit.36
Visitors to Pittsburgh and Hamilton at midcentury would have encountered similar physical landscapes: dirty, smoky cities with visibly aging downtown cores and residential areas. Steel production continued apace in Pittsburgh’s South Side and Hazelwood neighborhoods and in Hamilton’s North End. In 1950, nearly 38 percent of the Pittsburgh region’s workers held manufacturing jobs, and almost half of those were in iron and steel.37 Most of those jobs were located in the mill towns along the along the Monongahela, Ohio, and Allegheny Rivers. Four decades later, only 12 percent of the region’s jobs were in manufacturing.38 In Hamilton, more than half of the labor force worked in manufacturing in 1951, and the majority of those jobs were located within the city limits.39 By 1991, only 15 percent of Hamiltonians were manufacturing workers.40
In 1950, neither city was yet equipped with the world-class universities that would later become central to postindustrial knowledge economies. The Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute had not merged to form Pittsburgh’s prestigious Carnegie Mellon University (they did so in 1967), and the University of Pittsburgh had not become a major research university. In a coup against Hamilton’s nearby rival, the Chamber of Commerce successfully convinced a Baptist college, McMaster University, to relocate from Toronto to Hamilton’s West End in 1927. When McMaster held its first classes in Hamilton in 1930, it offered only two professional programs: theology and nursing. During and after World War II, the university administration came under tremendous pressure from the province to develop a specialization in technical and scientific fields, but it would take until 1957 for McMaster to do so, when it dissolved its religious affiliation and become eligible for federal funding.41
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
