Pittsburgh’s hinterlands. By the early 1960s, Pennsylvania’s coal miners were permanently out of work and riverside factories stood empty.50 Even as the PRPA praised the growth coalition for facilitating “a significant rearrangement of functions” within the city itself, in 1963 its planners issued a dire economic forecast for the region. In coming decades, the PRPA warned, increased corporate investment, job training programs, and additional government intervention and planning would be necessary to manage a coming economic transition from manufacturing to service and finance industries. That transition, they (correctly) predicted, would be more difficult in the Pittsburgh region than in other areas of the country because the regional economy and labor force were shaped “to an exceptional extent” by coal and steel specialization. “Nineteenth century industrial development patterns,” the PRPA cautioned, had to be jettisoned to make Pittsburgh more appealing to a postwar populace with greater spending power and more leisure time.51
The PRPA study anticipated the economic transition that Daniel Bell described a decade later in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Pittsburgh’s regional planners forecast that, faced with international competition, manufacturing in general and primary metals in particular would continue to decline in importance in the regional economy. In response, they contended, Pittsburgh’s public officials and business leaders needed to diversify the regional economy by attracting jobs in light industry, advanced manufacturing, and commercial services. Certainly, planners were not so prescient in the 1960s that they sought to redevelop the Strip District’s warehouses as live-work space, nor did they imagine that the South Side, then primarily home to steelworkers, would some day house the financial district’s young, white-collar workforce. Instead, planners predicted in general terms the types of economic activity that would come to dominate the urban and regional economy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. They offered suggestions in broad strokes for moving away from development patterns associated with industrial cities toward a spatial organization of social and economic functions that would attract service, finance, and light industry, exhibiting early evidence of the postindustrial imagination shared among planners throughout the North Atlantic within the next few decades.52
The mayor’s office and the Allegheny Conference’s board showed limited interest in regional development in the 1960s, delegating development beyond city limits to county governments and the RIDC. The RIDC acquired its first parcel for redevelopment in rural O’Hara Township the year the PRPA study came out and in 1966 began renting space in one of the nation’s first planned industrial parks to area companies for light manufacturing. Two years later, the organization began construction on a second industrial park at the edge of Allegheny County, eventually securing a U.S. post office sorting facility as a tenant and attracting the Society of Automotive Engineers away from their New York City headquarters. By 1971, the RIDC was so pleased with its economic diversification efforts that it issued a self-congratulatory report, “Transition of a Region: Southwestern Pennsylvania’s Changing Economy.” Its glossy cover juxtaposed images of steelworkers and the Golden Triangle. In case the symbolism was lost on readers, the RIDC staffers pointedly noted that the cover celebrated “the transition in the economic structure of the Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania region. The region appears to be moving from a mature heavy industry economy toward one with a balance of material goods-producing industries and service industries.” A presidential note at the outset cited National Planning Association data that indicated that service-producing industries had increased their share of regional jobs. The RIDC predicted that the Pittsburgh region would achieve a “balanced” economy by 1980.53
In the early 1970s, heavy industry still formed the material basis of the declining regional economy, but urban renewal had laid the spatial and institutional foundations for a postindustrial rebirth in the city. Mayor Joseph Barr had symbolically marked the end of the Renaissance with the 1969 dedication of a new headquarters for Westinghouse, the last building completed in the Golden Triangle. “It’s hard to believe that less than twenty years ago this area where we now are standing was blighted industrial and commercial slum,” Barr said at the event, praising the $200 million downtown facelift that had, the Washington Post enthusiastically reported, “transformed one of the nation’s worst eyesores into a cluster of dazzling skyscrapers.”54 Coal miners in the hinterlands may have been out of work, but downtown, modernist glass-and-steel skyscrapers had replaced the “nineteenth-century” architecture that the growth coalition believed forestalled new investment.
Hamilton was a different story. It did not share Pittsburgh’s long history of corporate welfare, and, because of its greater reliance on publicly funded, planned, and managed projects, postwar urban redevelopment moved more slowly there than it did in Pittsburgh.55 The city had established a master plan in 1944, drafted by Toronto planning consultant E. G. Faludi. When city officials hired Faludi, Hamilton did not have a planning department. The city council appointed an ad hoc town planning committee composed of local politicians, civic leaders, and representatives from labor, industry, and women’s organization to assist Faludi. Faludi’s findings were worrisome for political and civic leaders: he and the town planning committee determined that more than three-quarters of Hamilton’s residences were blighted or in decline, and the report recommended that the city use the slum clearance provision of Canada’s 1944 National Housing Act to replace some of them with affordable housing. The master plan outlined an ambitious slum clearance program that led city officials to formally establish a planning department in 1947, but it would be more than a decade before public opinion and political will made a large-scale redevelopment program feasible.56
Figure 4. Downtown Pittsburgh before the Renaissance with industry still visible at the Point, ca. 1950. Reprinted with the permission of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and its Affiliates.
Figure 5. Downtown Pittsburgh after the Renaissance, showing corporate headquarters buildings and Point State Park, ca. 1969. Reprinted with the permission of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and its Affiliates.
In Pittsburgh and other U.S. cities, redevelopment partnerships went hand-in-hand with central business district redevelopment. Hamilton’s city officials, too, were eager to implement a downtown urban renewal program in the early 1960s. In 1962, Vic Copps made downtown revitalization a central feature of his mayoral campaign. Copps won in a major upset, unseating thirteen-year incumbent Lloyd D. Jackson. Within months of taking office, Copps made overtures to local businessmen and corporate leaders to ensure their cooperation with his redevelopment plans. But his efforts were stymied: in 1962, Canada’s federal government only subsidized low- and moderate-income housing, not commercial development.57
The ambitious Copps held office for nearly twenty-five years and was the patriarch of what would become Hamilton’s Liberal political dynasty—his wife Geraldine was a city councilor in the 1980s and 1990s; his daughter Sheila served in provincial and national parliament and as deputy prime minister under Jean Chrétien. A journalist by trade, Copps had moved to Hamilton shortly after World War II to pursue a career as a sportscaster. Riding on his popularity as a radio personality, he entered politics in 1960, winning more votes than any other candidate in a Board of Control election. As a councilor, Copps earned the loyalty of Hamilton’s pensioners through bus fare reductions and secured support from workers by introducing job retraining programs for the unemployed. By the time Copps ran against Jackson, Jackson and local labor leaders were in open conflict. The Hamilton and District Labor Council declined to endorse either candidate, but union officials and rank-and-file workers backed Copps and led him to victory.58
Copps may have styled himself as a labor mayor, but he was eager to work with Hamilton’s businessmen and industrialists to realize his urban redevelopment goals. During his campaign, he presented his lack of experience as an asset, telling voters that it meant he was not “bogged down with a lot of political affiliations.”
