The Bulletin Index, September 25, 1948, pp. 21-28.
What Is Its Past?
From the beginning of French and English claims in the New World, the Point has been recognized as a strategic and desirable place for trade and defense. France laid first claim to the site when Captain Pierre Joseph de Celeron marked the region with leaden plates sunk in the ground as belonging to the Tricolor.George Washington, as a youth of 21, visited the Point in 1753. He was enroute from Virginia to the French on Lake Erie, studying suitable sites for British fortifications and to warn the French against encroachment on English territory. While standing at the forks of the three rivers he wrote in his diary: "I have spent some time in viewing the rivers and the land in the fork, which I think extremely well situated for a fort," and that back of it lay "a considerable bottom of flat, well-timbered land, very convenient for building." Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia, much impressed by Washington's description of the area, sent troops under Ensign Ward to build a fort at the Point. This mission was doomed to failure when the French, with Indian allies, soon arrived and demanded that the Virginians leave. Immediately the French built Fort Duquesne, in honor of the Colonial Governor of Canada. Britain unsuccessfully attacked the fort two times until November 1758, when the English, under General John Forbes, took possession of the abandoned Point. The new English fort was called Pitt, in honor of William Pitt, prime minister of England. The settlement that grew around the fortification was called Pittsburgh, which has always been the correct spelling of the name, the final "h" distinguishing it from eight other American "Pittsburgs."
Log-built Fort Pitt remained an important military post for many years. For one thing, the Indians were a menace until 1790. By 1760 there was a well established settlement although it wasn't legal for a white man to own property here until 1768 because the land belonged to the Indians. By 1785 there was a store where it was possible to buy such luxuries as black lace, velvet, silk thread, purple gloves, buckles, and many household supplies. Pittsburgh's first newspaper, the Gazette, was started in 1786, and a year later the Pittsburgh Academy, now the University of Pittsburgh, was opened affording the young men of the district their first opportunity at higher education. During this early history of Pittsburgh, Semple's Tavern at Water and Ferry Streets, was a well-known hostelry.
In the final years of the eighteenth century, river trade began to draw industries. John O'Hara was Pittsburgh's first industrialist, establishing a glass factory on the south side of the Monongahela in 1798. Europeans, experienced in glass making, were imported, and by 1812 there were half a dozen glass shops in town.
Shipbuilding also became an early and thriving industry along the Ohio. Many of the ships were commissioned for government service and sent out to sea down the Mississippi River. In 1798, the armed galleys President Adams and Senator Ross were launched in Pittsburgh for war service. Most westbound settlers came through Pittsburgh giving it the name "Gateway to the West." Many stayed, prospering on increased trade offered by the large floating population. First national census in 1800, gave the new borough a population of 1,565, and ten years later it had grown to 4,768. The Scotch-Irish were predominant among the first Pittsburghers, coming mainly from Virginia and Maryland and their numbers are noticeable even today. Stagecoach lines ran between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh was granted a charter as a city in 1816.
The real growth of the city began after the discovery of vast natural resources in the vicinity. Cheap transportation was also provided by the great river highways. There was no more favorable location for heavy industry in the United States than Pittsburgh. With the multiplication of manufacture, visitors already began to complain of Pittsburgh's smoky atmosphere caused by the use of locally-mined soft coal.
Discovery of oil near Titusville in 1851 by Dr. Francis B. Brewer contributed much to the prosperity and growth of the Pittsburgh district. The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company was the first in the world.
Pittsburgh's iron industry was mainly concerned with the production of tools and blacksmiths' materials prior to 1835. As the demands of the iron consumers grew, however, the city became a foundry center. The result was a huge increase in the need for steel. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the position of Pittsburgh as the iron and steel capital of the nation was firmly established.
Civil War in the United States contributed further to the strengthening of Pittsburgh's position as an industrial city. The Pittsburgh Arsenal was devoted to the production of nearly all kinds of ordnance material and, during the War, the city was one of the great producers of firearms. With the cessation of hostilities, however, this type of manufacturing did not continue. During the Civil War, Pittsburgh became one of the large pools of skilled precision labor, with many technical schools. The city did not retain this position for long; heavy industry again became dominant and lighter diversified manufacturing establishments located elsewhere.
On December 10, 1852, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced the opening of a continuous track between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Growth of the road was rapid and extremely complicated. Mergers, outright sales, system organization, and intricate financial manipulations all combined to give the Pennsylvania Railroad quick pre-eminence among the railroads of the world.
Pittsburgh's great fire of 1845 was a major disaster. On April 10 of that year flames raged in the business district and the money loss was counted in the millions. By seven o'clock in the evening the destruction was almost over. Twenty squares in the most valuable part of the city, with nearly a thousand buildings,
had been ravaged and twelve thousand people made homeless. A third of the area of the city was in ashes and two-thirds of its wealth had been destroyed. Homeless families were quartered in the courthouse and other public buildings for four months after the fire. No time was lost in starting reconstruction, and though it was years before all signs of the fire were blotted out, in the long run the fire proved to have been a blessing in disguise. It necessitated the construction of modern buildings in an old part of the city and drew a great deal of eastern capital.
Until about 1840 most of the business activities of Pittsburgh were confined to the triangle bounded by the rivers and Wood Street. Market Street was the main business thoroughfare and anything east of Wood was considered out in the country. Hogg's Pond, which was on the present site of Kaufmann's store was filled in with dirt from the slicing of Grant's Hill, making good building land available. The arrival of the Pennsylvania Railroad assured the continued prosperity of the district as was shown by the erection in 1853 of a new federal customhouse and post office at Fifth and Smithfield on the site of the present Park Building.
Changes in the Pittsburgh scene were rapid after the Civil War. This period saw the last of the downtown district as the main residential section. New factories needed for war production crowded out the homes and the quiet village life gave way to an expanding trade and industrial area. The post Civil War hard times lasted from 1870 to 1880 and was due to national panics and financial adjustments after the war. In spite of economic problems and readjustments, the city grew in population; annexations of the boroughs of Ormsby, the Birminghams, St. Clair, Temperanceville, Mt. Washington widened the boundaries.
In this period blast furnaces came to Pittsburgh. Lucy furnaces of the Carnegie association and the Isabella furnaces of a rival combination of iron manufacturers rose on the banks of the Allegheny. Carnegie's group began erection in 1873 of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works at Braddock's Field for production of Bessemer steel to be used for merchant and rail purposes. Edgar Thomson was at that time president of the Penna. R.R.
Henry Clay Frick became a millionaire in the coke business at the age of thirty. Coke was one of the essentials in the manufacture of steel, bringing Frick into contact with the Carnegie associates who eventually acquired a controlling share of H. C. Frick Coke Company. Frick was offered a partnership with Carnegie in 1889. "Pittsburgh Manufacture" became an expression of familiarity all over the nation in the nineties and some of the great family fortunes of the century were made here in this era.
Great advances in the culture of the city was made when Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Institute in 1895, comprising the Music Hall, Carnegie Museum, the Department of Fine Arts and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Carnegie Institute of Technology was projected in 1900, opened in 1905.
Labor disorders, always present in large industrial areas, best Pittsburgh. There were riots at the Union Station and later the famous steel strike in Homestead.
From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, Pittsburgh has seen a period of population growth, expanding of residential sections, and development of new communities of beautiful homes. The rivers became veritable floating highways. Research found new uses for coal and oil; aluminum, the phenomenal metal of the century, found many new markets. High production of steel, glass, electrical industries, airbrake, [cork], food, and petroleum was maintained all through the years of World War I. Radio ushered in the prosperous twenties in Pittsburgh when KDKA was first to broadcast news of the election of 1920.
In 1926 the University of Pittsburgh began construction of its 42-story skyscraper dominating the Oakland civic center and called it the "Cathedral of Learning."
Weathering the world-wide depression of the early thirties, Pittsburgh had an even worse disaster to face in 1936. In that year the most disastrous flood in its entire history enveloped the entire downtown district. Power plants were completely flooded and there was no telephone, light, or trolley service for several days. A program of dam building to prevent the recurrence of such a catastrophe was begun at the headwaters of the Allegheny and Monongahela.
Pittsburgh proved its value to the nation during World War II years. Steel was needed everywhere, and the "Steel City" was called upon for full production of war goods. Figures of output were staggering as factories went on a day-and-night schedule. New plants were built by the government to meet the needs of an all-out war. A large synthetic rubber plant was build at nearby Kobuta. Dravo shipyards, on Neville Island, contributed the all-important LST boat, sliding them down the ways and out to sea ready for war duty. Civilian Pittsburghers organized an efficient Council of National Defense which sponsored home defense guards, police and fire auxiliaries, nurses aid for hospitals, air raid drills and black out practice. Pittsburgh was praised by soldiers and sailors as a good service men's town. It boasted of its USO-Variety Club Canteen which was one of the nation's most popular.
Whatever has been said of Pittsburgh's past, sometimes uncomplimentary, there has been color and vitality. It has been and still is a truly American city that looks to the future with its civic mind intent upon creating a community in which to live and work with freedom and dignity.
What Is Its Future?
"At several stages in my career," Andrew Carnegie recalled with a burr some 50 years ago, "I have been informed by wise people that Pittsburgh had lost her grip. But I have always felt that the proper response to make to these pessimists was to take a firmer grip than ever. Pittsburgh is all right, and if anyone things that her grip is lost, I am not that man." Although Pittsburgh has more than doubled in size and has grown greatly in wealth in the half century since Steelman Carnegie reaffirmed his faith in the city, there are still wise people to say that it has lost its grip. And, until recently, there were few who would raise their voices, as Andrew Carnegie did, in denial.Today there are many who will reply to Pittsburgh's critics by admitting the city has indeed lost its grip, but in so doing has taken an even firmer hold of itself and of its plane in American life. For Pittsburgh today realizes its faults, is aware of its deficiencies, knows its problems. That its failings are serious it knows full well, but it also has faith that they can be overcome. And from the solutions will not come a Pittsburgh of the past, a city of big fortunes and bigger slums, but a new seat of modern industrialism, "more equitable, more spacious, more in the human scale."
Progressively the center of the textile industry, petroleum, then coal, and finally steel, Pittsburgh has had a romantically successful past. Its industrial might was not, as some citizens of competing cities have claimed, established on a false foundation conceived in the minds of financial and political inveiglers. Its location, its climate, its natural resources made it a logical center for producing material for America's dresses and suits, petroleum products for its industry and automobiles, coal for its stoves and locomotives, steel for its bridges and cannon. These natural advantages, which made Pittsburgh great, still remain, although to a lesser degree in several instances. Add to them the advantages accumulated during a century of industrial dominance--capital investments in the mills and mines, the skyscrapers and houses, the great population gains which provide a greater labor supply, the webs of railroad tracks and highways which make it a transportation and distribution center, and the invaluable "know-how" which its past has given its people and industrial system--and Pittsburgh today has more to offer than ever before.
But with these gains, which the background has provided, have come disadvantages too: smoke, urban decay, congestion, governmental inefficiencies, stream pollution, inadequate housing have been by-products of Pittsburgh's industrial power along with the fortunes, bolstered tonnage, increases in incomes, and towering buildings. And Pittsburgh's background begot a structure of heavy industry, failing to establish industrial diversification to make for a sounder economy less sensitive to cyclical fluctuations. While Pittsburgh and Steel will continue to be synonymous years from now, the district must find new branches of industry to settle on its already crowded river banks and railroad tracks. As industries imperceptively leave Pittsburgh to better serve shifting markets or to expand in less congested areas, other industries must be introduced into the Pittsburgh economy to take their place. But to get these new industries (such as light metal fabricators), the district must make up for deficiencies which have, in part at least, been responsible for the exodus of others from it. Plant sites must be found, transportation facilities improved, streams and skies cleared, floods prevented, adequate housing built. In addition to housing, the city can hold its citizens (which, as labor supply, serve to induce new industry to locate in the area), only if it improves its recreational facilities, constructs better streets and parking lots, provides honest and efficient government, rids itself of smoke, and, generally, makes itself a city in which living conditions are attractive as are the wage rates and job opportunities. All this calls for a program, not a list of needs; a plan, not an aggregate of projects. But it needs also the spirit to set such a program into effect; since 1900 Pittsburgh has had no less than six master plans drawn up for large-scale rehabilitation, none of which was ever put into effect to a degree sufficient to bring about the desired results.
Organized five years ago "to stop the downhill trend of the regional community as a well-adjusted social organism," the Allegheny Conference on Community Development has been integrating the city's needs into a program, banding projects into a plan, providing the spirit with which to accomplish the goals it knows the city must meet to remain strong and healthy. Other non-governmental agencies, such as the Federation of Social Agencies, the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association, the Pennsylvania Economy League, and the Pittsburgh Industrial Development Council, have worked closely with one another, striving for that unanimity of thought and action necessary to implement any master program for Pittsburgh's revitalization. These groups have brought together bankers, industrialists, educators, labor leaders, government officials, and persons from various other phases of the city's life--many of them every day competitors with each other but all sharing common interest in Pittsburgh and its future.
Largely through efforts of these citizens who have come to support the rehabilitation program, city-wide smoke control became a reality last year after more than a century of planning and expostulating; county-wide anti-smoke legislation is also in the offing. Authorities have been set up to work for other improvement projects: an Urban Redevelopment Authority is negotiating with private enterprise to have urban blight areas reclaimed and housing developments constructed; the Pittsburgh Parking Authority is planning construction of public-owned parking garages; and the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority has completed preliminary plans for an $80 million sewage treatment system which will cleanse Pittsburgh's presently polluted rivers. Construction workers are building flood control projects such as the Conemaugh Dam, transportation facilities such as the multi-million dollar Penn-Lincoln Parkway and Greater Pittsburgh Airport, and, of course, hundreds of homes and tens of apartment houses. Almost all of the 36 acres which will make up Point Park have been acquired by the state, and a survey on the advisability of building a huge rail-river-truck terminal on the North Side is to be released later this year. Studies on mass transportation, agriculture, and housing are now underway, while surveys on other phases of the area's life, such as recreation and health, have been completed and plans for action are being worked out.
All these studies, and others, the Allegheny Conference and similar planning and research agencies make to fully analyze the city's problems and to determine the best way to correct them. Action must come from government, either from the local, state, or federal level, or from all three. Tossing partisanship to Pittsburgh's prevailing westerlies, agencies, and government have worked together, have been getting results. Slow moving though this action may seem, it must be remembered that the rehabilitation of Pittsburgh is almost as ambitious an undertaking as rebuilding a bomb-ravaged city, that rehabilitation can be accomplished only by a comprehensive program, well considered and well executed.
While such a program must be carefully weighed, Pittsburgh has no time to loiter. The Westward movement, the trend toward decentralization, present conditions in the city itself will take their toll, day by day and week by week, unless rehabilitation becomes a reality within the next decade. Smoke control was the first real proof that the city meant business. Work on the Parkway, on new bridges, and on dams is showing Pittsburghers and non-Pittsburghers alike that the challenge has been accepted, that Pittsburgh is going to remake itself.
The fact that the city's giants--its bankers, industrialists, politicians, and scientists--have taken the lead in the program is the most encouraging sign for the future. The Mellons, whose importance to Pittsburgh life has never been fully realized, not only have remained in the city but they have become most active in working for its rebirth; the industrial empire that is U.S. Steel, with almost a billion dollars invested in the area, is not abandoning Pittsburgh either. But there are people who are leaving the city, who look on present plans and programs as mere rehashes of the plans and programs of the past, despite the smokeless skies, the new highways, the miles-long runways. Many will succumb to the romantic lure of the West, to the magnetism of New York City, to the promise of the South. But most will remain, and new people too will come to Pittsburgh if it becomes a desirable place to live as well as to work.
Housing and new industries are Pittsburgh's most pressing needs and will probably be the most elusive of all the rehabilitation goals. New industry might come to the district because of the new steel pricing system; on the other hand, steel might move from Pittsburgh because of it. The result will be determined largely by the city's vigor in selling itself to others. New and adequate housing it must have, and to get it there must be federal aid. It needs more--parks, a more settled cultural atmosphere, better government, more emphasis on living.
A Pittsburgh of tomorrow probably would never rival New York or Chicago in size, but [it] could well remain one of the nation's largest ten metropolitan areas. Its rivers would still reflect the gaunt chimneys of steel plants and the glare of blast furnaces, but they would also be scenes of boat races and leisurely canoeing. The skies would be clear, but there would still be a few foggy days. Trees would line the new boulevards, and downtown parks, as would window-filled apartment and office buildings. There would be a civic auditorium where conventions could meet and where theatrical and musical activities alike could find adequate homes. Automobiles would have sufficient parking facilities, street cars would no longer jam traffic, and railroads would have one downtown terminal, as modern as the terminal at Greater Pittsburgh Airport. Pittsburgh's people would continue to be steel workers, but many would be employed in chemical plants and textile factories while still others would be making food products, printing books, working leather goods, and fabricating metal products. The Hill, the Strip and the North Side would be patterned with apartment houses and playgrounds and community centers. Pittsburgh would be expanded to include all of Allegheny County's 130-odd governmental units, and its government streamlined along a managerial and proportional representation system. These and other things Pittsburgh can be. This she must be if she is to live and prosper.
As Pittsburghphile-historian Leland Baldwin romanticised in one of his many books about the city, "Pittsburgh . . . is still in the making, is still to attain the full maturity of its powers. It stands enthralled upon the threshold of a great adventure.viewing through the doorway to the future an intellectual and material empire such as few other cities have the faith or the opportunity to behold."
And what are the chances of this empire being manufactured out of the Pittsburgh of today? Conservative Benjamin Fairless reminded Pittsburghers recently that "where the civic mind is alert and determined, the road to progress is open." In Pittsburgh, Andrew Carnegie would be glad to know, the civic mind has become alert and determined--alert to the mistakes of the past and determined to correct them for the future.
The road to progress in Pittsburgh, then, is an open one.
