Why was Pittsburgh selected as one of three focus cities for the opening episodes when we were already featuring Philadelphia?
With Philly and LA covering both coasts, we wanted a Rust Belt or midwestern metropolis to round out our stories and Pittsburgh perfectly fit as a city that has been reinventing itself for 80 years. That’s why we filmed in Pittsburgh.
The goal of making cities better places is nothing new. While affordable housing, inadequate infrastructure and social and economic inequities are some of the problems facing today’s cities, these issues have bedeviled planners and policymakers, and builders and developers, going back to the 19th century.
Paralleling today’s competition for talent among cities, Pittsburgh’s civic leaders feared the city would fail to retain and attract workers after World War II. The Steel City’s blast furnaces were firing around the clock during the War years and air pollution was so bad that even some of the city’s captains of industry were looking to move their corporate offices to New York.
So what to do?
Starting in 1943, even before the War was clearly going to be won, Pittsburgh’s academic, business and civic leaders came together out of concern for the city’s future and created the Allegheny Conference to concentrate on four key areas: cleaning the air, cleaning the water, taming the water (flood prevention), and urban redevelopment.
The widely heralded Renaissance 1 in the 1940s and early 1950s largely achieved those goals but at a price, as urban renewal cleared vast swaths of the city leaving scars to this day. At one point, the Urban Redevelopment Authority controlled about 40% of the entire city.
Downtown Pittsburgh’s Gateway Center marked the first time a city used eminent domain for such a large-scale development in a case that went to the Supreme Court in 1950. It was the nation’s first privately funded urban renewal project.
Public sector intervention into what the private market couldn’t or wouldn’t do has been a Pittsburgh hallmark that endures as the city continually remakes itself.
Meet Eve Picker, founder of real estate crowdfunding platform Small Change and developer of the first residential lofts in downtown Pittsburgh. Watch more videos.
Contact us — Check out our work and let us know what you think, suggest stories and introduce us to people we should know about.
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