Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, Volume Two

Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, Volume Two PDF Author: Roy Lubove
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 9780822971672
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This volume traces the major decisions, events, programs, and personalities that transformed the city of Pittsburgh during its urban renewal project, which began in 1977. Roy Lubove demonstrates how the city showed united determination to attract high technology companies in an attempt to reverse the economic fallout from the decline of the local steel industry. Lubove also separates the successes from the failures, the good intentions from the actual results.

Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, Volume Two

Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, Volume Two PDF Author: Roy Lubove
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 9780822971672
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume traces the major decisions, events, programs, and personalities that transformed the city of Pittsburgh during its urban renewal project, which began in 1977. Roy Lubove demonstrates how the city showed united determination to attract high technology companies in an attempt to reverse the economic fallout from the decline of the local steel industry. Lubove also separates the successes from the failures, the good intentions from the actual results.

Steel and Steelworkers

Steel and Steelworkers PDF Author: John Hinshaw
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 079148940X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Steel and Steelworkers is a fascinating account of the forces that shaped Pittsburgh, big business, and labor through the city's rapid industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century, its lengthy era of industrial "maturity," its precipitous deindustrialization toward the end of the twentieth century, and its reinvention from "hell with the lid off" to America's most livable (post-industrial) city. Hinshaw examined a wide variety of company, union, and government documents, oral histories, and newspapers to reconstruct the steel industry and the efforts of labor, business, and government to refashion it. A compelling report of industrialization and deindustrialization, in which questions of organization, power, and politics prove as important as economics, Steel and Steelworkers shows the ways in which big business and labor helped determine the fate of steel and Pittsburgh.

A Gift of Belief

A Gift of Belief PDF Author: Kathleen W. Buechel
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988321
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Philanthropy has long been associated with images of industrial titans and wealthy families. In Pittsburgh, long a center for industry, the shadows of Carnegie, Mellon, Frick, and others loom especially large, while the stories of working-class citizens who uplifted their neighbors remain untold. For the first time, these two portraits of Pittsburgh philanthropy converge in a rich historic tapestry. The Gift of Belief reveals how Pittsburghers from every strata, creed, and circumstance organized their private resources for the public good. The industrialists and their foundations are here but stand alongside lesser known philanthropists equally involved in institution building, civic reform, and community empowerment. Beginning with sectarian philanthropy in the nineteenth century, moving to scientific philanthropy in the early twentieth century and Pittsburgh Renaissance-era institution-building, and concluding with modern entrepreneurship, twelve authors trace how Pittsburgh aligned with, led, or lagged behind the national philanthropic story and explore how ideals of charity and philanthropy entwined to produce distinctive forms of engagement that has defined Pittsburgh’s civic life.

Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern

Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern PDF Author: Edward K. Muller
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 082298699X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Pittsburgh’s explosive industrial and population growth between the mid-nineteenth century and the Great Depression required constant attention to city-building. Private, profit-oriented firms, often with government involvement, provided necessary transportation, energy resources, and suitable industrial and residential sites. Meeting these requirements in the region’s challenging hilly topographical and riverine environment resulted in the dramatic reshaping of the natural landscape. At the same time, the Pittsburgh region’s free market, private enterprise emphasis created socio-economic imbalances and badly polluted the air, water, and land. Industrial stagnation, temporarily interrupted by wars, and then followed deindustrialization inspired the formation of powerful public-private partnerships to address the region’s mounting infrastructural, economic, and social problems. The sixteen essays in Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern examine important aspects of the modernizing efforts to make Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania a successful metropolitan region. The city-building experiences continue to influence the region’s economic transformation, spatial structure, and life experience.

Devastation and Renewal

Devastation and Renewal PDF Author: Joel A. Tarr
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822972867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Every city has an environmental story, perhaps none so dramatic as Pittsburgh's. Founded in a river valley blessed with enormous resources-three strong waterways, abundant forests, rich seams of coal-the city experienced a century of exploitation and industrialization that degraded and obscured the natural environment to a horrific degree. Pittsburgh came to be known as "the Smoky City," or, as James Parton famously declared in 1866, "hell with the lid taken off."Then came the storied Renaissance in the years following World War II, when the city's public and private elites, abetted by technological advances, came together to improve the air and renew the built environment. Equally dramatic was the sweeping deindustrialization of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, when the collapse of the steel industry brought down the smokestacks, leaving vast tracks of brownfields and riverfront. Today Pittsburgh faces unprecedented opportunities to reverse the environmental degradation of its history. In Devastation and Renewal, scholars of the urban environment post questions that both complicate and enrich this story. Working from deep archival research, they ask not only what happened to Pittsburgh's environment, but why. What forces-economic, political, and cultural-were at work? In exploring the disturbing history of pollution in Pittsburgh, they consider not only the sooty skies, but also the poisoned rivers and creeks, the mined hills, and scarred land. Who profited and who paid for such "progress"? How did the environment Pittsburghers live in come to be, and how it can be managed for the future?In a provocative concluding essay, Samuel P. Hays explores Pittsburgh's "environmental culture," the attitudes and institutions that interpret a city's story and work to create change. Comparing Pittsburgh to other cities and regions, he exposes exaggerations of Pittsburgh's environmental achievement and challenges the community to make real progress for the future. A landmark contribution to the emerging field of urban environmental history, Devastation and Renewal will be important to all students of cities, of cultures, and of the natural world.

Beyond Rust

Beyond Rust PDF Author: Allen Dieterich-Ward
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812247671
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Beyond Rust chronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of metropolitan Pittsburgh, an industrial region that once formed the heart of the world's steel production and is now touted as a model for reviving other hard-hit cities of the Rust Belt. Writing in clear and engaging prose, historian and area native Allen Dieterich-Ward provides a new model for a truly metropolitan history that integrates the urban core with its regional hinterland of satellite cities, white-collar suburbs, mill towns, and rural mining areas. Pittsburgh reached its industrial heyday between 1880 and 1920, as vertically integrated industrial corporations forged a regional community in the mountainous Upper Ohio River Valley. Over subsequent decades, metropolitan population growth slowed as mining and manufacturing employment declined. Faced with economic and environmental disaster in the 1930s, Pittsburgh's business elite and political leaders developed an ambitious program of pollution control and infrastructure development. The public-private partnership behind the "Pittsburgh Renaissance," as advocates called it, pursued nothing less than the selective erasure of the existing social and physical environment in favor of a modernist, functionally divided landscape: a goal that was widely copied by other aging cities and one that has important ramifications for the broader national story. Ultimately, the Renaissance vision of downtown skyscrapers, sleek suburban research campuses, and bucolic regional parks resulted in an uneven transformation that tore the urban fabric while leaving deindustrializing river valleys and impoverished coal towns isolated from areas of postwar growth. Beyond Rust is among the first books of its kind to continue past the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1980s by exploring the diverse ways residents of an iconic industrial region sought places for themselves within a new economic order.

City of Steel

City of Steel PDF Author: Kenneth J. Kobus
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442231351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Despite being geographically cut off from large trade centers and important natural resources, Pittsburgh transformed itself into the most formidable steel-making center in the world. Beginning in the 1870s, under the engineering genius of magnates such as Andrew Carnegie, steel-makers capitalized on western Pennsylvania’s rich supply of high-quality coal and powerful rivers to create an efficient industry unparalleled throughout history. In City of Steel, Ken Kobus explores the evolution of the steel industry to celebrate the innovation and technology that created and sustained Pittsburgh’s steel boom. Focusing on the Carnegie Steel Company’s success as leader of the region’s steel-makers, Kobus goes inside the science of steel-making to investigate the technological advancements that fueled the industry’s success. City of Steel showcases how through ingenuity and determination Pittsburgh’s steel-makers transformed western Pennsylvania and forever changed the face of American industry and business.

City Schools and City Politics

City Schools and City Politics PDF Author: John Portz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
An explanation of why some US cities are better at educational reform than others. It relates education to politics, showing how the whole village can be mobilized to better educate tomorrow's citizens. It is based on an 11-city study of civic capacity and urban education.

Circulation of Power

Circulation of Power PDF Author: Michael M. Widdersheim
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111013405
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
What is the public sphere, how is it best described, and what role does it play in modern life? These questions have attracted considerable attention within library and information science circles over several decades, especially regarding public libraries. Circulation of Power contributes to this discussion by proposing a new research framework and new methods for analyzing public sphere communication. Using extensive data gathered from an urban public library infrastructure, this historical case study demonstrates how public sphere communication shaped the infrastructure’s development over time, producing both changes and continuities across the case’s nine periods. Two new conceptual tools—circuits and decisions cycles—form the study’s research framework, and a new explanatory theory—RLCr, or "Releaser," theory—accounts for why the infrastructure developed as it did. Consideration of competing theories reveals that public sphere communication remains the best explanation for infrastructural development. This book’s meticulous historical narrative of the greater Pittsburgh case, supplemented by its groundbreaking theory and innovative mixed methods design, is of interest to practitioners, academics, and general readers alike.

After the Factory

After the Factory PDF Author: James J. Connolly
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739148257
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The most pressing question facing the small and mid-sized cities of America's industrial heartland is how to reinvent themselves. Once-thriving communities in the Northeastern and Midwestern U. S. have decayed sharply as the high-wage manufacturing jobs that provided the foundation for their prosperity disappeared. A few larger cities had the resources to adjust, but most smaller places that relied on factory work have struggled to do so. Unless and until they find new economic roles for themselves, the small cities will continue to decline. Reinventing these smaller cities is a tall order. A few might still function as nodes of industrial production. But landing a foreign-owned auto manufacturer or a green energy plant hardly solves every problem. The new jobs will not be unionized and thus will not pay nearly as much as the positions lost. The competition among localities for high-tech and knowledge economy firms is intense. Decaying towns with poor schools and few amenities are hardly in a good position to attract the 'creative-class' workers they need. Getting to the point where they can lure such companies will require extensive retooling, not just economically but in terms of their built environment, cultural character, political economy, and demographic mix. Such changes often run counter to the historical currents that defined these places as factory towns. After the Factory examines the fate of industrial small cities from a variety of angles. It includes essays from a variety of disciplines that consider the sources and character of economic growth in small cities. They delve into the history of industrial small cities, explore the strategies that some have adopted, and propose new tacks for these communities as they struggle to move forward in the twenty-first century. Together, they constitute a unique look at an important and understudied dimension of urban studies and globalization.