“I had almost forgotten how bad it is,” Connie said. “Now I understand why a lot of people leave and why a lot of people will never come back.”
Mellon sensed what Connie was implying: that she might not want to return to Pittsburgh. “We must come back here,” he said.
“Well, you have a lot of ideas about it,” Connie challenged him. “Will they ever get done?”
“They must get done,” Mellon replied.
A reserved man whose most memorable feature was his mane of gray-streaked hair, Mellon had not always been so civic-minded. He had spent much of his youth foxhunting, golfing, and fishing at Rolling Rock, the ten-thousand-acre country estate south of Pittsburgh that his grandfather Thomas Mellon had built and left to his father, Richard Beatty Mellon. But “R.K.,” as he was called, had been persuaded to join and then take charge of the Mellon empire after his father died and his cousin Paul, the son of banker Andrew Mellon, showed no interest in the family business.
While in Washington, R.K. had time to contemplate his hometown’s future, and it did not look bright. Despite Pittsburgh’s contributions to the war effort, its dirty streets and sulfurous smell had turned it into a national laughingstock. Harper’s magazine had captured the widespread view with a cover entitled “Is Pittsburgh Civilized?” Gilded Age companies founded there were threatening to leave, taking away precious tax revenue, and no replacements were in sight. So when an aide named Wallace Richards approached Mellon with a bold proposal to raze and revitalize the entire downtown area, he listened attentively. “We’ve got to do something about that place or give it back to the Indians,” R.K. joked ruefully after one meeting between the two men in Washington.
In the spring of 1943, with Mellon’s blessing, Richards convened a meeting of forty of Pittsburgh’s top financial, business, and political leaders at the William Penn Hotel. By the time it was over, they had agreed to form a nonprofit group called the “Allegheny Conference on Post-War Community Development.” (“Post-War” was later dropped and it became known as the “ACCD,” or simply “the Conference.”) The members accepted Mellon’s suggestion that they meet—often over lunch and cocktails at the Duquesne Club—not as heads of companies but as concerned private citizens. Soon the group began plotting a push in the state legislature for a series of bills called the “Pittsburgh Package” that paved the way for aggressive smoke and garbage controls; new bridge and highway construction; a traffic commission, parking authority, and parks department; and broad taxing authority to pay for it all.
In the fall of 1945, Mellon gained an unlikely partner in the overall redevelopment scheme that became known as the “Pittsburgh Renaissance.” David Lawrence, the Democratic firebrand who had risen in Pennsylvania politics as a protégé-turned-foe of New Deal senator Joseph Guffey, ran for mayor of Pittsburgh and won by only fourteen thousand votes. Mellon had supported the Republican in the race, but he took the advice of an associate and reached out to Lawrence. The publicity-hungry populist and the shy capitalist quickly formed a highly effective team. A onetime amateur boxer from a working-class Irish neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Lawrence relished the public fights and splashy ribbon cuttings that came with the ambitious rebuilding plan. Mellon preferred to work behind the scenes, picking up the phone to lobby and assuage heads of powerful business interests—from Consolidated Coal and Alcoa to the Pennsylvania Railroad—that owed money to his family’s banks, or counted Mellon among their corporate directors.
So low-profile was Mellon that readers of Time magazine were likely puzzled to see his face on the cover in October 1949. Time hailed the choice as a tribute to the unprecedented experiment in “urban renewal” that Pittsburgh was undertaking. By then, a new thirty-nine-story, $28 million home for Mellon National Bank and U.S. Steel was under construction. A thirty-story, $10 million headquarters for Alcoa was on the drawing boards. Equitable Life Insurance had funded the clearing of the “Point,” an area at the intersection of Pittsburgh’s three rivers that was littered with abandoned warehouses and an old rail station that had burned down in a suspicious fire. In its place was planned a “Gateway Center” of modern office buildings and a public park atop a parking garage.
Smoke controls requiring that homes burn less coal and wood and cars reduce gasoline emissions had thinned the city’s black horizon to a smoggy haze, letting through a third more sunlight. New modern dams were being built to protect against the devastating floods that periodically engulfed Pittsburgh. A hole through Squirrel Hill had been dynamited to make way for a tunnel to connect the business and university districts with the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the expanding suburbs to the east. To the west, a new airport was taking shape, spacious enough to serve as a hub for a national carrier called All American Airways, later to be renamed Allegheny Airlines.
That same year, two of Pittsburgh’s most prominent Jewish leaders added an exciting new cultural dimension to the “Renaissance.” Abraham Wolk was a city councilman whose family owned a successful furrier business. He was also an avid patron of the City Light Opera, and he had a novel vision: a new home for the company with a mechanized roof that could open for concerts under the stars during the summer and close to protect against the cold and snow of Pittsburgh winters. Wolk shared the idea with his friend and fellow opera buff Edgar Kaufmann, the owner of the city’s largest department store. Taking the concept a step further, Kaufmann agreed to put up $1.5 million to make the structure a multipurpose civic arena that could host concerts and sporting events and attract corporate and political conventions to Pittsburgh.
The question was where to locate the “retractable roof” structure. Lawrence’s first choice was Highland Park, a scenic area northeast of downtown along the southern banks of the Allegheny River. But Highland Park also happened to be the home of another member of the Mellon family, R.K.’s uncle Robert King. Neighborhood residents mobilized in opposition, gathering more than a thousand signatures. Then at a City Council hearing, King made a dramatic appearance. Hobbling in on a cane and dressed in a tuxedo and black tie, he offered to donate his sprawling estate for a new city park if Lawrence called off his plan. “I am in favor of light opera and musical comedy,” King told the gathering, “but I am against the proposal by promoters who may think that this particular site, which is now a refuge for birds and wildlife, can be man-made by destruction into something better than God made it!” Enticed by King’s park proposal and not wanting to antagonize his powerful nephew, Lawrence backed off. Instead he proposed another home for the Civic Arena: the lower end of the Hill District.
At first, black leaders welcomed the proposal. Homer S. Brown, the Pittsburgh judge who served in the state legislature, had been an early supporter of Mellon’s grand scheme, helping to pass the “Pittsburgh Package” bills and to win approval for an Urban Redevelopment Authority. Now Brown supported the URA as it took charge of plans to clear the Lower Hill to make room for the civic arena. At the Courier, editors had been upset to see black areas omitted from the first phase of the “Renaissance.” Once the Hill District was put into play in the spring of 1950, they assigned a reporter named Paul L. Jones to write a three-part series spelling out how its residents could benefit from urban renewal.
In “Is the Hill District Doomed?,” Jones estimated that more than half of the area’s homes—6,000 out of 11,500—were “substandard,” with major structural defects, no running water or outdoor toilets. Greedy landlords had made matters worse, carving up homes to create more rooms to rent and refusing to make repairs. During a postwar real estate boom elsewhere in Pittsburgh, the assessed value of Hill properties had fallen—in part because of their proximity to “numbers joints” and “painted ladies” as well as TB and pneumonia rates three times the city average. Yet overcrowding had only grown worse, as even blacks who could afford to leave struggled to find “colored” rentals, to get approved for mortgages, or to take advantage of GI Bill loans, which “haven’t meant much to Negroes,” as Jones put it, because of their
stringent appraisal requirements.
Describing the Hill as “Hell with the lid taken off”—a term that had first been applied to the soot-caked Pittsburgh of the 1860s—Jones cited all the new housing options that urban renewal would create for its inhabitants. It would allow those who met the criteria, earning less than $2,500 a year, to move to Pittsburgh’s first low-income housing projects: Bedford Dwellings and Terrace Village. The federal Housing Act of 1949 had authorized the construction of as many as fifteen thousand additional units across the city. For homeowners who stood to lose property on the Hill, “financial settlements will be negotiated,” Jones predicted, or “the Urban Redevelopment Authority will exercise its right of eminent domain and a fair price will be set by a board of reviewers and approved by the courts.” All in all, the Courier writer concluded, “the dream of a good house for everyone will be closer to realization, and that will be all to the good.”
But Jones also raised concerns. “There are other considerations that are important to Negroes aside from living in a sound pile of bricks and mortar,” he pointed out. “What is going to happen to the political power that Negroes now have on the Hill? What about the churches whose membership may be scattered and whose sites may be taken? What about the informal neighborhood associations? Where will those not eligible for public housing go? What about the probable hostility of some communities to the influx of Negroes as renters, purchasers and builders? Will we wind up with other ghettoes and heightened barriers or will a better democracy come to our city?”
In the five years that followed, until the City Council formally approved the Hill clearance plan in May 1955, all of those prescient questions were put off. When the minister and members of the Bethel AME Church on Wylie Avenue—the oldest in black Pittsburgh—learned that the church was slated for destruction, they appealed repeatedly for a reprieve. But the URA rebuffed them, offering only to find another home for the church at “a reasonable price.” Around the corner, the Loendi Club also sought to be spared, citing its long history as the premier gathering spot for the city’s black elite. The URA turned a deaf ear to the well-heeled Loendi members, too, eventually giving them a final deadline to vacate just days before demolition began.
What the Hill petitioners didn’t realize was how little leverage the URA actually had. The real powers behind the Pittsburgh Renaissance weren’t the city agencies, or even David Lawrence’s mayor’s office, but R.K. Mellon and the other business leaders. Thanks to Mellon’s Duquesne Club strategy, private firms and individuals had put up most of the $118 million for the city’s renewal, compared to only $600,000 provided by the city itself. Those interests had little sense of the cultural significance of the Lower Hill for Pittsburgh’s Negroes, or much concern for the human toll that their grand visions of a new Pittsburgh might take. In addition, the URA had the federal government to worry about. To finance the rest of the cost of the Hill project, it was seeking $88 million in “slum clearance” dollars provided by the 1949 Housing Act, providing an added incentive to portray the entire area as an unsalvageable ghetto.
In the meantime, the entire city became entranced by the futurist promise of the Civic Arena. Two local architects with degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, James Mitchell and Dahlen Ritchey, designed a round, domed building that resembled a huge steel flying saucer. It spanned 170,000 square feet and called for more than three thousand tons of Pittsburgh’s most famous product. The roof was divided into eight sections, with a patented engineering scheme to use gears and tracks to remove six of them in a matter of minutes. According to the elegant drawings and brochures produced by the ACCD, the arena was to be surrounded by high-rise garden apartments and a Symphony Hall that would help turn the area into a mecca for tourists and Pittsburghers of all stripes. So auspicious did the plan seem that at the end of 1954, Paul L. Jones himself left the Courier to take a job in the mayor’s office as David Lawrence’s secretary. (In her weekly gossip column, Toki Schalk greeted the news by reporting how much Jones would earn, $5,700 a year, and exclaiming “Swish!”)
A year and a half later, at eleven o’clock on a May morning in 1956, Jones joined his boss at a ceremony to mark the beginning of the end of the Lower Hill. As a symbolic first target, the city chose a two-story house on Epiphany Street that dated as far back as the Civil War. The land on which it stood had even more history: it had once belonged to William Penn and was later owned by William Arthurs, the man for whom the surrounding area had once been known as “Arthursville.” By the late 1940s, however, the house had fallen into disrepair and been seized by the city for nonpayment of taxes. Lifting an ax, David Lawrence chipped off a piece of the front doorway. Then he climbed atop a podium to announce to a crowd of Hill residents that the clearance of their neighborhood was officially under way. While the mayor and his associates repaired to lunch at the William Penn Hotel, trucks carrying cranes and wrecking balls lumbered onto Epiphany Street to begin tearing down the first of 1,300 structures that were earmarked for demolition over a span of ninety-five acres.
Yet almost immediately, it became apparent that the city agencies hadn’t adequately prepared to resettle the more than eight thousand Hill dwellers. By the summer of 1956, some 230 families had moved to low-income housing units at Bedford Dwellings and Terrace Village. But at least one hundred earned too much to qualify and were struggling to find affordable housing elsewhere on the Hill or nearby. The URA had also failed to anticipate how many of the first wave of displaced residents would be single. By the following fall, 250 of them were living temporarily in the Improvement of the Poor shelter on Webster Avenue, a structure that itself was slated to be torn down in the next phase of demolition. A wrecking crew arrived at one house to find three single mothers with a total of twenty-one children still squatting there; city officials scrambled to find them a new home but had no capacity to provide additional child care help. At another home, workers had torn down everything but the basement when they came across a crippled alcoholic, so incapacitated that he couldn’t move.
Delays and spotty communications left Lower Hill residents in the dark about when and where the “headache balls” would arrive. Less than three months before the second phase of demolition was scheduled to begin, clearing the twenty-acre expanse running from the bottom of Wylie Avenue to Bedford Avenue where the Civic Arena would sit, the city was still taking bids from private companies. Once the work began, it turned out that no one had planned for the mountains of decayed lumber that would pile up as more than 250 wooden structures were torn down. In an ironic twist, the city had to order a halt to the demolition under the new “smoke control” laws while it figured out how to cart away and burn the flammable debris in a way that didn’t create a hazard.
Still, slowly but surely, youngsters who showed up to gawk at the demolition each day watched as many of the Hill’s most storied gathering places disappeared. The wrecking balls laid waste to the Crawford Grill; to the Loendi Club; to the YMCA on Chatham Street; to the Bible Institute and the Improvement of the Poor shelter; to the Old Bath House that had served as a hiding place on the Underground Railroad; to the Washington Street Playground where Josh Gibson had first played sandlot baseball.
On a late July morning in 1956, Teenie Harris, the Pittsburgh Courier photographer, arrived at the corner of Wylie Avenue and Elm Street to document the last hours of the Bethel AME Church. It housed the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation west of the Allegheny Mountains, founded in a private home by three black freemen four decades before the Civil War. The church on Wylie Avenue dated back to 1906, and its enormous front facade was the most striking architectural sight on the Hill, with three tiled arched doorways and two enormous Romanesque towers. Harris had come to take pictures of the church four months earlier, before any demolition begun. He had returned several months later to shoot it once most of the surrounding blocks had been razed. Now Bethel stood alone, looming over a flat horizon of debris. As a wrecking ball went to work, di
smantling the structure from back to front, Harris kept shooting, until, in a final image, there was nothing left but the entranceway and the bell towers and the outline of the new downtown skyscrapers in the smoggy distance.
Eight months later, in April 1958, Harris returned to the same spot to photograph the groundbreaking for the Civic Arena. With his usual showmanship, Mayor Lawrence presided over the event from the back of a dump truck, while a marching band serenaded the crowd and a huge Speedshovel backhoe stood at the ready. At the time, planners expected construction to take no more than two years. But the following year, a steel industry strike set the project back six months. Mounting material costs and unexpected design alterations kept adding to the budget, eventually increasing it to $22 million and necessitating a special bond offering. After more than three years, the project was far enough along to announce an opening day and a lavish $200,000 celebration. But at the last minute, that first dedication had to be called off when ticket sellers went on strike and construction workers refused to cross picket lines.
When a second Dedication Day was finally set for September 1961, it was greeted with more relief than excitement. David Lawrence, who had moved on to the governor’s office, showed up briefly to join Pittsburgh’s new mayor, Joseph Barr, for a low-key ribbon cutting. Customers who bought tickets for the arena’s first event, an Ice Capades performance, were disappointed not to see the roof retract, since its movable parts had yet to be properly sealed. (When the roof was opened for the first time nine months later, at a Carol Burnett concert, the comedienne quipped: “Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present . . . THE SKY!”) The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette conceded that the arena had not lived up to the grandiose expectations that it would be the modern equivalent of “Rome’s Coliseum and the arenas of Syracuse and Athens.” Instead, the paper suggested, its greatest contribution to city life had been to provide a pretext for “some $75 million worth of blight clearance . . . in the Low Hill District, once notorious for its congestion of slums.”
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