“Live on the Hills and Work in the City”

Abstract

In November 1959, a group of businessmen and politicians from Wheeling, West Virginia, a small city of fifty-five thousand along the Ohio River, traveled to their larger neighbor upstream with hopes of recreating Pittsburgh’s successful urban renewal program in their own community. Over the previous six years, the Wheeling Area Conference on Community Development had pushed through a series of smoke control and infrastructure projects modeled on the Steel City’s Renaissance. In a letter to Edward Magee, executive director of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Conference on Community Development, Wheeling retailer Robert Levenson expressed his gratitude for the “wonderful cooperation and inspiration you provided,” and declared that the trip had “galvanized our city government into action.” Adopting the slogan, “live on the hills and work in the city,” the Urban Renewal Authority of Wheeling (URAW), chaired by Levenson, subsequently cleared a rundown neighborhood along the river in the early 1960s with the goal of creating a new planned industrial district. “All citizens who believe in Wheeling find themselves welcome,” Wheeling Conference officials declared. We are “moving forward in giant steps and can become as great a city as its citizens want it to be.” 1 The public–private partnership behind the Pittsburgh Renaissance always understood its economic mission in terms of the broader metropolitan region. First and foremost, Allegheny Conference leaders and their political allies sought to improve the competitiveness of the Pittsburgh region with respect to other American cities. Smoke and flood control efforts, highway construction, a system of rural parks, and urban renewal projects, including the corporate skyscrapers of the Golden Triangle, were all conceived within an overall framework of attracting and maintaining population and business investment. In response to long-running concerns about a chronic shortage of space for commercial expansion due to the rugged topography, conservative business leaders reluctantly turned to federally subsidized urban renewal programs in the 1950s for assistance in transforming older, mixed-use areas along the riverfronts into planned industrial districts, such as one envisioned for the Manchester neighborhood on the city’s North Side. At the same time, Conference officials acknowledged and even encouraged the migration of other urban functions, especially housing, to the periphery, where there was “enough land so that housing objectives may be realized, and every family live within easy commuting distance of the heart of the city.” 2