Renaissance and Retrenchment in the 1970s

Abstract

Between World War II and 1970, Pittsburgh’s Democratic Party hand-selected the city’s mayors, with one exception: Pete Flaherty. After four years on City Council and a close relationship with Party leaders, Flaherty rejected first an invitation to be Mayor Joseph Barr’s designated successor, beholden to the Party for campaign money, and a subsequent attempt by Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD) members to lure him onto the Republican ticket. He campaigned instead as an unendorsed, independent Democrat and beat the machine candidate in the Democratic primary; in the 1969 general election, he ran on the platform that he was “nobody’s boy.” He financed his campaign through donations, launched innovative billboard and newspaper advertising campaigns, and won handily. Four years later, after alienating the Democratic Party, organized labor, his predecessor, most of the City Council, the police, the firemen, local CEOs, African American leaders, and both of the city’s major newspapers, Flaherty ran unopposed for a second term, having secured both the Republican and Democratic nominations. The joke around town was that “nobody likes Pete except the voters.”1 Popular narratives of Pittsburgh’s urban development since 1945 most often characterize Flaherty’s 1970–1977 mayoral tenure as a temporary disruption of perpetual Renaissance and relentless progress. Flaherty was a passionate critic of the Renaissance’s top–down, corporateoriented approach to urban development and the distribution of public resources, and he set out