Pittsburgh always was tough to navigate
“The city was given to intermittent waves of efforts to clean up its cluttered affairs, many the partial starts of a functioning drunk — ashamed of his chaotic appearance but unable to shake it entirely.”
So says architecture critic Anthony Paletta in his whipsmart essay in The American Conservative, “Why Pittsburgh is a Planner’s Dream and Nightmare.” Mr. Paletta lives in Brooklyn but grew up in little Washington and is back often to visit family in Dormont and Polish Hill. He knows our terrain well, and his love for these hills and valleys seeps through his writing.
He’s sympathetic with the task that a team led by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. took on in 1910 when it tried to find better ways for Pittsburghers to get around — and beautify our region in the bargain. “No city of equal size in America, and perhaps the world,” Mr. Olmstead wrote, “is compelled to adapt its growth to such a difficult complication of high ridges, deep valleys and precipitous slopes as Pittsburgh.”
The Pittsburgh Civic Commission hired Mr. Olmsted at a time when the city had the shaky but earned confidence of a suddenly big player on the national stage. In the previous decade, Pittsburgh had annexed the city of Allegheny (now our North Side), along with a handful of neighboring boroughs, such as Sheraden, Beechview and Elliott, helping the city go from the 11th largest in the country to the eighth.
By 1910, almost 534,000 people lived in Pittsburgh — about 76% more than now — and the peak population of nearly 677,000 would not come until 1950. It was about then that metropolitan planners began earnestly leveling city neighborhoods to make way for the parkways, stadia and the full-blown suburbanization of the region.
That is not what was envisioned by Mr. Olmsted (son of the landscape architect who co-designed Central Park in New York, and a celebrated designer of national parks himself). It’s not that he lacked ambition. Mr. Olmsted proposed no less than 80 road improvements, which even he acknowledged would put “an altogether unreasonable financial burden” upon Pittsburgh and its neighbors.
He didn’t get all he sought, but it’s fun to go back 110 years and see that locals had some of the same gripes then as now, albeit with twists.
“Pittsburgh pavements are prevailingly bad,” Mr. Olmsted wrote, and this makes “teamsters in Pittsburgh ... driving in the car tracks ... less ready to turn aside for cars or other vehicles, than in most cities.” That seems the flip side of newcomers’ contemporary traffic complaint: natives giving oncoming traffic the courtesy of the Pittsburgh left.
The automobile age was dawning in 1910, but less than 2% of the 530 miles of main thoroughfares within 7 miles of Grant Street had “room for passage between cars and vehicles, slow-moving or standing at the curb.” Among the better roads were Fifth Avenue, a “fourline thoroughfare,” and Liberty Avenue, with six “lines.” A drawing of Liberty shows horse-drawn carriages in both directions in each of the outer lanes, with autos and trolleys in both directions in their respective lanes between them. All it lacked was a bike lane.
Some of what Mr. Olmsted suggested came to be. The Mount Washington slope became green and the “Monongahela Hillside Thoroughfare” was realized as the Boulevard of the Allies, “another avenue that shows occasional signs of aspirations to a parkway pedigree but whose reality remains a good deal more unlettered,” Mr. Paletta noted. Negley Run Boulevard, Allegheny River Boulevard and Saw Mill Run Parkway also arrived, “although the foliage along them is more often by accident [than] design,” he correctly wrote.
Mr. Olmsted was unabashed in proclaiming that utility and beauty are not at war, and it “was striking and rather shameful” that no bridge in Pittsburgh ranked with the world’s beauties. I’d argue that he overlooked the Smithfield Street Bridge, built in the 1880s and now the oldest river bridge in Allegheny County. But in the 1920s, handsome yellow triplet bridges rose across the Allegheny River at Sixth, Seventh and Ninth streets, as did the 16th Street/David McCullough Bridge farther upstream. The George Westinghouse Memorial Bridge, gracing the Turtle Creek Valley since 1932, is even more impressive than the viaduct in Lausanne, Switzerland, that Mr. Olmstead touts in his report.
I suspect he was pleased, but we still shy from beauty hereabouts. The plan to cap Interstate 579/Crosstown Boulevard with a three-acre park has been criticized by those who embrace the uglification of cities because all they want is to zoom through them as fast as possible. It’s like urban planning by “Death Race 2000.”
It’s good to be reminded that, with a little care, we can aspire to civilization.