Renaissance and Retrenchment in the 1970s

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, corporate-oriented approach to urban development and the distribution of public resources, and he set out to break up the cozy relationship between elected officials and ACCD leaders. Even as Flaherty challenged the corporatist urban vision of the first Renaissance, however, his administration introduced austerity measures and began redevelopment projects that laid the programmatic and institutional foundations for his better-known successor Richard Caliguiri’s “Renaissance II” development program in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ² Flaherty helped facilitate Pittsburgh’s transition from its reliance on the urban development strategies typical of the postwar liberal state, many of which were pioneered in Pittsburgh in the 1940s and 1950s, to the devolutionary and privatizing strategies that later became fundamental to neoliberal urbanism. ³

Flaherty represented a new kind of Democrat, the likes of which Pittsburgh’s well-oiled machine had never encountered. Unlike his Democratic predecessors, who were beholden to both the ACCD and the unions, Flaherty’s wariness of the outsize influence of interest group politics made him more like Jimmy Carter than like Lyndon Johnson. As former city planning director Morton Coleman recalled with some understatement, Flaherty “was not a big government person.” ⁴ He was the first of a new breed of neo-populist liberals who embraced fiscal conservatism when faced with tax revolts and urban financial crises. ⁵ Democratic mayors like Flaherty and, later, Ed Koch in New York City, Diane Feinstein in San Francisco, and William Green in Philadelphia, rejected the political legacy of the declining New Deal coalition and promoted instead new modes of governance that they saw as more consistent with their limited resources and emerging middle-class resistance to tax increases. ⁶

When Flaherty was first elected mayor, Pittsburgh’s seminal postwar urban renewal program had just wound down. In the four years between 1965 and 1968, Pittsburgh had received over $100 million in federal grants-in-aid—an average of just over $25 million a year. Pittsburgh’s debt burden was up slightly in 1970, but as Flaherty prepared to take office, city planners predicted that the federal funds they expected to receive, along with the private investment continued public investment would attract, promised a rosy fiscal outlook into 1975. ⁷ The planners had not anticipated funding changes under the Nixon administration. During Flaherty’s time in office, the federal government slashed the amount of aid it sent to Pittsburgh by a third. ⁸ Flaherty took up the challenge of a reduced city budget and a higher debt burden by implementing austerity policies, eliminating public sector jobs, and reducing some city services.

Pittsburgh experienced problems common to North American manufacturing centers earlier and more acutely than other cities, and Flaherty’s focus on government efficiency and the austerity programs he implemented prefigured the more severe policies put in place in New York City in the middle of the decade. Flaherty eliminated a wage tax (which was later reinstated) and cut property taxes three times. He removed 18% of the non-uniformed workforce (nearly 2000 workers) from the city payroll, largely through attrition and departmental reorganization. He fired Democratic Party officials from their longtime patronage positions and replaced them with young department heads tasked with making the city’s bureaucracy more efficient. He openly scorned City Council and saw no reason to respond to interview requests from journalists. He eliminated chauffeurs for city department heads, and when city councilor and Teamsters leader Thomas Fagan challenged that decision, public opinion firmly supported Flaherty’s stance. ⁹ He improved some city services while allowing Pittsburgh’s aging infrastructure to collapse; he infuriated Allegheny County leaders, the Democratic Party, and the business community by blocking an unmanned light rail from downtown to the South Hills; and he severed the Renaissance’s carefully nurtured relationship between city hall and the business community. ¹⁰ As a result, at a time when other cities (New York, Cleveland) faced bankruptcy, Pittsburgh had a budget surplus.

Pittsburgh’s political and economic elites interpreted Flaherty’s campaign slogan, “nobody’s boy,” as a rebuke not only to the Democratic machine, but to the corporate-driven Renaissance and its most prominent champions: the ACCD, its Republican members, and the Mellon family in particular, whom Flaherty believed had too much influence over local politics and urban development. Not long after Flaherty took office, he evicted the ACCD from its office space in the city’s Urban Renewal Authority (URA)–owned Civic Building, where city planning and the URA kept offices. Flaherty canceled the lease and gave the ACCD sixty days to clear out; ACCD Executive Director Robert Pease recalled the move as part of Flaherty’s strategy, in concert with appointing new heads of planning and the URA, to restrict the ACCD’s influence over public agencies. ¹¹ Flaherty appointed his executive secretary Bruce Campbell head of the URA and replaced the corporate elites who had dominated the board since the agency’s inception with what he described as a mix of “downtown, political, and neighborhood people.” He brought in a new city planning director from Philadelphia, Bob Pasternoster, rather than promote someone from within the existing ranks. ¹² He reassigned some URA staffers to the city planning department and imposed a series of professional indignities, such as mandatory Friday afternoon meetings, on those who remained as a means of disciplining them. ¹³ Jack Robin, long-time Democratic political boss and chairman of the URA first under Mayor David Lawrence and again under Caliguiri, accused Flaherty of trying to destroy the agency, charging that Flaherty and Campbell “did their best. . . to denigrate, to loot and remove the powers of the Authority.” In Robin’s recollection, Flaherty came to office “thinking that we were all engaged in some terrific conspiracy.” ¹⁴ Pease remembered that mayors traditionally attended ACCD meetings and stopped by to “just talk,” but Flaherty delegated that responsibility to Campbell. When Pease asked Campbell to tell Flaherty to let the ACCD know if he needed anything, Campbell replied, “He’ll never call you.” ¹⁵

Flaherty recognized and capitalized on residents’ dissatisfaction with the redevelopment partnership at the heart of the Renaissance. ¹⁶ While he undoubtedly would have liked to retain the federal funding largesse of the 1960s, Flaherty believed that the city’s redevelopment partnership had removed too much power from the people, a concern that aligned with the Nixon administration’s devolutionary policies. Flaherty wanted to return power to the neighborhoods in much the same way Nixon wanted to restore autonomy to state and local governments. As part of his campaign to weaken the relationship between the city government and corporate elites, Flaherty reoriented the attentions of the URA and planning department toward neighborhood development and away from the Golden Triangle. Through the “more equitable distribution” of URA funds and tax revenue, Flaherty channeled more money and energy into the neighborhoods than any previous administration, “especially the small business areas and so forth,” he recalled, “to try to perk them up so they wouldn’t have the ghost-like quality of boarded up little neighborhood commercial centers.” ¹⁷

Most significantly, Flaherty redirected at least half of the city’s federal aid into the neighborhoods. “I think the previous mayors had been ‘downtown-oriented,’” Flaherty reflected. “Nothing wrong with that, but to be a bit too much ‘downtown-oriented’ was perhaps a mistake.” ¹⁸ Pease agreed, saying that by the time Flaherty took office, the city was “exhausted” by the redevelopment that had taken place over the previous two and a half decades. ¹⁹ The ACCD had, in fact, half-heartedly turned its attentions to social rather than physical development in the wake of resistance to urban renewal programs from African Americans in the Hill District and an uprising in that neighborhood after Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination. ²⁰ Flaherty’s determination to break the powerful political coalition between the mayor’s office and the ACCD reinforced the organization’s new direction. To ensure that Pittsburgh’s planning process focused on residential neighborhoods, Flaherty established a Community Planning Program in the city planning department in 1971, which institutionalized a citizen participation process through neighborhood-based advocacy planning. ²¹ Pease disparaged the Community Planning Boards that developed in response as “pseudo-city planning,” and the ACCD made little effort to cooperate with neighborhood planning programs. ²²

Flaherty’s focus on neighborhood planning did not, however, mean that he ignored large-scale projects, particularly those that would help remake industrial spaces for other kinds of uses. In the early 1970s, Flaherty’s planning department proposed many of the redevelopment projects that gained traction under his successor. Most prominently, planners sought ways to encourage the expansion of medical and educational complexes in Oakland and advocated using eminent domain to assemble land for industrial or commercial uses on the South Side, Herr’s Island, and in the Strip District, all sites that subsequently became centers of activity for Renaissance II. ²³ Flaherty and his city planners had not yet abandoned heavy manufacturing uses within the city limits, but projects already underway pointed to historic preservation as a mechanism for redeveloping industrial sites, or sites that were understood to be remnants of the industrial era, for uses compatible with visions for a postindustrial city. By shifting his focus away from Golden Triangle construction projects, toward decentralized and neighborhood-based development, Flaherty laid the groundwork for Caliguiri’s more ambitious citywide vision for a second Renaissance. Flaherty’s fiscal austerity also created the budget surplus that made it possible for Caliguiri to even contemplate such an undertaking. Flaherty’s city treasurer Joe Cosetti recalled, “the Caliguiri administration never would have been able to get off a dime had Pete not gotten rid of the load of patronage. If that same payroll was there when Caliguiri became mayor, he would have gone under.” ²⁴

Flaherty built his populist reputation by challenging the Renaissance and its corporate beneficiaries, but he pragmatically employed Renaissance institutions and, at times, the top–down approach of his predecessors to reorganize the city government and its finances. In his second term, Flaherty even “softened” toward the ACCD. ²⁵ By 1976, his last year in office, economic conditions in the city had deteriorated to the extent that Flaherty could no longer afford to indulge his anti-establishment inclination to sideline Pittsburgh’s corporate elites. That year, planners identified maintaining strong links between city government and the corporate sector, maintaining a favorable tax climate, and supporting continued growth in the Golden Triangle and Oakland as the city’s key economic development concern—priorities that were very much in line with the pro-growth agenda articulated first under Renaissance mayors Lawrence and Barr. Flaherty laid the foundation for Caliguiri’s ambitious Renaissance II downtown and neighborhood redevelopment program, which established Pittsburgh as an international model of postindustrial urbanism. His urban agenda also heralded the emergence of policy instruments associated with devolution and privatization that took shape first under Nixon and accelerated as the Carter and Reagan administrations increasingly withdrew federal resources from the urban sphere.