Abstract
In 2011, a reporter on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s urban neighborhood beat penned an article optimistically titled, “Hello Chateau, Your Neighborhood Has Potential.” The Chateau “neighborhood” is an industrial area wedged along the city’s North Shore, adjacent to a suddenly vibrant strip of land that saw two sports stadiums, a casino, and several hotels and restaurants built in the previous decade. The article celebrated Chateau’s inclusion in an Urban Lab architecture course at Carnegie Mellon University. For an entire semester, students, as the reporter wrote, “took the neighborhood, simmered it in the juices of their creative minds and turned it into a hip new destination.” Chateau, in its current form, was “ugly and hard to get to.” Worse still, its industrial buildings were “hogging a potentially high-rent shoreline with a great view of the Golden Triangle.” Students spent the semester replanning the neighborhood, giving it riverfront apartments, a public market, stormwater mitigation, and other amenities typical of planning in twenty-first-century urban America. 1 The class was only an exercise, but nowhere in the article was any discussion of working with the current owners and occupiers of the industrial buildings. Industrial uses were timeworn and needed reworking to fit the new image of Pittsburgh, a decidedly postindustrial city. The undercurrent of rebranding, rebuilding, and renewal flows through urban history, but the undertow is the strongest in America’s manufacturing heartland and present in four deeply researched recent studies of this region.
The architectural students’ classroom exercise could easily serve as a coda to Tracy Neumann’s brilliant new study Remaking the Rust Belt. Neumann’s comparative study of Pittsburgh and Hamilton’s economic transformation in the 1970s and 1980s stops short of accusing Pittsburgh’s urban leaders of sabotaging the city’s steel economy. However, she argues that Pittsburgh civic leaders and the postwar “growth coalitions” actively welcomed and even promoted a “postindustrial” vision for the city that amounted to a “pervasive ideology that privileged white collar jobs and middle class residents” over “social democratic goals” (pp. 2-3). Seen this way, “postindustrialism” serves as one path among many to neoliberalism. Most scholars would agree that recent urban policy has embraced varying combinations of New Urbanist aesthetic with fealty to so-called “creative class” industries, with preference to development that favors work in medicine, technology, and education. Neumann’s claim here is that the postindustrial ethic was at work in reshaping Pittsburgh well before the 1970s and 1980s, and those decades essentially served as a flowering of previous developments. Sources that emphasize policymaking and policy sharing serve as the foundation of Neumann’s research. This is a book about how ideas were shared across cities and countries, and how those ideas influenced economic development policy.
Pittsburgh’s first “Renaissance” was a national bellwether for urban renewal and synergy between the mayors’ office (David Lawrence) and local business elites (the Allegheny Conference on Community Development) in rebuilding an aging downtown, along with innovative pollution and flood controls. Neumann’s emphasis is how Pittsburgh’s leaders understood and marketed the Renaissance. The most famous rebuilding project of the Renaissance completely demolished a mixed-use industrial and warehouse district at Pittsburgh’s confluence and resulted in its now iconic Point State Park, adjacent to a complex of office buildings, high-rise residences, and a hotel. This, Neumann argues, amounts to a foundation for postindustrialism for Pittsburgh. This theme continues through the 1970s, into an era where federal funding dropped precipitously for cities, and private-sector investment was now expected to take up the slack. Along the way, Neumann, like many recent revisionist scholars, does not spare Jimmy Carter of criticism, noting his administration commissioned a report on “Urban America in the 80s” that explicitly encouraged flexible labor markets and welcomed the nation’s economic restructuring.
Such restructuring wreaked havoc on Pittsburgh’s industrial economy in the 1980s, when fully 44 percent of the region’s manufacturing jobs disappeared. Neumann’s harshest criticism is saved for Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania’s civic and state leaders in the 1980s, whose economic policies did little to preserve manufacturing jobs. One example of this is “Strategy 21,” an economic development vision for the region created in 1985 by a consortium of city officials, civic leaders, and local universities. Pittsburgh’s future, its authors argued, was in economic diversification, manufacturing was de-emphasized, and education, technology, medicine, and cultural amenity enhancements were the key to future prosperity. Just as Pittsburgh’s factories closed for good, Strategy 21 and “Renaissance II” were second verse, same as the first. Vast swaths of downtown saw new development, most prominently the beginnings of a “Cultural District” of theaters and restaurants, and new corporate headquarters for PPG Industries and Dravo Corporation. Ironically, the very industrial corporations that threw so many locals out of work were now lauded for deciding to keep their white-collar headquarters in Pittsburgh. Neumann notes that even manufacturers themselves essentially used a “postindustrial” ethic, quoting a local executive as saying “US Steel wasn’t in the business of making steel. It was in the business of making profits” (p. 86).
Neumann’s study is comparative, and the foil for Pittsburgh’s embrace of postindustrialism is Canada’s steel city, Hamilton, Ontario. As a distant second to Toronto in provincial size and stature, Hamilton’s civic leaders sought to mimic Pittsburgh’s public-private economic development partnerships. Ironically, Hamilton’s postindustrial ambitions were somewhat hamstrung by provincial political leaders who cultivated Toronto as Ontario’s financial and service-sector center and sought to maintain Hamilton as a manufacturing center and a secondary city. Even Hamilton’s renewal schemes differed from Pittsburgh, as the city could not retain industrial headquarters jobs, its urban industry in some cases survived longer than Pittsburgh’s. Some of Neumann’s comparisons between Hamilton and Pittsburgh sometimes seem a bit facile. She acknowledges that Hamilton also eventually lost thousands of manufacturing jobs and recently became an attractive and less expensive place for “creative class” professionals willing to leave Toronto. But she has also given us a timely and invaluable revision of Pittsburgh’s supposed “recovery,” reminding us that at least some of the national perception of a new Pittsburgh is a result of marketing. Perhaps the clearest example of this came in 1985, when Rand McNally rated Pittsburgh as the “most livable city in America” based on a variety of arbitrary metrics. That pyrrhic victory came in the middle of the city’s worst economic decade since the Great Depression, as a virtual economic diaspora swept thousands of Pittsburghers reluctantly out of the region, in search of living wage employment.
Neumann’s chief provocation is that Pittsburgh’s civic leaders, at minimum, welcomed and arguably facilitated deindustrialization. Another recent study of Pittsburgh, Beyond Rust, by Allen Dieterich-Ward, approaches some of the same problems from a different lens. Neumann compares two cities across international borders, but is chiefly concerned with physical spaces in central cities. Dieterich-Ward approaches Pittsburgh as the largest city in a culturally and economically homogeneous region he calls the “Steel Valley” that stretches across many Western Pennsylvania counties and even includes industrial nodes in eastern Ohio and the West Virginia panhandle. Taking a regional approach allows Dieterich-Ward to argue that cities’ futures and pasts depend “as much on the hinterland as what happens downtown” (p. 287). Dieterich-Ward agrees with Neumann that policymakers, at times, willingly erased Pittsburgh’s industrial past, but he also believes there “are few clear-cut villains” in the Steel Valley’s history of transformation. To Dieterich-Ward, economic transformation itself is gradual, and distinctive eras overlap. The first American residents of the Steel Valley were mostly farmers, and agriculture never died; “the industrialized countryside existed side-by-side with earlier agricultural modes of production” (p. 42). Industry never fully died out either; “scratch the surface of post-industrial Pittsburgh and you’ll uncover the Steel Valley buried not far underneath” (p. 254).
Dieterich-Ward’s regional approach to urban history takes us to small cities and small towns across the Steel Valley, where economic recovery proved to be more intractable. The hilly terrain of the Steel Valley encouraged the development of villages and cities that hugged riverfronts, and the region’s plentiful iron ore and bituminous coal facilitated the growth of coal mining and steel production. The result was vertically integrated industrial corporations operating within municipal fragmentation, as hundreds of boroughs, cities, townships, and villages were, to one degree or another, dependent on manufacturing for their livelihood. From this regional vantage point, center-city Pittsburgh enjoyed built-in advantages that industrial satellite communities such as Steubenville, Ohio, and Wheeling, West Virginia, did not. Dieterich-Ward agrees with Neumann that major urban renewal projects such as the Renaissance purposely “erased the previous century of industrialization,” but he also correctly points out that Pittsburgh was the Steel Valley’s center of capital and culture, which were deployed as tools to reinvent the city. Smaller communities on the geographic fringe of the Steel Valley had less of both. This is important because even when creative and energetic mayors, such as John Laslo in 1960s Martins Ferry, Ohio, succeeded in attracting federal funding for civic projects, outside capital almost never followed up to create new jobs. Dieterich-Ward tellingly quotes a local businessman, who observed Martins Ferry was “not an island. It had to rely on things happening from outside, and those things didn’t happen” (p. 115). Other communities on the Steel Valley fringes tried their hands at leveraging transportation changes into rebranding, most notably Steubenville, Ohio. Thanks to new freeways, the formerly midsized industrial city, bleeding population and jobs in the 1970s and 1980s, suddenly found itself within a half hour’s drive of Pittsburgh’s airport. Steubenville’s civic leaders nicknamed their community the “burb of the Burgh,” hoping to attract suburbanites whose work took them to the region’s airport corridor. These efforts are framed less as successes or failures than as examples of the interconnectedness of the Steel Valley’s communities, and, therefore, the importance of using a regional framework of analysis for urban historians.
Dieterich-Ward sees the end result of the great variety of policies he unearths as “a region of contrasts.” The city of Pittsburgh still retains a vibrant downtown, renowned cultural institutions, major research universities, and a growing technology sector. The entire Steel Valley, however, has lost population for decades. As early as the 1950s, the Wheeling-Steubenville Metropolitan Statistical Area was one of only six metropolitan study areas in the entire country to lose population during the boom period between 1940 and 1970, a trend that has yet to reverse itself. Including the hinterland also allows Dieterich-Ward to integrate rural spaces into urban history. This is accomplished in his analysis of the creation of Ohiopyle State Park, built in Fayette County during the 1960s, a decade where local residents absorbed the loss of thousands of mining jobs as part of coal’s long decline. A nonprofit corporation purchased land for the park along the Youghiogheny River, and turned it over to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Building the park required land acquisitions, razing properties along the riverfront, in short, the same process that urban renewal in the city center required. Like urban renewal, decision-making for rural Ohiopyle occurred in downtown Pittsburgh, and the park was largely conceived of as a place for outside residents. Rural tourism was a poor substitute for mass industrial employment, as Dieterich-Ward quoted one Fayette County resident with saying that the park would generate very few jobs, and “meanwhile, the rest of us have to live” (p. 137). Weaving rural, urban, and suburban history together is one of Dieterich-Ward’s many virtues, and urbanists would serve our field well to take up his call for more regional studies to complicate how we approach problems that are rarely inherently “urban” or “suburban.”
Dieterich-Ward is reluctant to embrace the “declension” narrative familiar to Rust Belt history, even though the Steel Valley’s actual population decline stands out as an obvious and increasingly existential problem for many of its communities. Read a certain way, Beyond Rust is a story of how a region did somewhat successfully reinvent itself to compete economically in a postindustrial world. The current mayor of Pittsburgh actually provides a promotional quote on the book’s jacket. To his credit, Dieterich-Ward avoids a success-failure binary as too simplistic. Both Neumann and Dieterich-Ward decisively conclude that deindustrialization and capital reallocation have not benefited the region’s large and embattled working class. The declension narrative may be too simplistic, but it also holds true that hundreds of thousands of living wage, unionized jobs are gone, probably forever. Neither of these two excellent new histories of Pittsburgh makes claims as social history, but we rarely hear from workers themselves. Dieterich-Ward estimates the Steel Valley region lost 120,000 manufacturing jobs in the 1980s alone, and Neumann laments of Pittsburgh that “factories were gone, and so were most of the people who had worked in them” (p. 211). 2 What happened to these people? Even in the midst of steel’s final collapse in the 1980s, this was an open question. The eminent labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan, writing about deindustrialization in 1980s Chicago, recalled standing on a street corner near where 18,000 can manufacturing jobs once were, all of which were gone. Of the workers, Geoghegan wrote, “Now where are they? Nobody really knows. Even social scientists get spooky, heebie-jeeby feelings when they have to think about them.” 3
But after plants shut down and capital is redeployed, people adjust to economic restructuring. Chloe Taft’s remarkable From Steel to Slots seeks to understand how urban residents live and experience these jarring changes, and, in the process, she makes a genuinely original and fresh contribution to urban scholarship. Taft’s chosen case study is Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the kind of midsized city that gets little attention from urban scholars, but has also relied on steel for a century, experienced dramatic job losses, and is now reliant upon “postindustrial” employment. Taft’s primary frame of reference is a single physical space, the former site of the massive Bethlehem Steel factory, since closed, mostly razed, and rebuilt to house a large casino, owned by the Vegas Sands Corporation. “Deindustrialization,” argues Taft, is a concept that is too simplistic in understanding both how capital operates with ever-increasing mobility and how residents adjust and adapt to economic changes. Studying a single space allows Taft to do the urban historians’ version of a deep dive, and she argues that the postindustrial landscape “is not a blank slate, but a rich resource of past associations and memories that are regularly mined for political, economic, and social purposes” (p. 16). Such past associations and memories are constructed by civic elites, new and old corporate entities, and—most important to Taft’s study—ordinary residents themselves. Taft’s own intellectual labor is impressive; she interviewed seventy-six people over many long stays in her former hometown. What results is a study that defies academic discipline; From Steel to Slots can be read by practitioners and students of social history, urban studies, American studies, and sociology, told mostly through the eyes of people who are experiencing urban change in real time.
Taft prefaces her study with a useful chapter on Bethlehem and Bethlehem Steel’s history. The actual decline of Bethlehem’s steel industry occurred gradually, at times imperceptibly. There was no “finite moment” where prosperity gave way to economic free fall. Nevertheless, certain patterns in Bethlehem’s history inform its postindustrial economy and served to “order” the city’s cultural landscape. Moravian Germans seeking religious freedom first moved to and built up Bethlehem’s North Side, and throughout the city’s history, Taft demonstrates, the North Side was associated with order, thrift, and a certain kind of quaintness entirely unrelated with factory work. As Bethlehem Steel grew into an industrial giant and the city’s largest employer, its managerial class favored the supposedly bucolic North Side as a place of residence. The city’s South Side, on the contrary, became the site of Bethlehem Steel’s single largest factory, which employed 22,000 workers by 1915. South Side neighborhoods filled up with Eastern European immigrants and then Latin American immigrants in the second half of the twentieth century. Class differences between North and South Sides were evident, but also not mutually exclusive. The dirt and soot of the industrial and working-class South Side represented prosperity of a different sort to its residents, most of whom relied on “The Steel” (as Bethlehem Steel was colloquially nicknamed) for their livelihoods.
Residents of mid-twentieth-century Bethlehem shared a widespread perception that a “social contract” governed the city, with Bethlehem Steel as the chief benefactor of jobs and charity. But the contract shattered when Bethlehem Steel gradually declined and finally collapsed into bankruptcy. During bankruptcy litigation in 2001, courts privileged shareholder value over pension obligations, allowing Bethlehem Steel to unload 95,000 pensions on the federal government. Taft’s ability to give human meaning to these structural changes shines through, as one retired worker tells her these actions reduced his monthly pension by 40 percent, and eliminated his health care. These lived realities act as the chief narration of Bethlehem’s transformation. Taft manages to avoid condescending to her interview subjects while also not falling into the oral history trap of nostalgia. Her story of Bethlehem’s industrial rise and fall is not used as a prelude to an empty present, but to show that historical perceptions and reputations lingered long enough to be reimagined in the twenty-first century. When Pennsylvania legalized gambling and Bethlehem became a candidate for a new casino, debates over the casino became intertwined with the city’s past dual heritage. Opponents evoked the city’s Moravian “North Side” wholesomeness; Taft convincingly demonstrates that many residents sincerely believed this image of the city was real and ill-suited to a Las Vegas capital-supported casino. When the Bethlehem South Side site was chosen, the Las Vegas Sands corporation consciously adopted a design that reflected 1940s industrial South Side Bethlehem, a form of heritage development that evokes a “golden age” over a messier recent past.
Throughout From Steel to Slots, Taft conveys that the distant past, recent past, and present day are always overlapping. The Vegas Sands casino did create several thousand jobs, but Taft is more interested in the way that actual casino employment and business practices resemble the neoliberal economy. “Casino capitalism” has become a descriptor for America’s modern-day economy, and the Vegas Sands wears the label well; employment is not seen as permanent, and many workers have digested this reality. To illustrate capital’s postindustrial deployment, Taft quotes Vegas Sands mogul Sheldon Adelson’s comment that “you need dough to make bread, and we’re gonna make dough here” as symbolic of capital’s now unbounded relationship with community (p. 12). Yet, even within literal casino capitalism, many Vegas Sands employees envisioned work at the casino as a postindustrial “factory” and in their interviews invoked the language of the industrial workplace in their new work worlds. Likewise, even in its industrial heyday, Taft unearths a Bethlehem Steel executive essentially repeating something that a U.S. Steel executive says in Neumann’s study: “We are not in the business of making steel. We are in the business of making money” (p. 211). To its corporate masters, industrialism itself primarily amounted to capital accumulation.
Taft also interrogates historic preservation in great detail. Here, she argues preservation itself is fixed in a specific context, and when that context changes, the language and content of what preservation seeks to preserve also changes. In the 1950s, when Bethlehem Steel remained the city’s corporate king and preservation first became a part of urban policy, Bethlehem’s planners focused their energies on preserving Moravian structures on the North Side, and simultaneously allowed a South Side neighborhood to be razed to make room for expanding Bethlehem Steel’s largest plant. When the Bethlehem Steel plant shut down decades later, suddenly, “manufacturing joined Moravians as a touchstone for narratives of past stability and order” (p. 134). Relatedly, Taft takes inventory of the ethnic Catholic parishes that slowly lost parishioners and closed their doors. Parish closures essentially acted as a second “shut down” for South Siders. Bethlehem Steel represented economic order and stability; ethnic parishes served as symbols of cultural and spiritual stability. In discussing these jarring changes, Taft again avoids nostalgia, observing that many South Side Puerto Rican residents have lived in Bethlehem as long as white ethnics, and are rarely included in “heritage-based” cultural development. In this carefully woven tapestry of the ambiguities and emotions of postindustrial Bethlehem residents, Taft also reminds us that small, noncoastal cities like Bethlehem are no less “global” than New York or Chicago. It would also behoove historians and urban scholars to give urban casinos the same attention universities and medical centers are beginning to receive, because they are also an important part of postindustrial urbanism.
Taft spends much of From Steel to Slots analyzing how historic preservation and community memory are selective and utilized for political and economic ends. The final book in this essay essentially inverts this concept. What historically constitutes the “modern,” not the “historic,” makes up a considerable part of Domenic Pacyga’s Slaughterhouse, a narrative-driven chronicle of the birth, growth, death, and partial rebirth of the “Square Mile” south of Chicago that made up its iconic and, at times, infamous Stockyards and Packingtown. Pacyga, one of Chicago’s most prolific historians, frames his study as a history of a distinctive place, one that ushered Chicago and the United States into the “modern” era of industrialization that characterizes the half century after the Civil War. Many previous historians have tackled the Stockyards before, but usually in the service of other themes: labor, immigration, race, and economic. Pacyga seeks to see the “Square Mile” (which encompasses both the Stockyards itself and the adjacent Packingtown slaughterhouses) itself as a unique urban space that generated so many key themes of American history.
Perhaps the most unique argument made here is Pacyga’s analysis of the Square Mile’s popularity as a tourist destination, almost from the moment construction ended in 1865. Visitors’ guides to Chicago included the Stockyards, large packing companies such as Swift put out guide books, trading cards, and gave tours of its operations. Many famous dignitaries stopped at the Square Mile, including Rudyard Kipling, Max Weber, Tsar Alexander II of Russia, and millions of other visitors. Why? A fascination with the grotesque? Pacyga tells us that the world’s largest meat processing urban space in the late nineteenth century was also the ultimate symbol of America’s industrial progress. Here was were transportation innovations aligned with modern and efficient production, where technology and innovation interlocked, and also where modern human beings’ relationship with their food forever changed. Local production of foodstuffs was replaced by mass production. Even Henry Ford was said to have been inspired by the shop floor efficiency of the slaughterhouses in his creation of the moving assembly line. If Chicago was the ultimate symbol of the nineteenth-century American urban boomtown, the Square Mile personified many of the reasons why. At its height during World War I, the Square Mile employed 50,000 workers, including many thousand women, and an alarmingly high number of children. Pacyga never glosses over the graphic nature of nineteenth-century meat-packing, nor its appalling working conditions, but others have provided historical meanings to endless capital and labor clashes on the kill floors of Packingtown. Readers do learn that women were purposely paid less money for identical work to men, that strikes were usually crushed by capital’s reliance on state power, and that industrial unionism remained a forlorn dream until the Great Depression, but these stories are told as only one part of the Square Mile’s history.
Pacyga’s narration of the economic decline of the Square Mile is yet another example of how historians have continuously pushed the seeds of urban industrial decline back in the timeline of American history. He uncovers a startlingly prescient observation from an industry insider in 1910 who predicted the trucking industry would eat into the centralizing power of American railroads, a trend that rendered the marriage of transportation and production in the same Square Mile obsolete, expensive, and unnecessary (pp. 137-38). Other familiar trends to urban industrial decline emerge in the 1920s: local businesses are bought up by out-of-town investors—this first occurs with Armour’s sale to New York investors in 1923—and fidelity to shareholder value gradually became amplified decade-by-decade. The specific significance of these trends for Chicago’s own urban history cannot be understated. As generations of immigrants from Europe settled in modest neighborhoods ringing the Square Mile, they secured work, then usually moved further west and south to the urban and suburban fringes of Chicago. Irish and German workers were replaced by Eastern Europeans, and they by Mexican and (especially) African American workers. By 1958, African Americans made up a clear majority of all packinghouse workers, precisely when mass employment in the Chicago packing industry came to an end. Three years earlier, Wilson Packing closed its Square Mile operations, throwing 3,000 now-unionized workers out of employment, 2,000 of whom were African American. The timing of these industrial job losses is strikingly similar to Detroit, another city with a large unionized African American work force, where Thomas Sugrue has famously argued Detroit’s deindustrialization started in the 1950s. 4 Pacyga’s book ends on a much more hopeful note, with a concluding chapter on a successfully redeveloped Square Mile that includes minority-owned businesses, and a variety of niche locavore food and produce start-ups, hinting that the Square Mile could again become an innovator, this time in a fledgling green economy. All told, Pacyga’s precise and accessible monograph is not just a fond reminder of an important historical artifact; it reminds us that urbanization and industrialization were deeply interconnected in the late nineteenth century.
But not so much anymore. Urbanization and industrialization have been untethered for decades. Scholarly attention is turning away from pinpointing the chronology of the urban industrial sunset. Historians are now much more suspicious of attributing globalization and economic restructuring to benign market forces. 5 Both inside and outside of urban history, scholars are now zeroing in on the 1970s as an era when politicians began to appeal to what Tracy Neumann has identified as postindustrialism. 6 As urban history scholarship continues to evolve, perhaps historians should interpret economic restructuring less as the product of a distinct era and more as a certain type of urban ethos that has at varying times intersected with class, ethnicity, and race to serve the material ends of ruling classes and political coalitions. One example of this is Domenic Vitiello’s argument that Philadelphia’s “deindustrialization” began quite intentionally during the Progressive Era, when a City Beautiful project virtually wiped out a major manufacturing district north and west of Center City. 7 Other such cases in the early twentieth century can be found without much squinting. Taft’s analysis of preservation in Bethlehem remind us that today’s historic space was yesterday’s modern icon, wiping out what policymakers decided was timeworn. Cleveland’s now architecturally iconic nearly century-old Terminal Tower is another example, as it was originally built with the express purpose of clearing out a central city immigrant “slum” that also housed dozens of small factories, workshops, warehouses, and other artifacts of urban industry. 8
These limited examples do not necessarily mean that industrial decline was a self-inflicted wound on cities. They are significant, instead, because they hint that reimagining and rebuilding cities at the expense of the people living and doing business in them is a pervasive pattern across the span of American history. Three of the four books examined here make this critique implicitly. Neumann’s Pittsburgh postindustrial boosters sought to reimagine the Steel City as a white-collar center at the expense of industrial production. Dieterich-Ward is more charitable to many of the same policymakers, but also provides examples of converting rural and urban land toward new uses that serve the purposes of different residents. Taft’s entire analysis is premised on the replacement of the “social contract” with the more arbitrary concept of “corporate social responsibility.” She concludes with a plea for planning to be more closely attuned to local culture that might make it more difficult to “treat citizens as generic consumers” (p. 257). Urban history is, instead, riddled with examples of the opposite, of physical and economic restructuring occurring at the expense of residents, in the name of urban renewal or revitalization. This pattern is so deeply embedded in urban power relationships that when a newspaper narrates a cohort of architectural students’ imagining the erasure of a whole district in Pittsburgh, no one bats an eye.