Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America by Allen Dieterich-Ward (review)

Beyond Rust is an ambitious history of Pittsburgh and its relationship to the surrounding tristate region. In the late nineteenth century, industrialists drawn by the region’s natural resources and rivers built an industrial landscape of mines and mill towns and tied them together with rail transport. The decline of steel and ancillary industries spurred planners to envision a new future, and civic and commercial leaders went to work, attempting to erase that nineteenth-century landscape and replace it with new developments.

Allen Dieterich-Ward’s study combines the history of planning, historical geography, reading the landscape, and social and cultural history. Growing up in rural Belmont County, Ohio, he viewed Pittsburgh from his family’s farm, not far from Consolidated Coal’s massive Egypt Valley strip mine. Unlike many histories of urban planning, he is deeply concerned with how changes in the urban center affected the surrounding region, once so intimately tied to Pittsburgh’s industries, and his book provides a model for metropolitan regional history.

The first part of Beyond Rust charts the rise of the “Steel Valley,” an area that stretches from the coal and coke country of western Pennsylvania, through the mill towns of the Monongahela Valley, past Pittsburgh and the many mill towns of the Ohio Valley, with mines of northern West Virginia and eastern Ohio on the outskirts. Dieterich-Ward finds that the construction of railroads and vertically integrated corporations brought the region together in a way that was hard to replicate. In the 1940s, Pittsburgh’s industrial and political leaders created the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a public-private partnership that advanced their vision of the Golden Triangle, a series of developments, projects, and policies that would usher in a new economic era. Encompassing more than just smokestack industries, it was a vision for regulated commerce in the city, development in the suburbs, and recreation and less regulated extraction in the hinterlands.

The second part of the book examines the complicated results of those plans in both the city of Pittsburgh and the broader region. Civic leaders in smaller mill towns in the region were unable to achieve the same results that Pittsburgh planners enjoyed, partly because of limitations on their resources, political divisions, and lack of private investment. As planners from the urban center imposed their ideas on rural places like Ohiopyle and Egypt Valley, they encountered support and resistance. The resulting parks and mines failed to realize boosters’ lofty dreams or detractors’ worst fears. Back in the urban center, Pittsburghers who were left out of the “Renaissance,” like the low-income residents of the Hill District, organized and resisted further urban-renewal efforts that damaged and displaced their communities.

In the final part of the book, Dieterich-Ward explores the meaning of “post-industrial” metropolitan Pittsburgh. Planners have tried to learn from the mistakes of urban planning’s past and forge a new community identity that is pragmatic yet still embraces the historical legacies of the industrial landscape, from the success of Pittsburgh’s higher education, medical, and high-tech economy to more modest projects downriver to attract new residents, preserve historic buildings, and create new public spaces and retail centers.

Beyond Rust brings together an impressive body of archival research, published primary sources, and oral histories. It also brings together both convergent and divergent histories of cities, towns, and villages in the region. Where scholars set the geographical boundaries of their studies matters, and Dieterich-Ward tells a story that complicates the celebratory accounts of the Pittsburgh Renaissance as well as the gloomy tales of coal patches and mill towns in decline. By forcing us to look at both—a region of contrasts he calls it—he challenges us to see connections previously hidden and to grapple with realities of urban neoliberalism.

While I appreciate the complexities of this history, there were times that I wanted Dieterich-Ward to make more definitive...