In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

30 2 the฀smoky฀City p u b l i c฀i n v o lv e m e n t฀i n฀c o n t r o l l i n g฀ ฀ a i r฀p o l lu t i o n฀i n฀p i t t s b u r g h Pittsburgh town is a smoky ol’ town, Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh town is a smoky ol’ town, Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh town is a smoky ol’ town, Solid iron from McKeesport down. Pittsburgh, Lord God, Pittsburgh. . . . All I do is cough and choke in Pittsburgh. All I do is cough and choke in Pittsburgh. All I do is cough and choke, From the iron filings and the sulfur smoke. In Pittsburgh, Lord God, Pittsburgh. —Woody Guthrie, “Pittsburgh Town” Pittsburgh’s air pollution problem makes an excellent case study of public involvement in political matters, and it does so for two reasons. The first is illustrated in the lyrics to folksinger Woody Guthrie’s “Pittsburgh Town”: the political matter at issue was so visible, so omnipresent, and so fundamental to the city’s image that it permeated almost everything in the city and in the minds of its residents alike. First and foremost in the minds of Americans, Pittsburgh was a “smoky ol’ town.” Air pollution is unique in this way; it disperses more easily and more widely than does water pollution, which flows only downstream. It circulates more quickly and broadly than does solid waste, which sits more or less where humans put it. Air pollution spreads out across the city and countryside, without regard for political boundaries and largely outside of human control, making for a remarkably difficult policy problem. The second reason might also be implicit in Guthrie’s lyrics, written in the tradition of folk protest against forces seemingly arrayed against the interests of the common people. For the vast majority of the city’s history, political responses to smoke and air pollution in Pittsburgh excluded public representation. Itwasnotuntilthelate1960sthattherewassubstantiveandmeaningfulinclusionof t h e฀s m o k y฀c i t y฀•฀31 the public. The importance of the issue, combined with the transition in public involvement , leaves historians both with copious records and effective comparisons of control attempts with and without public involvement. Pittsburgh’s dirty skies, and more than a century’s worth of attempts to clear them, provide a microcosm of larger political themes. The case of Pittsburgh thus deserves some explication, and this chapter describes the history of both the forces that created the pollution problem and political attempts to resolve it. making฀the฀City฀smoky In Pittsburgh, a variety of forces combined to concentrate the effects of air pollution , including meteorology, geography, technology, human settlement, industrial development, and the available fuel. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these forces made Pittsburgh known, nationally and internationally, as a dirty city; the town was defined by its air pollution as much as it was by its industrial production. Pride in industry competed with an emerging, progressive vision of urban life as the negative impact of air pollution became increasingly evident and set Pittsburgh apart from the rest of the nation. That vision spurred a series of attempts to control the production or ameliorate the consequences of smoke, and later, air pollution. The settlement that eventually became the city of Pittsburgh was founded on a narrow triangle of land where two rivers met to form a third. Deep in the forests of Southwest Pennsylvania, this natural formation was attractive to Native Americans and Anglo explorers alike, and an obvious location for trade, fortifications, and settlement. The confluence of rivers was a strategic hub for transport: people and goods flowed with the current down to Pittsburgh and beyond, and the city became a nexus for trade. Rivers, roads, railways, and canals flooded the Pittsburgh region with people and goods throughout the nineteenth century.1 New resources also fueled industrial development in Pittsburgh. The city developed at the center of a vast hinterland that served its needs for resources and markets. It was surrounded by the raw materials necessary for iron and steel production , including coking coal, the readily accessible bituminous coal of the Pittsburgh seam, and iron ore.2 Perhaps more importantly, Pittsburgh sat at the center of markets for its industrial products, with population centers to the east, the Great Lakes transportation hubs to the north, and the expanding needs of the frontier and transportation opportunities of the Mississippi to the west...

Share