Abstract
Cities on both sides of the North Atlantic began transitioning to a postindustrial economic base as early as the 1950s. However, the pace and extent of change varied greatly, not just among different cities but also within each one, with some areas experiencing new prosperity and others subjected to long-term decline. Two books published in 2016—Tracy Neumann’s Remaking the Rust Belt and Chloe Taft’s From Steel to Slots—explore this variation in the postindustrial experience, highlighting efforts by business leaders, policy makers, workers, and residents to influence the course of creative destruction.
Tracy Neumann’s Remaking the Rust Belt compares the redevelopment of two steel towns: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States and Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada. Both cases are drawn from the same region of North America, but Neumann sets them in transatlantic context. She argues that after World War II, business and political leaders in the industrial regions of the United States, Canada, and Western Europe backed a common agenda of economic diversification. Growth coalitions sought to engineer a transition from blue-collar jobs in heavy industry to professional jobs in technology, finance, services, and research through “a set of pragmatic tactics designed to remake urban space, including financial incentives, branding campaigns, and physical redevelopment, typically carried out by public-private partnerships” (p. 2). However, while urban elites on both sides of the Atlantic hoped to bring about a postindustrial future as speedily as possible, they varied in their capacity to pull it off. By comparing the pursuit of the postindustrial city on either side of an international boundary, Neumann is able to reveal how each city’s political context—from the local level to the federal—influenced the course of its redevelopment, much as Christopher Klemek did in his transatlantic analysis of urban renewal. 1
The book’s six chapters span 1945 to 1990, with each chapter alternating focus between Pittsburgh and Hamilton. Although never spelled out, the book has a clear structure. The first chapter argues that restructuring began with the remaking of central business districts after World War II, but the extent of redevelopment depended on regional, state/provincial, and federal support for urban renewal. The second chapter compares the formation of public–private partnerships in each city in the 1970s. The third chapter follows the partnerships into the 1980s, analyzing how instability in the steel industry and the rise of neoliberalism led the partnerships to prioritize the interests of middle-class professionals. The next two chapters compare the partnerships’ impacts on the physical structure of each city, with respect to their downtowns and steel-oriented waterfronts. The final chapter compares efforts to draw new residents and capital investment to each city by rebranding the once-sooty steel towns as livable, green, and innovative.
Although the term “postindustrial” did not circulate widely until after the publication of Daniel Bell’s 1973 bestseller, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Pittsburgh elites were already pursuing economic diversification in the 1950s. 2 After World War II, Pittsburgh executives formed the Alleghany Conference on Community Development to oversee the redevelopment of the Golden Triangle—the city’s central business district—into a financial and service center. Responsibility for implementing the “Pittsburgh Renaissance” fell to the public–private Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). The URA harnessed federal funds to bulldoze thousands of older homes, businesses, and warehouses, including nearly all of the Hill District, a densely populated black neighborhood on the edge of downtown. Demolition paved the way for a convention center, skyscrapers, shopping centers, sports arenas, high-rise housing, and parking lots. The Alleghany Conference also pushed for pollution and flood controls, and with the State of Pennsylvania’s aid, the historic triangle of land at the confluence of the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers—long dominated by warehouses—became Point State Park.
After a brief lull in the early 1970s, when mayoral attention shifted toward historic preservation and neighborhood improvement, a new mayor, Richard Caliguiri, launched Renaissance II with the goal of restructuring the city’s entire economy, not just downtown. The list of partners expanded to include hospital and museum directors, university presidents, and the leaders of community development corporations. The geography expanded as well, moving beyond downtown to encompass nearby neighborhoods like the Strip District, South Side, and North Shore. Funding also changed. With federal support for urban renewal winding down, redevelopment depended more on state and local incentives, foundation grants, and private capital.
Renaissance II’s broader ambitions reflected the consensus among executives that steel production was no longer viable in Pittsburgh. As Neumann notes, this prophecy was partially self-fulfilling. When its profits began to decline, U.S. Steel stopped investing in Pittsburgh’s mills in order to save sufficient capital to buy Marathon Oil, enabling the corporation to redefine and relocate its economic raison d’étre. Between 1979 and 1983, U.S. Steel cut its regional workforce by 66 percent (p. 75). Likewise, Mellon Bank invested unapologetically in Japanese and Chinese steel producers at the expense of local mills. These investment decisions were not the only factors behind the collapse of the American steel industry, but they accelerated the pace locally, with the Pittsburgh region losing 44 percent of its manufacturing jobs between 1979 and 1988 (p. 74).
Facing an existential threat, unionized labor fought energetically to retain manufacturing jobs. Activists withdrew deposits from Mellon Bank, befouled bank lobbies with skunk oil, and confronted business executives outside their homes and places of worship. But despite attention-grabbing tactics, activists won few concessions toward their vision of worker-led reindustrialization. Rather than pushing to reopen shuttered mills, Pittsburgh politicians focused on expanding white-collar jobs, offering incentives to U.S. Steel, Heinz, Mellon Bank, Pittsburgh National Bank, Dravo, Westinghouse, and Pittsburgh Plate Glass to invest in new headquarters in the Golden Triangle rather than decamp for the suburbs or other regions. They also sought to entice corporate executives from other cities to move their businesses and white-collar workforces into Pittsburgh—a campaign whose success depended on redeveloping steel-oriented riverfront neighborhoods.
Neumann highlights two cases: the South Side and Hazelwood. Both neighborhoods were built concurrently with the Pittsburgh Works, a sprawling steel operation that spanned both sides of the Monongahela River. Both experienced population loss as production gradually shut down. However, the South Side weathered these changes more successfully. Most steel production on the South Side ended in 1981, and the site closed fully by 1987. During this period, the local chamber of commerce and a community development corporation enhanced the neighborhood’s appeal by renovating its Victorian homes and commercial district. In the 1990s, the Texas-based owner of the steel site, LTV, shut down hopes for a worker-owned mill, opting instead to demolish the structure. The city then bought the cleared land and partnered with private developers to build the SouthSide Works, a “lifestyle center” featuring luxury apartments, office buildings, national chain restaurants, shopping, a movie theater, University of Pittsburgh medical and sports facilities, and recreational trails along the riverfront.
Hazelwood, by contrast, slid into deeper poverty, even though the neighborhood retained an industrial base. Starting in 1986, the city gradually repurposed the Hazelwood Works into the Pittsburgh Technology Center, a light industrial park anchored by University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon research facilities. These high-tech jobs paid well but were out of reach to Hazelwood’s residents, who began to move away in search of work and a better residential environment, leaving abandoned buildings in their wake. When LTV shut down its last coking facility in Hazelwood in 1998, environmentalists from affluent Squirrel Hill organized to stop one of LTV’s suppliers from opening a new facility on site, protecting air quality but severing the last link between Hazelwood and the steel industry—and its fading legacy of high-paying, low-skilled jobs.
The two cases illustrate the uneven nature of Pittsburgh’s postindustrial prosperity. As Neumann notes in her final chapter, Pittsburgh scored a marketing coup in 1985 when Rand McNally dubbed the city “America’s most livable”—a designation that reflected its expanding postindustrial economy, low cost of living, and beautiful setting on the Alleghany plateau. The designation made it easier for Pittsburgh’s boosters to dissociate the city not only from its steel-town past but also from the contemporary reality of poverty and population loss in many areas. In marketing materials, Pittsburgh became equated with only the renewed parts of the city—the Golden Triangle, the hospitals and universities, and the increasingly green riverfront—rather than declining neighborhoods like Hazelwood or the rusting mill towns scattered throughout the region. Its success made it the envy of the Rust Belt, where nearly all cities were attempting to rebrand. 3
The arc of Pittsburgh’s story will be familiar to urban historians from prior scholarship. In Downtown, Inc., Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn presented the Golden Triangle as a paradigmatic example of how American downtowns get remade, and in The Rough Road to Renaissance, Jon Teaford favorably compared Pittsburgh’s revitalization to that of other Rust Belt cities, which experienced similar deindustrialization with far less reinvestment. 4 In Root Shock, Mindy Thompson Fullilove revealed the enduring trauma that African American families experienced after being uprooted from the Hill District as part of Pittsburgh’s renewal. 5 More recently, Allen Dieterich-Ward analyzed regional variation in Pittsburgh’s postindustrial transformation in his excellent book, Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America. Dieterich-Ward covers similar ground as Neumann, but from a metropolitan and environmental perspective, noting the divergence of experience between Pittsburgh and its more impoverished satellites cities like Wheeling, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, which have had less success with economic reinvention. 6 Set against this literature, Neumann’s strengths are her attention to policy specifics at multiple scales and her global and comparative perspective. By putting Pittsburgh’s story in conversation with Hamilton’s, Neumann is able to draw out, in particular, the influence of state/provincial and federal policies.
Politicians in Hamilton were no less committed to the postindustrial project than their counterparts in Pittsburgh but were stymied in their ability to replicate Pittsburgh’s swift restructuring—and therefore in their ability to rebrand. In the 1950s, Hamilton officials aspired to remake downtown through public–private partnership, but federal and provincial policy would not allow for it. Canada had urban renewal legislation, but it could only be used to build affordable housing, not shops, offices, or museums. Nor could local officials offer tax breaks to corporations. Furthermore, Ontario had considerable control over local economic development policy and land use planning, and provincial officials preferred to maintain Hamilton’s status as a regional manufacturing hub that would support Toronto’s growth rather than compete with it.
Local officials had greater leeway after the passage of Canada’s 1964 National Housing Act, which broadened the scope of urban renewal. Hamilton’s longtime mayor, Vic Copps, used it to remake downtown through the ambitious Jackson Square project. The project endeavored to reinvent Hamilton as an attractive site for corporate headquarters, a need brought home by the humiliating departure of homegrown steel giant Stelco to Toronto in the late 1960s. Yet implementation was slow moving. The city acquired and cleared land in 1966 without first securing a private developer, creating a forty-three-acre dead zone until 1970. The project ultimately produced three new office buildings, a mall, a theater, a hockey rink, a convention center, a library, and a public market, among other attractions, but promises of attractive public space and pedestrian-friendly streets were not fulfilled. Downtown Hamilton ended up losing more headquarters than it gained, and the project failed to spur the private building boom that Mayor Copps had predicted.
Complementary efforts to remake neighborhoods along the industrial harbor were also underwhelming. Plans centered on reorienting the North End neighborhood to better connect with downtown. A ring road would divert trucks from residential streets. New high rises on the waterfront would attract higher-income residents. But the project sputtered out after the federal government withdrew funding in 1971. Three hundred homes were torn down for the ring road, but it was never completed. Shops were forced out, but no new ones came. In a mid-1980s reversal mandated by the province, attention turned to buying out some of the smaller residential enclaves in the harbor district to ensure that industry had room to grow if desired. Unlike their rivals in the United States, steel producers in Hamilton were still profitable and expanding thanks to workforce reductions, protective tariffs, and investments in technology. The city council tried to protect homeowners by modifying zoning rules to forbid industrial encroachment onto residential land, but the council reversed itself after pressure from industry and the province. No one was immediately displaced by the council’s capitulation, but industrial capitalists regained the right to buy up homes to expand facilities as needed.
Not surprisingly, Hamilton was less successful in its efforts at rebranding. Local officials longed to make Hamilton competitive with Toronto as a financial and service center, but federal and provincial policy ensured that industry would retain its imposing presence on the waterfront. Boosters still tried to market Hamilton as a low-cost city with a growing postindustrial economy and ample green space, but unlike in Pittsburgh, Hamilton’s cheerleaders could not override the city’s enduring reputation as a “lunch bucket town.”
Given the divergence in experience between Pittsburgh and Hamilton, Neumann concludes that postindustrial redevelopment was neither uniform nor inevitable. Despite elite consensus in favor of postindustrial change, economic and welfare policies at the state/provincial and federal levels had the power to slow the speed and ease the pain of economic transition. These findings accord with those of Steven High who argued in Industrial Sunset that Canadian labor unions were better positioned to pressure provincial and federal officials to counteract the damage of deindustrialization because Canadians perceived capital flight as a threat to national sovereignty rather than as a tug-of-war between particular communities. 7 Neumann also shows that many of the tactics associated with neoliberal urbanization, like public–private partnerships, did not originate with neoliberalism and were not necessarily deployed on behalf of a neoliberal agenda. Local leaders weren’t trying to gut the middle class; they were trying to “save” their cities by attracting a larger middle-class population of white-collar professionals, but in making this pivot, they abandoned other kinds of work and other kinds of laborers.
Where Neumann’s book ultimately falls short is in evaluating the social implications of each case. Because the book focuses so closely on the growth agenda—on the drive to craft partnerships to remake urban space—the narrative sometimes parrots Pittsburgh’s self-promotion as an unabashed success story. However, while Hamilton comes across as the perpetual underdog, it also appears to have been the more secure city for its working class—a possibility that Neumann suggests in the conclusion but doesn’t fully develop. While Hamilton’s steel industry did decline, especially in recent years, the city retained a robust manufacturing base even as it saw steady postindustrial job growth. Hamilton never lost population—indeed, it grew through immigration and amalgamation with its suburbs—and Canada’s more generous welfare state offered some protection to steelworkers facing layoffs and pay cuts. Pittsburgh, by contrast, is still shrinking, nearly seventy years after the city’s peak. While prosperous in parts, the city and region remain highly unequal by class and race. While the evidence provided is not conclusive, one is left with the impression that of the two, Pittsburgh became the nicer city for its upper middle class—with a more dramatic turn toward the knowledge economy and more urban amenities to match—but Hamilton may still be the better city for working-class families.
Chloe Taft’s book, From Steel to Slots, focuses less on the mechanics of redevelopment and more on its meaning. Artfully blending archival and ethnographic evidence, Taft reveals how residents, laborers, and visitors to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, make sense of that city’s shift from a hub of the steel industry to an outpost of casino gambling. This interpretive mission puts Taft’s book in league with Steven High and David Lewis’s Corporate Wasteland, which used photography and oral history to decode the cultural landscape of deindustrialization. 8 However, Taft’s book does not tell the typical story of community devastation that has dominated the literature since the publication of Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison’s 1982 landmark, The Deindustrialization of America. 9 Instead, heeding Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott’s call to scholars to go “beyond the ruins,” Taft shifts the analytical focus from the shock of the factory shutdown to the life that follows as a new economy emerges. 10 She does so by incorporating interviews with Bethlehem residents from all walks of life, not just steelworkers.
Taft sets the stage for the book by introducing Bethlehem’s history and geography. The more prosperous North Side took shape in 1741 with the founding of a Moravian settlement, forming the basis of Bethlehem’s branding as “Christmas City, USA.” The South Side transitioned from farmland to industry in the mid-1800s. The largest firm, Bethlehem Steel, grew to encompass 1,800 acres along a 4.5-mile stretch of the Lehigh River. At its peak production in World War II, the firm employed nearly 300,000 people worldwide and 31,000 people locally, many of them Eastern European immigrants who lived alongside the steelworks in tight-knit neighborhoods organized around Catholic churches. White-collar professionals typically lived on the North Side or in the suburbs.
The Steel, as locals call it, was Bethlehem’s backbone: its biggest employer, taxpayer, and philanthropist. Its slow decline reshaped the city. In the 1980s, the firm sold its research campus to Lehigh University. Steel production continued until 1995 but with a shrinking workforce. The last 800 steelworkers were let go in 1998 when the coke works closed. Yet, unlike in Gary or Youngstown, the collapse of steel did not portend the collapse of Bethlehem. 11 The city’s hospitals and universities became major employers, and the North Side successfully capitalized on its Moravian heritage and charming building stock. The South Side had a rockier transition, but Bethlehem Steel did not abandon its monumental brownfield. One end was successfully cleared for light industry, and the remainder was targeted for adaptive reuse in the festival marketplace tradition.
However, plans for the site went awry when Bethlehem Steel lost control of the brownfield after its 2001 bankruptcy. The new owner, billionaire “vulture investor” Wilbur Ross, threatened to dismantle the steelworks for scrap, but he off-loaded the property before the bulldozers could move in. At the urging of local officials, the next owner of the brownfield revived plans for a festival marketplace, but with one important change. After the passage of a statewide bill enabling casino gambling, the site’s centerpiece would now be a Sands Casino, adding Bethlehem to the growing list of Rust Belt towns to embrace regulated vice as a generator of jobs and tax revenue.
The remainder of the book explores the repercussions of shifting “from steel to slots.” Like Neumann, Taft foregrounds the capacity of communities to shape redevelopment, but the stakes that she highlights are cultural and personal as well as material. In the next five chapters, Taft discusses the casino’s faux-industrial aesthetic, labor conditions on the casino floor, debates over how to preserve Bethlehem’s heritage, demographic turnover on the South Side, and xenophobia toward the Chinese tourists who patronize the casino. These chapters show locals vying with developers to control the built environment and shape the historical narrative while also reconciling themselves to uncertain roles in the postindustrial economy. While focused on a single community, Taft also contributes to global urban history. Employing a spaces-and-flows perspective rather than transnational comparison, Taft convincingly links Bethlehem’s fate to conditions in communities as near as New York City and as far as Macau. 12
One opportunity to influence the redevelopment of the Steel came through the rezoning process for the Sands Casino. In a successful bid to win over local officials, the casino developer dropped plans for a Venetian theme in favor of an industrial design featuring exposed brick, steel beams, gabled roofs, and orange lights. Fulfilling plans for a festival marketplace, the casino and its hotel were also set alongside an arts center, an industrial heritage museum, a community college, hundreds of lofts, an outlet mall, and a conference center. Yet only a few of those elements, including the community college and the museum, met demands for adaptive reuse of existing buildings. The other attractions were designed with an industrial aesthetic, but they replaced historic structures on site. Additional buildings were torn down for parking and green space.
Workers at the casino discovered they have little control over their labor conditions. The casino is safer than a steel mill, but gone are the days of high wages, generous health care, and defined-benefit pensions. Those promises were broken in bankruptcy, when Bethlehem Steel’s 95,000 retirees had their pensions capped and health care cut. The Sands never promised such security. Casino workers earn lower wages, chase tips instead of bonuses, hold 401(k)s instead of pensions, get “flex time” instead of vacation, and work varied hours. No union protects them from layoffs. While some employees voice anxiety about their positions, many of Taft’s interviewees—including card dealers and slots attendants at the casino—nevertheless praise the Sands’s entrepreneurial culture, relishing the opportunity to get ahead by earning tips.
Residents are divided over how to memorialize the legacy of the Steel. Bethlehem officials embraced historic preservation early on, using urban renewal funds to refurbish buildings built by the Moravians. But the Steel was not recognized as “historic” until it shut down, and much of the brownfield has met the wrecking ball. The Basic Oxygen Furnace, which replaced an entire neighborhood in the 1950s, is now the site of a light industrial park. Other buildings, including the huge Steel General Office, have been mothballed in the hopes of future reuse. The Steel’s monumental blast furnaces remain standing, serving as a backdrop to the arts center and as a tourist destination in their own right. The Steel’s 1972 headquarters, by contrast, will soon be demolished, despite the tower’s spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Former employees recognize the tower’s place in history, but many recall that history as one of mismanagement and greed, and they would happily see it go.
Neighborhood change is also a source of contention. As white ethnic families departed the South Side for newer homes in the suburbs, Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants moved in. Some Catholic parishes adapted by offering Spanish- and Portuguese-language masses, but churches serving the Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Slovenian, and Slovakian communities were ultimately forced to consolidate. The suburban parishioners of these churches grieve the loss of a way of life. Many are unsympathetic to the Latino newcomers, failing to see how newer migrants’ economic struggles reflect the lack of entry-level job opportunities in the postindustrial city. The Latino residents themselves report feeling overlooked. They live in the Steel’s shadow, but their stories are not shared on heritage tours, and the new arts center has done little to celebrate their culture.
Like the Steel before it, the Sands has also changed Bethlehem’s demographics. Sands’ owner, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, was the first foreign developer to open a casino in Macau and his properties there and in Singapore account for the majority of his profits. To the surprise of locals, Sands Bethlehem also caters to Asian gamblers who arrive by bus from New York’s Chinatowns to play games popular in Asia like midi baccarat. The casino has even been renovated to feature feng shui designs with gold and red motifs. Yet not all bus riders come to gamble. Many are seniors on fixed incomes; others are without work. They take a cheap ride to escape the big city—some on a daily basis. These unexpected tourists have been met with suspicion and disapproval. Residents also resent the casino for hiring Asian workers from out of town; Taft’s interviewees view them as unwelcome competition for scarce jobs. Sentiments like these among some of Taft’s respondents—nostalgia for the past, anger at elites, resentment toward immigrants, and resignation to the vicissitudes of a high-risk economy—seemingly offer clues to President Donald Trump’s upset victory among white Rust Belt voters in 2016. Future scholarship should more directly analyze the electoral ramifications of postindustrial change.
As it stands, Neumann and Taft have contributed to Rust Belt scholarship by moving the analysis beyond deindustrialization to the negotiation of the postindustrial city. Neumann explains the policy and planning decisions that produced divergent outcomes in the United States and Canada. Her analysis suggests that higher-level governments can alleviate the pain of economic change by regulating how cities compete for jobs and by enforcing worker protections. After all, the entire Great Lakes region deindustrialized, yet Canada has no parallel to the devastation of Detroit. 13 The ruination of cities like Camden and Flint required more than the decline of manufacturing; in the United States, state and federal governments also enabled racialized abandonment on a massive scale and imposed fiscal austerity. 14 Despite limits on local power to influence economic trends, Neumann also shows how growth coalitions shape the geography of opportunity by steering tax abatements and infrastructure investment to particular sectors and social classes. As Taft shows, communities can also insist on preserving the past in exchange for enabling new development. Yet capital extracts more concessions from communities than vice versa. Even in a successful case like Bethlehem, where unemployment is low despite the closure of the Steel, residents feel insecure and struggle to find meaning in postindustrial work. Pittsburgh, Hamilton, and Bethlehem are not the usual emblems of Rust Belt decline; yet they show that all postindustrial cities are unequal.