Remaking the Rust Belt by Neumann Tracy;

Author:Neumann, Tracy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Spaces of Production and Spaces of Consumption

Downtown redevelopment may have occupied most of public officials’ and civic leaders’ attention, but uneven development within and between the neighborhoods that housed each city’s steel mills—Pittsburgh’s South Side and Hazelwood, and Hamilton’s North End and the residential enclaves in its harbor industrial area—posed the greatest threat to their postindustrial plans. In Hamilton, downtown and mill neighborhood redevelopment went hand in hand. Vic Copps had targeted Hamilton’s North End, a working-class residential neighborhood next to the harbor industrial area, for urban renewal in 1964. Planners set out to restore the North End’s once-grand Victorian homes to their former splendor, plotting out new housing, parks, community centers, and schools. The civic square project, said urban renewal commissioner Lloyd Berryman, would be a “catalyst” for new residential redevelopment in the North End. “As it progresses,” he predicted, “you’ll find more and more people will want to move back downtown from the suburbs.” Pointing to back-to-the-city movements in Toronto and U.S. cities, Berryman said he was confident that the North End, with its proximity to downtown and the waterfront, would once again attract middle-class homeowners. “Give people a shopping centre, cultural and institutional uses in the centre of the city, and they’ll move back in,” he assured Hamiltonians.1

By 1977, North End residents and city officials had judged urban renewal a failure. The Hamilton Spectator ran an article on the “North End Nightmare,” which charged, “After $10 million spent over 16 years, residents, bureaucrats, businessmen and some politicians say the city’s landmark redevelopment scheme has been largely bungled.” Residents held the city culpable; Hamilton community development commissioner Ed Kowalski and his predecessor Reg Monaghan blamed the federal government’s retreat from urban renewal, the province’s poor planning of low-income housing, and private developers’ resistance to building up the neighborhood. “The North End would have been improved considerably if the federal government hadn’t pulled out,” Kowalski insisted.2 By 1985, city officials’ focus on how to make the North End a middle-class rather than working-class neighborhood gave way to concern over providing space for industry to expand. Residential enclaves in Hamilton’s harbor industrial area had become a nuisance to city officials who were required by provincial mandate to make more land available for manufacturing.3

Pittsburgh’s mill neighborhoods, on the other hand, did not fall into decline until the 1970s. By the middle of the next decade, they were, like downtown, in the throes of postindustrial rebirth. “While downtown Pittsburgh basks in the splendor of its new skyscrapers and emerging white-collar image,” began a 1984 Pittsburgh Business Times article about the city’s South Side, “a more subtle renaissance is gaining momentum across the Monongahela River.” Jones & Laughlin’s (J&L) South Side works sat idle at the east end of the neighborhood, and East Carson Street, three decades earlier the commercial hub of a vibrant blue-collar neighborhood, was getting a facelift. Led by the South Side Chamber of Commerce, business owners and arts organizations remade the South Side as a regional destination for shopping, dining, and nightlife.

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