Before Renaissance: Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889-1943 (Regional)

Before Renaissance  examines a half-century epoch during which planners, public officials, and civic leaders engaged in a dialogue about the meaning of planning and its application for improving life in Pittsburgh. Planning emerged from the concerns of progressive reformers and businessmen over the social and physical problems of the city. In the Steel City enlightened planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Frederick Bigger pioneered the practical approach to reordering the chaotic urban-industrial landscape. In the face of obstacles that included the embedded tradition of privatism, rugged topography, inherited built environment, and chronic political fragmentation, they established a tradition of modern planning in Pittsburgh. Over the years a mélange of other distinguished local and national figures joined in the planning dialogue, among them the park founder Edward Bigelow, political bosses Christopher Magee and William Flinn, mayors George Guthrie and William Magee, industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Howard Heinz, financier Richard King Mellon, and planning luminaries Charles Mulford Robinson, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Harland Bartholomew, Robert Moses, and Pittsburgh’s Frederick Bigger. The famed alliance of Richard King Mellon and Mayor David Lawrence, which heralded the Renaissance, owed a great debt to Pittsburgh’s prior planning experience.  John Bauman and Edward Muller recount the city’s long tradition of public/private partnerships as an important factor in the pursuit of orderly and stable urban growth. Before Renaissance provides insights into the major themes, benchmarks, successes, and limitations that marked the formative days of urban planning. It defines Pittsburgh’s key role in the vanguard of the national movement and reveals the individuals and processes that impacted the physical shape and form of a city for generations to come.

History

Muller, Edward K.

BAUMAN, JOHN F.

Americas

University of Pittsburgh Press

In late 1933 and early 1934, Harry Hopkins, director of the infant Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), dispatched an elite corps of journalists and authors, including Bruce McClure and Lorena Hickok, to obtain a grass-roots portrait of Depression-wracked America. His marching orders to Hickok were "to go out around the country and look this thing over.... Tell me what you see and hear.... All of it."She and her compatriots spent two years in different regions of the country, talking with preachers, teachers, civic leaders, businessmen, and "the small fry John Citizen," monitoring the mood of a nation battered by natural and economic disaster. They found the downside of the American dream: flophouses overflowing with tenants who once had been sturdy middle-class citizens, aid administration offices awash in incompetence and corruption, and, beneath it all, a permanent underclass of the illiterate, the mentally ill, and the aged. Untrained in sociology or economics, the reporters described their impressions in passionate and graphic terms that helped move the Roosevelt administration to implement the work programs of the New Deal.Bauman and Coode reveal another dark side of 1930s America, one that is evident in the words of the writers themselves: racial and class prejudice. Comfortably middle-class, mostly from traditional East Coast backgrounds, Hopkins's reporters reflected prevalent beliefs concerning the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor—beliefs that would influence the scope of such New Deal ventures as the 1935 Social Security Law. Author Marth Gellhorn, repulsed by the pattern of inbreeding and degeneration she observed among the "white trash" families of South Carolina, suggested a two-pronged aid program of education and eugenics.In the Eye of the Great Depression objectively portrays a period of American history that is too often romanticized as a time when a combination of inspired leadership and pioneer resilience pulled the nation through a great test of its mettle.

IN THE EYE OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION: NEW DEAL REPORTERS AND THE AGONY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

COODE, THOMAS

Northern Illinois University Press

Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Temple Univ Pr

The Ever-Changing American City: 1945–Present

The Ever-Changing American City seeks to help readers understand the marked changes since 1945 in what constitutes a city in the United States and who lives and works in them. The story of the postwar American city is not a simple tale of decline and rebirth. Nor is it a straightforward account of the struggle between the old urban core or central business district and the suburbs on the urban periphery, for both have had their economic ups and downs. In the decades after World War II, the cityscape was altered to better accommodate the automobile, and the city gradually transformed from a place of production to a place of consumption. During the 1980s, city neighborhoods once occupied by migrants from the American South and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe began to house newcomers from Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. The economic, environmental, and social issues now facing American cities from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, will require them to continue the process of remaking or reinventing themselves.

The Ever-Changing American City: 1945-Present

Biles, Roger

Szylvian, Kristin M.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

<p>The Ever-Changing American City seeks to help readers understand the marked changes since 1945 in what constitutes a city in the United States and who lives and works in them. The story of the postwar American city is not a simple tale of decline and rebirth. Nor is it a straightforward account of the struggle between the old urban core or central business district and the suburbs on the urban periphery, for both have had their economic ups and downs. In the decades after World War II, the cityscape was altered to better accommodate the automobile, and the city gradually transformed from a place of production to a place of consumption. During the 1980s, city neighborhoods once occupied by migrants from the American South and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe began to house newcomers from Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. The economic, environmental, and social issues now facing American cities from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, will require them to continue the process of remaking or reinventing themselves.</p>

Situated on a peninsula jutting into picturesque Casco Bay, Portland has long been admired for its geographical setting―the "beautiful city by the sea," as native son Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called it. At the same time, Portland's deep, ice-free port has made it an ideal site for the development of coastal commerce and industry. Much of the city's history, John F. Bauman shows, has been defined by the effort to reconcile the competing interests generated by these attributes―to balance the imperatives of economic growth with a desire to preserve Portland's natural beauty.Caught in the crossfire of British and French imperial ambitions throughout the colonial era, Portland emerged as a prosperous shipbuilding center and locus of trade in the decades following the American Revolution. During the nineteenth century it became a busy railroad hub and winter port for Canadian grain until a devastating fire in 1866 reduced much of the city to ruins. Civic leaders responded by reinventing Portland as a tourist destination, building new hotels, parks, and promenades, and proclaiming it the "Gateway to Vacationland."After losing its grain trade in the 1920s and suffering through the Great Depression, Portland withered in the years following World War II as it wrestled with the problems of deindustrialization, suburbanization, and an aging downtown. Efforts at urban renewal met with limited success until the 1980s, when a concerted plan of historic preservation and the restoration of the Old Port not only revived the tourist trade but eventually established Portland as one of America's "most livable cities."

Gateway to Vacationland: The Making of Portland, Maine

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of Massachusetts Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BAUMAN, JOHN F.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by BAUMAN, JOHN F.