Comeback City

In 1842 Author Charles Dickens visited Pittsburgh, held his ears and called the town "hell with the lid lifted." Over a century later. Author John Gunther passed through, held his nose and described it (in Inside U.S.A.) as "one of the most shockingly ugly and filthy cities in the world." Last week much-abused Pittsburghers looked around, held their breath, and i) heard plans for a null $12 million skyscraper for their bustling Gateway Center; 2) watched the barricades go up for a 17-story. $7,000.000, metal-sheathed monolith for Pittsburgh's H. K. Porter Co.; 3) got the designs for a $15 million, 800-room, new Hilton Hotel. Said Hotelman Conrad Hilton: "We have heard about the renaissance of Pittsburgh. We like to go into a live city. Many communities just talk about urban redevelopment. Pittsburgh has accomplished what it talked about."

Three big projects in one week were quite a feat even for Pittsburgh, where, in the past decade, 50 major downtown buildings have sprung up (cost: $130 million) and 4,000 off-street parking spaces have been created. In the Golden Tri angle business district, where no new office building had been put up between 1930 and 1945, one-fourth of the area has been rebuilt in ten years, raising assessed property value by 25%. Now Pittsburgh is opening the second round of its rebirth. All told, $150 million worth of new buildings are under construction or due to start next year. On the downtown fringes, Pittsburgh is spending another $100 million to clean out the wormy Hill District slums--95 acres of cobbled streets, blighted homes, vice, crime and poverty. Much of it should be completed in time for Pittsburgh's 200th birthday party in 1958. Gateway to Heaven. Of the work already under way, builders are putting the finishing graces on the 16-story State Office Building, sheathed with striking blue aluminum panels; near by, the superstructure is pushing up for the twelve-story Bell Telephone Building. Both are rectangular slabs at Gateway Center, near the point of the downtown Triangle. They will add to the three all-steel office build ings thrown up since 1950 at Gateway, now the headquarters of Westinghouse Electric Corp., Westinghouse Air Brake

Co., Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., National Supply Co., Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co., Peoples Natural Gas Co. Eventually ten buildings will sprawl over Gateway in a parklike setting of shaded walks, lawns, fountains.

Not far away a 16-to-18-story luxury apartment building (cost: $6,000,000 to $8,000,000) will rise near the new Hilton. In the Triangle, ground is to be broken in 1958 for a $4,500,000 Y.W.C.A. Building, 16 glassy stories resembling Manhattan's Lever House.

Let In the Sky. Just beyond the Triangle, rising from the Lower Hill slums, will be a $14 million, 14,000-seat civic auditorium with a fold-back dome to let the sky in for open-air spectacles. Growing around it will be a colony of civic, cultural and middle-income apartment buildings. Toward the outskirts the University of Pittsburgh will complete two new schools for medicine and public-health services in 1957 (cost: $20 million).

Near the campus, developers last week showed off blueprints for two towering (21 stories), high-priced ($350 a month) apartments. And across the Allegheny River from downtown Pittsburgh, girders are pushing up for the H. J. Heinz Co.'s new headquarters, which will be ready next year. The polluted Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers are being cleaned up, and Pittsburgh's air has been filtered of so much soot that the old Smoky City now claims that its air is cleaner than New York's or Chicago's.

Home-Town Push. Pittsburgh's herculean rebuilding efforts have been pushed by aroused businessmen who faced a dreary postwar prospect of losing the headquarters of some of their blue-chip industries to cleaner, more modern cities. Pittsburgh's first family, the Mellons, got the redevelopment rolling in 1947, and the Mellon foundations granted $4,400,000 to clear Mellon Square of its tangle of old shops and office buildings. The biggest home-town pusher, Richard King Mellon, set up the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, which masterminds planning, put to work the business and union leaders of the city.

So enthusiastically did Dick Mellon pitch into work with the city government that some of his fellow Republicans started grumbling, especially since Democrat Mayor David Lawrence comes up for re-election next year. But Mellon and friends were thinking of Pittsburgh and people, not politics. Said U.S. Steel Director Benjamin Fairless: "Something fine has happened to the people of Allegheny County that cannot be measured in dollars. We are more neighborly. We have forgotten our petty differences and have voluntarily combined, our talents, our money and our energy into this program for the common good of everyone."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.