Beyond Rust chronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of metropolitan
Pittsburgh, an industrial region that once formed the heart of the
world's steel production and is now touted as a model for reviving other
hard-hit cities of the Rust Belt. Writing in clear and engaging prose,
historian and area native Allen Dieterich-Ward provides a new model for
a truly metropolitan history that integrates the urban core with its
regional hinterland of satellite cities, white-collar suburbs, mill
towns, and rural mining areas.
Pittsburgh reached its industrial heyday between 1880 and 1920, as
vertically integrated industrial corporations forged a regional
community in the mountainous Upper Ohio River Valley. Over subsequent
decades, metropolitan population growth slowed as mining and
manufacturing employment declined. Faced with economic and environmental
disaster in the 1930s, Pittsburgh's business elite and political leaders
developed an ambitious program of pollution control and infrastructure
development. The public-private partnership behind the Pittsburgh
Renaissance, as advocates called it, pursued nothing less than the
selective erasure of the existing social and physical environment in
favor of a modernist, functionally divided landscape: a goal that was
widely copied by other aging cities and one that has important
ramifications for the broader national story. Ultimately, the
Renaissance vision of downtown skyscrapers, sleek suburban research
campuses, and bucolic regional parks resulted in an uneven
transformation that tore the urban fabric while leaving
deindustrializing river valleys and impoverished coal towns isolated
from areas of postwar growth.
Beyond Rust is among the first books of its kind to continue past the
collapse of American manufacturing in the 1980s by exploring the diverse
ways residents of an iconic industrial region sought places for
themselves within a new economic order.
