(See Cover)
Five of the windows in the office of T. Mellon & Sons are made of opaque, leaded glass which shuts out the contradictions of Pittsburgh's ugly business district. But a sixth window of clear glass opens like an eye in the blackened granite face of the old Union Trust Co. building on Grant Street, from which the Mellons run their family interests. In this window, at odd moments over the past fortnight, appeared an erect, grey-haired man in a well-tailored suit. Richard King Mellon was looking down into a large hole between Fifth Avenue and Oliver Avenue, where power shovels dug into Pittsburgh's dirt and a pile driver hammered away at a row of steel pilings.
From early morning until midnight the pile driver banged, ringing in the heads of downtown office workers, rattling the windows in Kaufmann's department store, keeping guests awake in the William Penn Hotel, echoing through the narrow canyons of Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle. Blasting intermittently shook the slab-side Mellon National Bank and Trust Co. which had hardly trembled through the depression of the '30s.
Vision of a City. As far as the man in the window was concerned, these were minor irritations. Out of the excavation on Oliver Avenue would rise a 39-story skyscraper, the Mellon-U.S. Steel building, a $28 million token of faith in Pittsburgh's future. In R. K. Mellon's mind's eye was the vision of a whole new city—a second skyscraper, the $10 million, 30-story Alcoa building rising beside a new $4,000,000 green park, other new office buildings rising on the Triangle's point. It was a vision of a city cleared of drab relics of half a century, cured of its traffic congestions, freed of the pollution of its rivers and the poison of its soot-heavy air, a city better housed. The hammering of the pile driver was the nervous pulse of a run-down old Pittsburgh acquiring a new life.
Countywide projects costing millions were already started: a new airport, new buildings, new highways, new bridges, new dams along the tributaries of the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers. R. K. Mellon himself had helped start them. Even facing the possibility of a paralyzing steel strike last week, Pittsburgh was a city of new hope. Pittsburgh was being rebuilt, restored, rejuvenated for a new day.
Aside from the ringing in its head, the city's reaction was: "It's time. God knows there's enough wrong with the town."
World of Margarac & Mestrovic. In Pennsylvania's steel country, men tell of Hungarian Joe Margarac, who could lift a locomotive with his finger, and his rival, the Slav Steve Mestrovic, who could twist 500-lb. bars of iron with his bare hands; they boiled their eggs in a Bessemer converter and combed their hair with traveling cranes. Margarac and Mestrovic belonged to legend, to Pittsburgh and to an industrial development that had its counterparts but never its equal anywhere in the world.
It had forged the weapons and the axles and the cooking pots which had opened western America. It had made the steel girders of history's greatest surge of industrialism and the tools of a nation's factories. It boasted that it was the world's No. 1 producer of aluminum, tinplate, refractories, plumbing fixtures, lifting jacks, air brakes. It had armed a nation in two world wars.