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"Well, you have a lot of ideas about it. Will they ever get done?"
"They must get done."
Good Politics, Good Business. Pittsburgh, like every other city, had a list of hopeful plans waiting; some of them dated as far back as 1910. But in Pittsburgh a "must" from a Mellon list gets done, especially when the Mellon himself gets busy and sees that it is done. R. K. Mellon took up his ideas with his colleagues around the Duquesne Club: such men as Pickleman H. J. ("Jack") Heinz II, Edgar Kaufmann of Kaufmann Department Store, U.S. Steel's Ben Fairless, Alcoa's Roy Hunt. Some of them products of a new age, all of them had a conception of the responsibilities of wealth that was far different from the views of the old masters of Pittsburgh. And all of them were conscious of the city's needs.
Not only was Pittsburgh becoming the most unlivable city in the U.S.; Pittsburgh's domination of the steel world was literally at stake. Markets for steel had moved westward. The Supreme Court's decision outlawing the basing-point system (by which Pittsburgh steel plants had absorbed freight costs to distant markets) had caused consternation among steelmen. Pittsburgh, with much of its equipment overworked and worn out by the war, was faced with determined competition from other steel centers; Chicago, with less steelmaking capacity, had actually outproduced it in 1949.
"We Expedite." R. K. Mellon and his associates formed the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a sort of umbrella organization to throw over the civic enterprises already in existence, and added new plans of their own. Then they enlisted David Lawrence, Pittsburgh's Democratic mayor, as a bridge to the Democrats and to Pittsburgh labor. "We expedite. We get things into motion," was R. K. Mellon's description of the Allegheny Conference.
Civic enterprise was a desperate necessity and almost a religion. Mellon told his friends: "Don't let business interfere with your civic enterprise."
Through the state legislature, Mellon, Lawrence & friends jammed a parcel of bills for countywide smoke control, sewage disposal, better highways, higher taxes. Pittsburgh only gradually became aware of what was happening. But in three years, much did.
No Floods, No Smog. The air had been fairly well cleared of smoke—Pittsburghers were sharply aware of that. There was 39% more sunlight: a white shirt could be worn decently a whole day. Locomotives were allowed by law to give off nothing worse than No. 2 smoke (not as white as No. 1, but not nearly as black as No. 4). Householders were forced to burn smokeless fuel. When fog settled over Pittsburgh, it was no longer smog; it was fog.
The town's traffic problem was slowly being untangled. Two weeks ago Governor Jim Duff presided over the dynamiting-through of a ¾-mile-long tunnel under Squirrel Hill, part of a highway which will carry traffic from the Pennsylvania Turnpike through the city and across the Monongahela towards the west.
Last week officials triumphantly announced that the Equitable Life Assurance Society had agreed to take on the financing of a spectacular $50 million project to clear 23 acres of the Triangle's point, convert it into a park and construct three modern office buildings.