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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."