The Pittsburgh Civic Arena: Memory and Renewal

by Rob Pfaffmann, AIA
Pfaffmann and Associates

Summary: This article contains excerpts from an abstract prepared for the 2008 DOCOMOMO conference, “The Challenge of Change,” adapted for this special edition of AIArchitect to explore what we have truly learned from our past. It challenges the current belief that Modern planning and design interventions are obsolete through a proposal to reuse the Pittsburgh Civic Arena as an anchor for a new urban plan that interweaves the multiple historic layers with Modern planning themes.

Urban renewal in Pittsburgh: success and failure
The history of urban renewal in Pittsburgh is a story of success and failure. Pittsburgh’s environmental reform movement is most often cited, but less known are the sometimes innovative but often failed efforts to redesign large areas of the city following Modern design principles. Much of the legal basis for urban renewal laws (eminent domain) in America was created in Pittsburgh during the 1940s and ’50s.

A debate is now taking place in planning and architecture professions in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. Pittsburgh, the city experiencing the second greatest population loss outside of New Orleans, also is challenged with the reconstruction of large areas of the urban fabric devastated by urban renewal and economic decline. Whether it is Pittsburgh’s Point State Park/Gateway Center, East Liberty, or the Civic Arena/Lower Hill, each project is a product of its time and prevailing view about urban design, architecture, and economic renewal. The nature and extent of civic discourse and examination of the failure to fully execute proposed plans is an important component of these questions.

The profession/policies of American historic preservation have identified the need to stand back from current popular views of a design or style (the “50-year rule”). At the turn of the 19th century, many believed that the “excesses” of the Victorian era were not worth saving. That attitude translated into wholesale demolitions of important fabric of our cities. Until Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses clashed in the 1960s, many only saw these issues as ones of style, not as a foundation for healthy city development. Pittsburgh, because of its environmental and economic troubles, became a place where Modern design principles were used extensively in the urban renewal process.

What does it mean to “undo the past”?
Today, across Pittsburgh, major projects that propose to “undo the damage of urban renewal” are well under way. As Pittsburgh’s political leadership undertakes this effort, current urban design and planning trends (New Urbanism, Contextualism, etc.) are assumed to be preferable to the past Modern schools of thought regarding planning and design.

Pittsburgh’s Hill District, which is one of the nation’s most important historic African-American communities, was extensively destroyed for the Civic Arena, a project led by Edgar Kaufmann (Fallingwater’s owner) and designed by architects James A. Mitchell and Dahlen K. Ritchey. We must explore what we have truly learned from our past and challenge the current belief that Modern planning and design interventions are obsolete through a proposal to reuse the Civic Arena as an anchor for a new urban plan that interweaves the multiple historic layers with Modern planning themes.

Taking a cue from Jacobs: “Cultural or civic centers, can probably in a few cases employ ground replanning tactics to reweave them back into the city fabric. The most prominent cases are centers located on the edges of downtowns . . . One side of Pittsburgh’s new civic center, at least, might be rewoven into the downtown, from which it is now buffered,” she wrote in The Death & Life of Great American Cities in 1962.

Brainstorming: ideas to build upon

• Reinvent Mellon Arena as an innovative community anchor.
• Take a holistic approach to the entire Hill: a supermarket, more affordable housing over a parking deck buried below an expansion of Crawford Square with loft houses, and the restoration of the New Granada Theater and the Crawford Grill.
• Make Wylie Avenue a key pedestrian connection to downtown, where you actually walk right through the arena civic space, learning about old and new Wiley Avenue as you go. The path would continue through a new park surrounded by state-of-the-art, mixed-use buildings with large floor plates.
• Rebuild Fifth Avenue into a strong, pedestrian- and transit-oriented place that emphasizes historic façades and high-quality Modern infill urban construction for the new economy, emphasizing small businesses and relationships to higher education.
• Make sustainable design, innovative urban design, and historic preservation the anchors, to compete for people wanting authentic, different places to live, work, and play. Divert storm-water runoff, build geothermal fields, create new public open space, and inspire new park-front property development.

This is only a set of ideas. You the reader must transform it, mess with it, and make it truly a product of community collaboration!