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Contents
20th Century Context: Cramped Spaces and a Smoky City
Unapproachable Appeals
The rhetorical project of The Westinghouse Memorial in particular and of Pittsburgh’s elites in general was to propagate and crystallize the city’s identity as “The Workshop of the World,” while downplaying its association with social and civic decay and contamination. However, despite their best efforts, overall civic pride remained low, and Pittsburgh’s identity was inseparable from pollution and poor living conditions for years after the memorial’s construction. Given all the potential of its rhetorical appeals to restore respect for Pittsburgh, why might this project have failed so miserably?
Ultimately, Pittsburgh’s business elites crafted a memorial and a message that was not accessible to the working-class: the ones who needed it most. To foster pride in Pittsburgh’s identity, the city chose to elevate George Westinghouse, captain of industry uniquely palatable to the working class. However, Westinghouse’s alignment with the spirit of the city would have only been familiar to the elites themselves, since this narrative existed solely in elite circles (Penna 56). Furthermore, placing the memorial in a park at all ensured that working class Pittsburghers would never see it. Industry workers largely lived apart from parks, which were usually located near the more expensive houses of the Pittsburgh elites. For example, when describing the mill town of Homestead, The Pittsburgh Survey explains how “larger and more attractive dwellings” are
grouped about two small parks….The green of the parks modifies the first impression of dreariness by one of prosperity such as is not infrequent in American industrial towns. Turn up a side street, however, and you pass uniform frame houses, closely built and dulled by the smoke; and below, on the flats behind the mill, are cluttered alleys, unsightly and unsanitary, the dwelling place of the Slavic laborers (“Homestead Introduction”).
Moreover, parks are areas generally earmarked for leisure time, especially within the 19th century park tradition which imagined a long escape from the city: “Ideally, people would spend an entire day in the park, selecting some portion of it and spending the time there with friends and books, watching squirrels and birds, listening to music, picnicking, playing croquet, boating, watching their children at play, and so on” (Cranz 10). Such luxuries were outside the purview of most Pittsburgh residents, whose lives primarily “included long hours, short pay, and smog” (“Homestead Introduction”). Because the designs and plans for the memorial mistakenly focused on what would best appeal to Pittsburgh’s business class, the memorial’s appeals did not reach and could not resonate with the working class. Indeed, in the words of Survey writer Edward T. Devine, change for industry workers would come “Not by gifts of libraries, galleries, technical schools, and parks, but by the cessation of toil one day in seven and sixteen hours in the twenty-four, by the increase of wages, by the sparing of lives, by the prevention of accidents, and by raising the standards of domestic life (Devine 4).
Potential bioregional appeals fell short for similar reasons. Though the power of the bioregional movement lies in its decentered, bottom up approach–elevating the particularities of individual experience and specific environments to the highest priority– the Westinghouse Memorial was by contrast an official city commission. Rather than allowing the ground level experiences of residents to rise up and inform the appeals of the monument, city elites used the memorial to project an identity of Pittsburgh that did not resonate with a majority of its population. The recognition and visibility of the particularities of individual experience were lost from the bioregional appeals of the memorial, hampering its effectiveness.
In the years following its construction, the Westinghouse Memorial eventually fell into disrepair alongside the rest of Schenley Park and the greater Pittsburgh park system. According to the executive summary of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy’s 2000 Master Plan, “Like many park systems, Pittsburgh parks fell into a cycle of decreasing funds, a decline in the skilled labor force, an emphasis placed on suburbanization and the priority of needs other than parks” (“Executive Summary” 13). The city’s intense focus on the potential for parks to exist as escapes from the city that existed in the 19th and 20th centuries gave way to other concerns as Pittsburgh’s economy began to suffer the consequences of the Great Depression and deindustrialization (Penna 50). It would not be until later that a renewed interest in Pittsburgh’s parks would drive 21st century restoration efforts that gave the Westinghouse Memorial a new significance to the city.