From Rust Belt to arts mecca
Pittsburgh reaps the benefits of its 20-year investment in a downtown cultural district - and in the vitality of its young people.
Cultural districts are popular ways for cities to reinvent themselves, especially older cities past their heyday as centers of industry. Nowhere has this been truer than in Pittsburgh, home of Big Steel. Now, the city is seeing impressive results from its 20-year experiment in designing such a district.
Unlike some cities that had to start from scratch, Pittsburgh already had a core of national-caliber institutions, and a philanthropic base laid by the Heinz and Carnegie families, among others.
The 14-block Cultural District was spearheaded by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust in 1984. By buying up derelict historic properties, the trust's first steps were to make the area viable. Now the goal is to nurture future audiences and young artists, and to do that, the trust will have to overcome some residents' resistance to the new.
"We're the town of Mr. Rogers and Andy Warhol, which speaks of what we are and what we're becoming," says Bill Peduto, a city councilman.
In place of X-rated entertainment shops and drug dealers, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has fused art, theater, and design with New Urbanism, a movement that takes historic buildings and envisions how they might be used in new ways. Public parks replete with art have also replaced blight. The Agnes R. Katz Plaza, landscaped by the late Dan Kiley, features a bronze fountain resembling a spiraling pyramid and granite benches shaped like disembodied eyes by famed sculptor Louise Bourgeois.
A 140-foot section of an old building's wall has been transformed from faceless brick to a glowing panel of light. Architect Richard Gluckman and stage visionary Robert Wilson collaborated on "Light Wall," bathing a wall in a wash of violet light, split by a moving bar of radiant white. The light sculpture is an icon of the area's artistic enhancement, seductively veiling the old with the new.
"Our objective was to light hidden, offbeat spaces - to animate the street," says Carol Brown, the trust's founding director.
The project also needs to cultivate young people, as well as retain the well-heeled older patrons who have long been the district's backbone.
"We're developing two streams," says Kevin McMahon, president and CEO of the trust, "one for international and touring companies and one small and local." He hopes the expanded mandate will become "a new paradigm" for revitalization.
The initial goal to create sumptuous halls for opera, symphony, theater, and ballet was accomplished with spectacular success. Now, to attract younger audiences, they need a different kind of development, says Hilary Frost-Kumpf, who wrote the "Cultural District Handbook" for Americans for the Arts and teaches at the University of Illinois, Springfield. "That means for-profit, commercial activities like night clubs, restaurants, bars, galleries, and retail that stays open late."
The hope is not only to enrich the culture but to overcome a problem: brain drain. "We've done a lousy job of keeping young artists in Pittsburgh and young people in general," says Jerry Coltin, professor of arts management at Carnegie Mellon.
High-ranking Carnegie Mellon University has an enrollment of 8,000 and the well-regarded University of Pittsburgh boasts 27,000, but "the best and brightest leave Pittsburgh, contending there are no jobs," says Tom Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum.
He faults the city's conservatism. "Pittsburgh's not strong on people who want to do things [in an] alternative [way]."
Barbara Luderowski, head of the Mattress Factory, a cutting-edge installation-art venue, agrees. "We've been whacking our way through the forest of Pittsburgh conservatism. The Cultural Trust was basically dealing with vanilla boxes," she says. "Our success encouraged the foundations to support more risky endeavors."
The trust has committed to sponsoring bolder cultural programming and a half-dozen grass-roots galleries to display edgy art. Its first large-scale effort is the three-week Festival of Firsts, which concludes Sunday, that coincides with the first three weeks of the Carnegie International, a showcase of contemporary art attracting visitors from all over the world.
