I was scheduled to describe for the Pittsburgh Rotary Club Wednesday the highs and lows of editing the Post-Gazette for 25 years. I instead talked about "Then and Now and What We Might Worry about in the Years Ahead."
I am not sure how the Rotarians felt about my changing horses in midstream, but I was more interested in promoting an idea than in sharing a reminiscence.
Specifically, I believe that qualitative issues are more important than quantitative issues in our civic lives and that they don't get the attention they deserve in this region. I think we need much better bench-marking in this area, that we have the technological capability to produce it and we should start doing so.
To make my point, I described what seemed to me be a great anomaly. For all the gloom and doom about population loss, aging population and no young people, from my perspective life here was much changed (and largely for the better) from what it was when I first came to town. It seemed to me that more people were employed, renting more office space, spending more shopping dollars and having more fun.
In the good old days of 1977, Rockwell, Gulf, J&L (LTV), Koppers, Dravo, Westinghouse, National Steel and Allegheny Ludlum were very significant local enterprises. There were three major banks, Mellon, PNC and Equibank; three major department stores, Kaufmann's, Horne's and Gimbels, and the traffic in the Golden Triangle was significantly tangled by old-fashioned street cars using iron rails and overhead electrical wires.
I put my head down in a rented furnished apartment in the Washington Plaza and had occasion to walk through Downtown city regularly in the evening on my way home after work. It was as dead as a doornail. The three movie theaters, Warner, Chatham and Bank were on their last legs. Market Square, despite a burst of excitement at the start of the 1970s, was burned out literally and figuratively.
The Encore II on Liberty Avenue, the Stanley and Heinz Hall were "it" for live entertainment. The hottest spot was the Rusty Scupper in the hot new Bank Center, between Forbes and Third, just across the street from Klein's. For excitement, there were the Pittsburgh Press Club, Top of the Triangle and two Palmers for every Stouffer's. Pirates attendance (like an elected coroner) was a hot topic, with the team attracting just over and just under 1 million fans in 1977 and 1978 -- this on the cusp of the "We Are Familee" world championship year. The popular wisdom held that fielding too many black players kept attendance down.
The 1980 Census counted 423,000 Pittsburgh residents and 1.45 million residents of Allegheny County. Employment in the metro area was reported at 1 million people that year, though the number was probably overstated because the mass exodus from steel was well under way.
It is obvious, I trust, that there has been a great deal of change since then. Those corporations I listed are all gone or significantly reduced in size. There are approximately 334,000 residents of Pittsburgh and 1.280 million residents of the county, a loss of about 90,000 and 140,000 people from the city and the greater Pittsburgh region. (Because of sprawl in parts of Butler, Beaver and Washington counties, not all of Allegheny County's population loss is a net loss for the larger community.) Particularly notable, is the reduction of people between the ages of 20 and 34, a decline of 32 percent from 691,000 to 472,000.
My question to the Rotarians was, given these very bad numbers that have given us all a collective nervous breakdown the past decade, why is it that employment in the region today is 100,000 or 10 percent higher than it was 25 years ago? Why is there a robust Cultural District, a vibrant South Side and 24-hour Strip, a growing North Shore? Why are Pirates attendance figures (almost twice as high), as well as all college and professional teams, much better today than they were 25 years ago?
How is it that the number of people working Downtown is a robust 160,000, a fact that has been lost because there has been so much vacant office space as a result of new capacity added since 1983? (PPG Place, Oxford Center, Fifth Avenue Place, Federated, Dominion Tower, Mellon One, the PNC and Mellon service centers and the new Gimbels conversion in the Golden Triangle alone.)
The short answer to these questions is that we really do not know. Sure, lower densities and lower margins across a broad range of activities and investments are probably part of it. Demographic trends and changes in behavior among adults of all ages are undoubtedly determinative as well.
But at the end of the day we don't have too much of a clue about what is going on in southwestern Pennsylvania. (See the editorial on the opposite page on our difficulties in coming up with a description of Pittsburgh as further evidence of this fact.)
As I told the Rotarians, it is well past time that situation was changed. I said that the means to benchmark vital qualitative matters in this region exist; that the Post-Gazette had made a start in this work over the past six years, but the job demanded more comprehensive and sophisticated attention, and that it was time to make better measurements an integral part of our public life.
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