Prince Charles' return: A look back at urban renewal dreams
Share with others:
V.W.H. Campbell Jr., Post-Gazette
Prince Charles enters the Benedum Center in early March 1988, where he gave the keynote address at the Remaking Cities conference.In the flurry of media coverage surrounding Prince Charles' visit to America, some reports have said that it's been 20 years since his last official visit, which leads to the question: What are we, chopped liver?
It's been 17 years and eight months since the prince unofficially stepped off a plane at Greater Pittsburgh Airport, as it was known in early March 1988, and into a late winter snowstorm. By the time his limousine reached Downtown, the city's celebrated view at the end of the Fort Pitt Tunnel, about which architect David Lewis had been raving to the prince on the ride in, was lost in a blinding blizzard.
It was the prince's first and only visit to Pittsburgh. The next day, he gave the keynote address at the Remaking Cities conference, an international event that brought together 350 architects, urban designers, economists, historians and ordinary citizens to brainstorm ideas for the revival of declining industrial towns from the Mon Valley to Germany's Ruhr Valley.
Before a packed Benedum Center audience, Prince Charles championed grass-roots involvement in preserving and regenerating older communities. He encouraged "a renaissance of craftsmanship and the art of embellishing buildings for man's pleasure and for the sheer joy in beauty itself."
Yesterday, the prince was awarded the National Building Museum's Vincent Scully Prize in Washington, D.C., for promoting traditional town planning and raising public awareness of architecture over the past 25 years.
But what, in the long run, did the conference accomplish? And what is its legacy today?
"There's volumes of legacy. Some of it's in Pittsburgh but mostly it's not," said Mr. Lewis, the conference organizer, who will retire in December after teaching urban design at Carnegie Mellon University for more than 40 years.
Using Homestead, Duquesne and McKeesport as case studies for Regional Urban Design Assistance Teams, the conference made some bold recommendations: Clear away the abandoned steel mills along the Monongahela riverfront; make it easy to get to the river; use the land under the mills as the new economic engines for the towns; put a racetrack in McKeesport and a garden festival in Homestead as tourist attractions until more permanent development comes along.
First Published November 4, 2005 12:00 am
