| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Before Renaissance: Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889–1943. By John F. Bauman and Edward K. Muller. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. xvi, 331 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-8229-4287-9. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 0-8229-5930-5.)
I moved to Pittsburgh in 1962, just as the Pittsburgh renaissance reached its apex. Having lived in a clean and orderly midwestern city, I was unimpressed by the accomplishments of the renaissance. Pittsburghers, however, insisted on how horrible the city was before those changes—the darkness at noon, the soot and ugliness—until I was finally convinced. My vision of pre-renaissance Pittsburgh was of an unplanned, chaotic environment—"hell with the lid taken off," as the journalist James Parton called it ("Pittsburg," Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1868, p. 21). This volume by John F. Bauman and Edward K. Muller challenges that perception.	1
The authors make a case for the importance of planning in Pittsburgh in the period well before the renaissance began in the mid-1940s. As they declare, their study "underscores the significance of Pittsburgh in planning history and in the changing nature of the urban conversation about the form and use of urban space" (pp. 270–71). Further, they argue that "the city reflected key trends in the history of planning ... and ... on a number of occasions and in several ways was central to the history of modern planning" (p. 271).	. . .

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