Downtown Pittsburgh is a ghost town, merchants say, and according to one local professor, it will never return to its pre-pandemic prosperity.  

But don’t be so quick to write Downtown’s obituary. The city’s center has weathered adversity before. Case in point: the Point and the Pittsburgh Renaissance.

Just after World War II, the famed intersection of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers accurately reflected the city’s gritty industrial heritage as a place where business empires were launched, fortunes were made and wares were shipped to the world, sometimes leaving a mess behind.

Smoke billowed from mills lining both sides of the Mon. Coal powered the railroad locomotives whose tracks crisscrossed the region and coal heated half of American homes in the 1940s. Smog and soot blotted out the sun, dirtied buildings, homes and clothing and made the air hard to breathe.

Railroad tracks — some no longer in use — cluttered the Point. Old Exposition Hall, which had its last show in 1916, was being used to store cars. Freight yards, brothels, rooming houses and an old hotel filled out the neighborhood.

“It was, in sum, a blighted area,” Robert C. Alberts wrote in “The Shaping of the Point: Pittsburgh’s Renaissance Park.” Pittsburgh in 1945 was “a chewed-up, run-down, decaying community.”

When architect Frank Lloyd Wright came to town, he was asked if Pittsburgh should be rebuilt. 

“It would be cheaper to abandon it,” he said, according to a story published July 1, 1935, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

But the region’s leaders weren’t willing to walk away. For decades after World War II, business, philanthropic and political leaders worked together to clean and beautify the city, especially the Point, and to make it a destination for residents and visitors.  

Hopes of rebuilding and revitalizing the Point began as early as 1936, after a historic St. Patrick’s Day flood that crested there at 46 feet, higher than a telephone pole.

Several proposals were considered for the neighborhood:

• A huge monument to George Rogers Clark, the “Conqueror of the Old Northwest”; a pioneer museum; town hall; historic monument and park; water park and boat landings; plus parking for 4,000 cars
• A shaft made of Pennsylvania black granite, steel, glass and aluminum with landscaped grounds behind it. This idea came from Robert Moses, a powerful and controversial city planner from New York.

• A tiered circular main building with 13 levels and a “grand auto ramp” on its exterior. This idea came from Wright, who designed the world-famous Fallingwater house in the Laurel Highlands.
• A small park around the site of the current fountain and no monuments.

All these ideas assumed that the Point and Manchester bridges, which connected the Point with the North and South sides, would remain in place. The bridges met the Point very close to its tip, isolating a small triangular piece of land.

Richard K. Mellon, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune and president and chair of Mellon Bank, played an outsized role in revitalizing the Point.

Inside the wood-paneled rooms of the Duquesne Club, Mellon gathered the city’s leaders to discuss cleaning up and reshaping the city. These meetings in 1943 organized the Allegheny Conference, comprising employers, philanthropists, cultural institutions and sources of wealth.

In 1945, plans to turn the Point from a slum into a showcase gathered steam as architect Charles Stotz and landscape architect Ralph E. Griswold began hashing out possible plans.

“We always came up against the fact that we had those two bridge ends looming 30 feet up in the air,” Griswold said. “There simply was no park area to design — only a tiny peak of land and waterfront beyond the bridges. How were people to get down to that? Who would want to and why?”

They got permission from Mellon to draw up two plans — one with the bridges moved and one without. In their plans finalized in October 1945, the architects made clear that anything other than moving the bridges would be a compromise and “will forever appear as such.”

They took the plans to Gov. Edward Martin, fearing he would reject them or favor less expensive options. Instead, the Republican governor said: “Which one is the better proposal? Which do you prefer?” When they answered, he laid aside the plan for leaving the bridges intact, saying, “I don’t want to see it.” Martin announced that his administration would finance the project.

David L. Lawrence, a Democrat, won the 1944 city mayoral race by just 12,790 votes. He could have taken a contrarian stance to Republican-backed plans for the Point. Instead, he embraced them, starting a long collaboration to transform Pittsburgh.

Under a new state law — the 1945 Urban Redevelopment Act — a city could, under certain conditions, use eminent domain to buy and develop commercial property for private, for-profit use. Pittsburgh’s attempt to do so resulted in years of political maneuvering and lawsuits, ending with the U.S. Supreme Court dismissing the last property owners’ appeal. The city obtained a 59-acre area that included the Point and land beyond it. Demolition began in 1950. 

The largest building to be razed was the Wabash Terminal Station, which stood on a triangular lot roughly at the site of Four Gateway Center. A grand Beaux-Arts station built in 1904, it was once considered “the most beautiful railroad building west of New York,” according to The Pittsburgh Press. 

George J. Gould, son of financial speculator Jay Gould, had hoped to build a freight railroad that spanned the entire country from west to east, breaking Pennsylvania Railroad’s lock on the east. But the Wabash Railroad never made it to the East Coast, and by 1908, the business was bankrupt.

In 1941, the American Red Cross moved into the Wabash Terminal Station, dividing its cavernous marble interior into ugly office spaces. The building caught fire in 1946 and smoldered for more than three weeks. It took almost a month to clean up 800 tons of decayed food, water and mud. The building’s blighted shell was razed between 1953 and 1954.

From the debris rose Gateway Center, a group of four glass high-rise office buildings. The first tenant, Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., moved in in April 1952, with Westinghouse Electric Corp. not far behind. 

In 1953, the city launched an archaeological dig on the site of Fort Pitt and discovered part of an oak stockade wall and original bricks. 

The work to clean up the city core reassured business leaders. Alcoa’s executives had been considering leaving the city. Instead, the company in 1953 built new headquarters at the opposite end of Downtown at 425 Sixth Ave. R.K. Mellon — through three Mellon family foundations — built a parking garage across the street. The 845-car underground garage cost $4.3 million and opened in time for Christmas shopping 1954.

Above the garage, Mellon had an urban park built. Mellon Square, which opened in October 1955, has distinctive black, white and green triangle patterns in its pavement and a cascading fountain. The Pittsburgh Press hailed the park as “a Triangle showplace.”

A Hilton Hotel opened in front of Gateway Center on Dec. 3, 1959. The hotel’s gold aluminum exterior was meant to honor the Golden Triangle. At the opening ceremony, 1,300 guests watched Hilton Hotels founder Conrad N. Hilton use gold-colored shears to snip a 5-foot-wide satin ribbon extending down the front of the building. The hotel is now the Wyndham Grand.

The main span of the Fort Duquesne Bridge was finished in 1963, but went unused for six years, earning it the name the "Bridge to Nowhere." The Portal Bridge, a pedestrian bridge under the highway that allows people to walk between the east and west parts of the Point State Park, also opened in 1963.

The Fort Pitt Museum, which incorporated the footprint of the old British fort, opened in 1969. 

An outcry to preserve the Manchester and Point bridges did not succeed. The Fort Duquesne Bridge finally opened in 1969, replacing the Manchester Bridge, which was detonated in April 1970. The Fort Pitt Bridge opened in 1959, replacing the Point Bridge, which was dismantled in 1969.

The last piece of Point State Park fell into place in July 1974, when Gov. Milton Shapp turned on a giant fountain at the very tip of the Point. It has been flooded and repaired many times since, but the fountain works.

“Those assets still live,” said Stefani Pashman, CEO of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. “We still rely on what’s there.

“The Downtown region is just as important today as it was in the 1940s. ... I feel very confident that as people start bringing their folks back, that we will emerge from the doldrums we’re seeing Downtown.”