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The Shaping of the Point: Pittsburgh's Renaissance Park
Book by Alberts, Robert C.
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1980
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 7, 2021
In a sense, this is a bit of an odd book for me to read. I've never been to Pittsburgh, and to be perfectly honest I had to look it up on a map before I started reading because I only had a very vague idea of where it was in America. But I'm reading my way through a list of books on urban nature, and if this one doesn't quite fit in with the rest it's relatively short and I thought I'd give it a go, because I know even less about landscape architecture than I do about the geography of Pittsburgh, and so I thought it might be interesting.
It was, though in places very dry. Basically, way back in the day, the point at Pittsburgh, at an effective junction of three rivers, helped to shape the history of the United States, being an important battleground between British, French, and Native American peoples. Some generations later it was a dump. Not an actual rubbish dump, but an ill-managed, ill-planned, rundown urban slum of a place that certainly made little advantage of its beautiful watery location. Hence the continual plans to tear down the lot and put a park there. I say "continual" because the bickering over what to put there lasted literal generations, and the building of the park itself took close to thirty years. Hence this historical overview, and Alberts makes plain the many, many challenges the multiple stakeholders had in developing the area into something attractive.
As I said, however, it can be quite dry, with a cast of dozens to keep track of, and it's not helped by the lack of pictures. There are admittedly a number of them, but a surprising proportion of the pictures here were of people involved in the park renewal project - groups of them standing around solemnly looking at plans, that sort of thing. I realise that Alberts wanted to give credit (and well-deserved credit) to the people involved, but it would have been much more helpful to embed visual images of the actual park development more effectively within the text. Let me give an example. Thanks to two elderly bridges of surpassing ugliness and endless traffic problems, two new bridges had to be built further back along the shoreline and a traffic interchange designed to link them up. Alberts describes plans A, B, C, E, and X for this interchange (I am not kidding) but I honestly couldn't figure out the difference between them, or even begin to visualise them, and the final result only became clear several chapters later, when photos of the construction of said interchange were inserted, for reasons past understanding, into the chapter on archaeological research within the park.
So, interesting, but more useful as a historical rather than popular record, I think.
It was, though in places very dry. Basically, way back in the day, the point at Pittsburgh, at an effective junction of three rivers, helped to shape the history of the United States, being an important battleground between British, French, and Native American peoples. Some generations later it was a dump. Not an actual rubbish dump, but an ill-managed, ill-planned, rundown urban slum of a place that certainly made little advantage of its beautiful watery location. Hence the continual plans to tear down the lot and put a park there. I say "continual" because the bickering over what to put there lasted literal generations, and the building of the park itself took close to thirty years. Hence this historical overview, and Alberts makes plain the many, many challenges the multiple stakeholders had in developing the area into something attractive.
As I said, however, it can be quite dry, with a cast of dozens to keep track of, and it's not helped by the lack of pictures. There are admittedly a number of them, but a surprising proportion of the pictures here were of people involved in the park renewal project - groups of them standing around solemnly looking at plans, that sort of thing. I realise that Alberts wanted to give credit (and well-deserved credit) to the people involved, but it would have been much more helpful to embed visual images of the actual park development more effectively within the text. Let me give an example. Thanks to two elderly bridges of surpassing ugliness and endless traffic problems, two new bridges had to be built further back along the shoreline and a traffic interchange designed to link them up. Alberts describes plans A, B, C, E, and X for this interchange (I am not kidding) but I honestly couldn't figure out the difference between them, or even begin to visualise them, and the final result only became clear several chapters later, when photos of the construction of said interchange were inserted, for reasons past understanding, into the chapter on archaeological research within the park.
So, interesting, but more useful as a historical rather than popular record, I think.
April 17, 2014
Enjoyable and succinct overview of the creation and development of Point State Park in Pittsburgh. It is particularly useful for sorting out the personal and political maneuverings occurring in the background. A must-read for anyone interested in Pittsburgh, parks, and urban planning.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews