The World's Richest Neighborhood: How Pittsburgh's East Enders Forged American Industry

by Quentin R. Skrabec Jr.

In 1900, Pittsburgh's East End neighborhood was the world's richest. It represented the opulence, power, and greed of 19th-century capitalism. And for many it was statement of hope and motivation. In a short walk, one might run into Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, George Westinghouse, H. J. Heinz, a member of the Mellon family or of the United States Congress. This book traces the lives of this influential coterie and their impact on American industry, culture and history.

The residents of Pittsburgh's East End controlled as much a 40% of America s assets at the turn of the last century. Mail was delivered seven times a day to keep America's greatest capitalists in touch with their factories, banks, and markets. The neighborhood had its own private station of the Pennsylvania Railroad with a daily non-stop express to New York's financial district.

Many of the world's most powerful men princes, artists, politicians, scientists, and American presidents such as William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, William Taft, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, came to visit the hard-working and high-flying captains of industry. Two major corporations, Standard Oil and ALCOA Aluminum were formed in East End homes. It was the first neighborhood to adopt the telephone with direct lines from the homes to the biggest banks in Pittsburgh, which at the time was America's fifth largest city.

The story of this neighborhood is a story of America at its greatest point of wealth and includes rags-to-riches stories, political corruption, scandals, and greed. The history of this unique piece of American geography makes for enjoyable reading for a large cross section of readers.

Genres: History

248 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2010

Reviews

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review title: Better story than the telling

East of downtown Pittsburgh, the landscape starts to roll up the sides of the river valleys, with neighborhoods like Oakland, Braddock, and Squirrel Hill. Before these place names were known for tragedy and steel mills, they were once, as Skrabec has titled his book and as hard as it may be to believe today, the world's richest neighborhoods. The confluence of geography, geology, religious and cultural values, the historical forces that generated the American Revolution, and individual genius produced industrial and commercial innovations that changed the shape of Pittsburgh, America, and the world.

In particular, five East End neighbors had transformed the industrial world. Carnegie, Frick, Mellon, Westinghouse, and Heinz were those lions. Judge Thomas Mellon died in 1909. Westinghouse died in 1911,and Heinz, Carnegie, and Frick all passed in 1919. (p. 195)

In the space of the few decades before and after turn of the 20th century, these men, all near neighbors and sometimes next door neighbors, would create empires in steel (Carnegie), coal and coke (Frick), electricity and railroad engineering (Westinghouse), banking (Mellon), and packaged food processing (Heinz). Skrabec claims that at their peak, these Pittsburgh East Enders, along with other neighbors working in smaller or related organizations, controlled 60% of the industrial wealth in the US. They were influenced by their common Scotch-Irish or German heritage, educated in frontier schools based on the McGuffey Readers and the Bible, convinced of the rightness of capitalism and individual effort by their immersion in the American experiment, and sure of both the rightness of earned income and the risk of inherited wealth by their Presbyterian religious beliefs.

Skrabec is a business professor at a small university in Ohio who was born and grew up in the Pittsburgh East End neighborhoods he writes about, and has focused his academic studies on writing biographies of many of the men he brings together here in this history. The history is fascinating, marred only by Skrabec's struggles as a writer. He repeats material as if he has forgotten he has already written it, sometimes as quickly as a paragraph or a page after introducing it. His phrasing can be awkward, and while he provides a bibliography, his footnoting is spotty; he sometimes makes factual claims that need attribution but aren't footnoted.

But if you stick with it, the history is thought provoking. These men generated fabulous wealth, are sometimes identified as robber barons of the Gilded Age (Carnegie and Frick masterminding the anti-union Battle of Homestead), yet they were also enlightened employers by the standards of their day, and sincerely philanthropic, funding health care, education, libraries, parks, and museums. Their names are memorialized in institutions known not only in Pittsburgh but globally. They provided the first safety net for their employees and the city of Pittsburgh, in an era when government was not yet seen as responsible for rounding and providing it. Even when pillaried as robber barons (and responsible for the Johnstown Flood when the dam holding the lake at their summertime retreat burst in 1889) they were respected and revered by their employees and most local media and institutions.

Skrabec provides some unique insights based on his study:

--Pittsburgh was first known as the "Iron City" not because the steel mills producing the metal, but because other industries like railroads and construction used so much of it.

--Pittsburgh might have better been known as the "Glass City", for its early dominance in glass manufacturing (which provided Heinz the packaging innovations for his famous pickles), or the "Aluminum City", for its application of Westinghouse's AC electric generation to creating the lightweight metal.

--The East Enders were also Republican Party kingmakers for several presidential elections during those decades, when candidates like William McKinley made obligatory visits to curry favor and gather contributions.

While the population and influence of Pittsburgh has declined since those halcyon days, the heritage of corporate wealth, industrial innovation, philanthropic contribution, and political influence remains because of those great early leaders. They made America a stronger nation. Indeed, they made America. So if you have an interest in the history of the city or in the development of the nation, this is history that still matters.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

The content of this book is incredibly interesting and serves as a great summary of the often forgotten impact Pittsburgh had on the country at the turn of the 20th century. However, the book was incredibly repetitive and often times presented the same information just paragraphs apart, sometimes even in the same paragraph. It also tended to talk about these giants of industry (Carnegie, Westinghouse, Frick, Mellon, Heinz, Schwab, etc.) with intense reverence while barely touching on the incredible hardships and poor working conditions that resulted from their quest for capital.

[cluedupreader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating. (Next up, nonfiction: The Johnstown Flood.)

But a lot of repetition (on the very same page at times), and an overuse of certain words. (One could play the drinking game with confluence, alone.)

The print is smaller than in textbooks, and the ten pages of pictures don't enhance the experience (I wish family trees and maps were included, which also could limit the repetitiveness). So, save your money (and your eyes) and purchase the ebook (available from Google Play) instead of the costly paperback.

If you like(d) this book, then I recommend Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House.