Allegheny Landing tells tale of revival

A crumbling mosaic spreads beneath the faded pebble sculpture “Piazza Lavoro” by Ned Smyth, while the curling, colorful “Pittsburgh Variations” by George Sugarman is splashed with graffiti. Traipsing across muddy North Side sod with the poignant winds of the river buffeting your face, the sculptures stand like forgotten monuments, or more appropriately, relics of days past.

Allegheny Landing, a North Shore park, is an archeological dig that shows the rise, stagnation and upcoming rebirth of public art in Pittsburgh. The story behind these forgotten tributes to the arts in Pittsburgh is unknown by many, but it is an intriguing tale of money, politics, identity and hope.

 Zoom back to the Pittsburgh of 1984. Rusted barges decomposed on the North Shore while the South Side was still a smoldering heap of recently abandoned steel mills. Steel, the industry that had powered this mid-Atlantic city, had left it high and dry. A new identity and, more importantly, a new source of income was needed.

Jack Heinz, then-CEO of H.J. Heinz Co., joined forces with the Mellon Stuart Construction Co. to spawn an urban art park, a place that would pay tribute to Pittsburgh’s industrial past but also look toward a new future. Alice Snyder, who was an art consultant for the project, described it as a place that aimed to “glorify the history of industry and labor.”

Companies such as Alcoa and philantrophist families such as the Hillmans joined the team, each sponsoring a different artist to create a work that would memorialize the cultured side of Pittsburgh as a child of its grittier industrial past. In this sense, the sculpture park was more than just a deposition of art in a park.

In a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article by Donald Miller printed on June 13, 1984, (the day Allegheny Landing was dedicated), the significance of the creation of the park was described as going “beyond the … sculptures placed in this outdoor showcase.”

The sculptures were placed in a meticulously designed landscape that overlooks the Ohio River and the city’s rapidly changing downtown, as well as the promise of Pittsburgh as a new kind of city. Art and recreational space came together in the hope of the “improvement of the North Shore and a promise of better development upstream,” Miller wrote.

Thirty years later, the landing is overshadowed by PNC Park and many of the sculptures that dot the landing have fallen into disrepair. Walking through the landing is like walking among the ruins of ancient Greece. The sculptures are stained from years of rain, scrawled with graffiti and cracked and chipped from neglect and the occasional construction crew.

The fall from grace the North Shore sculptures have endured reveals the attitude of the Steel City, as well as regional land issues and an alarming lack of responsibility.

The land that composes the Allegheny Landing area is owned by the city, but the sculptures are owned by the Carnegie Museum of Art. When the park was first built, it was Mellon Stuart Construction who promised to maintain the park and the sculptures. Snyder explained that the Pittsburgh Foundation “set up a public art fund to maintain the sculptures, with $30,000 given by the Urban Redevelopment Authority. But $30,000 wasn’t enough.”

Making matters worse, Mellon Stuart, which had built two buildings for their company on the North Shore and who saw the art park as a way to help create a public-friendly landscape, then went out of business and left Pittsburgh. After the company left, there was no caretaker for the city to call on to help maintain the landing. Even though the Carnegie Museum of Art owned the sculptures and the city owned the property, the park slowly fell into disrepair once the funding provided by the URA ran out. According to Snyder, plan at the time was to form a new committee to raise additional money, but this never happened..

 With this in mind, exactly why the park failed is the subject of debate, much of which according to many involved slides into topics of money, identity and unwillingness to change, and that also dips muddy fingers into the political sphere.

Pittsburgh’s heritage — built on steel and the sweat of workers — is an identity that some believe grounds the sort of stagnant attitude toward public art in the city.

Sophomore history of art and architecture student Meghan Hipple wrote her capstone paper about Smyth’s “Piazza Lavoro” sculpture. Hipple is from a town 45 minutes outside of Pittsburgh and has grown up with the image of Pittsburgh as a “Steel City.” While researching her paper, she found that this mindset is widespread.

“People still have the mentality that we are a ‘Steel City’ … But we are not a ‘Steel City’ anymore. … This is not who Pittsburgh is anymore. Pittsburgh still perceives itself as a ‘great industrial city’ but doesn’t realize how art is very important to a city. Art is a big tourist and money factor, and cities get money from the federal government for having public art. It’s a bigger benefit than just being pretty,” she said. 

Snyder said another issue is the simple fact that people don’t know about the history behind public art such as that in Allegheny Landing.

“A lot of the problem is the lack of education about public art and the city. A lot of people pass public art every day and don’t think twice about it, because they don’t know anything about it,” she said.

While there has been a history of neglect of public art in Pittsburgh, there has also been a recent renewal of interest in these works. Friends of Allegheny Landing, with the aid of the Carnegie Museum of Art and other groups, has begun raising funds to clean up Allegheny Landing, a process that involves landscape alterations and preservation work to be done on the sculptures.

Public art is not dead in Pittsburgh, and these kinds of initiatives show an increasing recognition of its importance to the city. According to Laura Zorch, an educational programs assistant with the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council’s Office of Public Art, “Art is playing an interesting role in how the city is reshaping and re-identifying itself after the industry is gone. It is changing, showing we may no longer be a steel town, but here is what else we have to offer,” she said.

This new line of thinking shows that art and the image of a “Steel City” do not necessarily have to be separated for Pittsburgh to clean up its image.

“One of the newer sculptures on the South Side called “The Workers” depicts two giant steel workers made with reclaimed beams,” Zorch said. “It is a giant piece of public art that reflects on [Pittsburgh’s] industrial past and that is representative of the steel heritage that once existed here.”