Part 7

In speaking of the civic center scheme for the business district, earlier in this article, I held that it should be supplemented by a larger one. This larger plan would provide a fitting approach to the East End, and could be made to join the two great improvement projects.

Owing to the interruption offered by Herron Hill, the usual approaches now to the East End are by Forbes street or Fifth avenue,--two mean and crowded thoroughfares, a block apart, that parallel the Monongahela and carry street car traffic by the shortest route to the Carnegie Institute region and the section beyond; by Wylie and Centre avenues (half over the hills), or in a roundabout way, by Liberty street or Penn avenue,--again relatively narrow and crowded thoroughfares, and for the most part meanly built up; or, finally, by Grant boulevard. The latter, beginning near the Union Station and cut out of a hill at much expense, was an attempt to provide a pleasant approach. Like the drives and viaducts serving the outer park reservations, it shows imagination and engineering skill. It is indirect, however, is too narrow to carry the bulk of the vehicle traffic, and with its cuttings, vacant property, sunny stretches and aggressive billboards, it is not yet inviting but it could be made attractive by terracing and parking. The need, however, aesthetically and practically is for an approach that shall be better than any of these.

Forbes street and Fifth avenue run east from the jail and court house in perfectly straight lines. They are at approximately even grades for a mile, separated from each other by only a short block. At Seneca street the grade changes, and from there on any joint improvement would involve a viaduct or other device, until the streets grow parallel, and close together again for the final half mile to Schenley Park. Suppose the two streets thrown together in one broad and splendid way, from the jail straight eastward for the first mile. None of the property here is expensively built up; most of it is exceedingly poor and shabby. There are, for the whole distance, the two streets and an alley, a total width for the whole distance of probably at least 140 feet that is now public property. At short intervals there are cross streets, to the number of about a dozen; these also are public property. And there is a school in the area to be used. Thus, altogether, the municipality already owns, one may confidently say, more than half of the land that would be required. The only question is concerning its wisest utilization. It may be admitted that to buy the intervening private plats, unifying the public property and making it available for a single scheme, would involve large cost. But there would be much on the other side of the ledger. Think of the noble thoroughfare, with its special lanes for high speeding surface cars, its quadruple roadways, one for fast moving and one for slow moving vehicles in each direction, its lines of trees and shaded walks; think of its convenience, its directness, its capacity, its spectacular sufficiency; think of the increase in the value of the abutting property. Under the Pennsylvania Law of Excess Condemnation part at least of this value would accrue to the city, as in the case of the great London improvements. Even in the matter of absolute (initial) outlay, the expenditure would probably not be greater than for the subway now proposed, while it would grant practically equivalent facilities for transit, as far as rapidity is concerned, with many other advantages.

Instead of expending a vast sum to give setting to a group of public buildings, in the proposed civic center, this parkway could be made to give the adequate setting incidentally. Certain ones would be placed along its margin at the western end. Further, the improvement, instead of redeeming one small space, would redeem two streets for a mile at least. It could even be extended farther by means of a viaduct or some other device, and ultimately carried clear out to Schenley Park.

There is no opportunity in this discussion to go into the project with detail. Even the Eastern terminus of the improvement must be left for later consideration. But it is plain that should the avenue stop at the mile, that much would be worth doing and would immensely increase the comfort and decrease the delay of getting to the East End. Further, the splendid avenue would be democratic in its benefit, since the trolleys would have their place in it. The wage earner would go bowling home or to business as well encompassed as the motorist. The social benefit of that, and of the ceaseless entertainment which the traffic of the gay avenue would offer, is to be esteemed. There is no park so popular as a great street.

V.

Pittsburgh's built-up suburban district is varied and far scattered. It lies along the rivers, as at Sharpsburg, in industrial towns; it lies among the hills, as at Sewickley, in purely residential areas. It is reached in some places by steam cars, and everywhere by trolley. It is the home of the millionaire and of the moderate wage earner. At times it is beautiful, and at other times it shows hardly the beginnings of aesthetic aspiration or social consciousness. No brief discussion of it is possible, for each separate suburban community would have to be taken by itself. But in a general way this can be said: As nature has given to Pittsburgh one of the most picturesque city sites in the world, so she has done what she could to circle the city with lovely suburbs. With sane and artistic planning, popular co-operation, and a degree of patience, the beautiful suburb with winding roads, entrancing views, individual privacy and communal neighborliness, might have been secured much oftener than it has been and it might have been brought within the financial reach of much greater numbers.

For suburbs rapid transit is essential; and that as yet has had nothing like the development one would expect near Pittsburgh. The subway plan involves the radiation from the loop of long, straight roads furnishing to certain outlying sections a transportation much more rapid than at present offered. With low fares, this should mean much to crowded Pittsburgh. But the time to improve suburbs is before, not after, the rush thither begins. The suburbs must act as quickly as must the East End, the playground supporters, the designers of an educational center, and the builders of an adequate East End approach. In all that Pittsburgh is to do for civic improvement she must act at once, generously and with comprehensive grasp.

VI.

With the exception of occasional ornamental spaces, and a few parks so small that they have only neighborhood importance, the parks of the Pittsburgh district may be said to consist of four public reservations. These are Schenley and Highland, in the East End; Riverview in Allegheny; and, in the older portion of Allegheny, the reservation,--once a great hollow square,--like a New England common; now in part relinquished to the railroads. Neither in total acreage, nor in distribution, nor in manner of development, are these parks what Pittsburgh ought to have.

Perhaps, of its kind, the old park in Allegheny is the most satisfying. Located close to the homes of a very large population from whom the country is far removed, it offers long, level stretches of greensward where good trees cast grateful shadows, with walks that one may use even when on business, with numberless benches that are never empty on summer days and evenings, a little lake at one place and now and again a fountain where the splash of cool water gives ceaseless entertainment. It is a pity that this park was deprived of nearly half its former area, that the railroad might have a convenient path.

Highland and Schenley, over in Pittsburgh's East End, are elaborately and expensively "improved." You get into Highland through a monumental entrance; costly beds of annuals confront you; from the reservoir heights there is a superb view; in a lower corner there is a Zoo, which is remarkably well set; and there are some charming retreats. It is a pretty good park of its kind,--a very costly, luxurious kind; and though it is located in an expensive residential neighborhood five miles from the city hall, a good many people get to it on holidays. It does some social work although far from the amount desired. Schenley does very little. The Phipps Conservatories, happily located near the entrance, are much visited when "a show" is on; somewhere in the inner recesses of the park there is a driving circuit, of which the crude old grand stand looms on the landscape like a combination of lumber yard and weatherbeaten country barn, and somewhere else there are golf links, maintained by a private club, where you may play if properly introduced! On the Fourth of July, fire works bring a crowd to the park. But it is significant that while there are costly bridges and many drives, there are no paths or walks. The cars touch only one projecting corner, and there are no park carriages. He who has not his own horses, or his own motor car, need not enter the East End's Schenley Park. For it is, typically, the East End's park, adapted fairly well to its neighborhood, but not at all serving the democratic needs of Greater Pittsburgh.

Here is a great industrial city. The scores of thousands of people whom the parks should serve are many of them foreigners, and the mass of them are workers over a single piece. Practically all of them work amid smoke and grime. The beauty of nature may be a new thought to these people. They should be helped to appreciate it, but they must be given first what they do understand and enjoy,--entertainment, vivacity, and brilliancy. If Schenley Park is little visited; a trolley park far away, where swings and boats, slides and ponies, keep something going all the time, is crowded day by day; and when, in the moonlight, shadows lie on the hills of Schenley, and the stars look down on deserted though free acres, other parks that are garish with a blaze of electric lights are thronged with people who have gladly paid a fee for admittance. There they find something to see and to do.

Industrial Pittsburgh ought to take pride in developing the special kind of park facilities that its population needs, and in setting an example to other cities. A comprehensive system of children's playgrounds would do something toward this; the proposed mall or parkway approach to the East End, where some thousands of the relatively poor would find, almost at their doors, a mile long open space with its ceaseless urban entertainment, would do something more; a system of small open spaces or outdoor social centers, where a man could smoke his pipe and chat with his neighbors, his wife at his side and his children at hand, would make further contribution; and the riverside park proposed for the business district, still further. But there should be two or three well-distributed and readily accessible large parks that would be real municipal pleasure grounds. Here should be ample athletic fields, a swimming pool, and a large field house; a band playing at frequent intervals; swings and boats; cheap conveyances that would make the whole space available; illuminations and song festivals; and refectory accommodations, with tables placed attractively out of doors, and wholesome food and drink at low prices. Tired workers, going to this free public park, should find entertainment. Little by little, and incidentally, they might learn there the more tranquil pleasure of contemplating nature.

There are various places in Pittsburgh where such parks could be established. One, that seems to be singularly adaptable is Brunot's Island. There is Maple Park on the South Side. For a neighborhood park, which by mere convenience of location and inherent interest should invite the Pittsburgh workman out of doors, the steep bank that rises across the Monongahela offers a site very distinctive and appropriate. Day and night the interest of its outlook would not cease. It would require little development. Inclined roads already scale the cliff, and midway stations would make any terrace available. And whatever landscape improvements were made would be visible and enjoyable from the business streets themselves. In Allegheny such a park site is already owned on Monument Hill.

The site of the penitentiary may some day become another available park site, for a penitentiary in the heart of a city is undesirable. Another wonderful park site, so wonderful that it is difficult to perceive why it has been so long neglected since track elevation has made it available, is the tip of the "Point." To-day it is a dumping ground. Aside from the historical and natural charm of this location, should be noted the breadth of outlook it offers, its free currents of air, its proximity to a large working population and the possibility of its attractive connection with a yet larger area by means of the suggested embankments which would practically form a riverside promenade and parkway to it.

With the acquisition of more parks it would be possible to arrange an interesting connecting system of boulevards and parkways. It is not enough simply to designate an existing street a boulevard. Calling it so does not make it so. And when Pittsburgh awakes to her greatness, and appreciates the surpassing beauty that might be hers, there is no reason to doubt that among other things she will commission the planning of an excellent system of drives.

There are naturally beautiful runs, now despoiled with mean dwellings and made little better than open sewers, that might be transformed into parkways; and there are hills and stretches of fair country that could be had now for a song for an outlying park system. It is true that all this will demand money, but there are no improvements that by long term bonds can be so justly made a mortgage on the distant future as those for parks. School houses, fire houses, public buildings, deteriorate with the lapse of time, but parks and boulevards become yearly of greater value.

VII.

The final word, which has to do with the needs of the whole community, hardly requires saying. It is a plea for comprehensive planning. Surely, if ever a city needed the definite plan that an outside commission could make for it, it is Pittsburgh. In most cities the "improvement" problem is largely aesthetic. In Pittsburgh, it is also economic and social. Its correct solution is something more than a desideratum; it is a need.

EFFECT OF FORESTS ON ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN THE PITTSBURGH DISTRICT

W. W. ASHE U. S. FOREST SERVICE

Three rivers determined the location of Pittsburgh. They have been important factors in creating its industrial position; they are now important agents affecting the health and earnings of thousands of its citizens. The two score of iron and coal towns which are known as the Pittsburgh District, fringe the banks of these rivers. Mine, factory and furnace alternate with the residence settlements of the laborers, and they and the railroads compete with the streams themselves for ownership of the narrow strip of land between low water and flood crest. With every recession of the floods, man crowds the streams, only to be driven back when they reassert their suzerainty. Whatever can be done therefore, to tame their caprices, to equalize their flow, either by lowering the flood crests or increasing the low water stages, adds to the well-being and prosperity of men who work at forge and furnace, or go with the barges,--men whose living is from day to day, and to whom the idle day brings want.

The flood is the open expression of the rivers' authority. But they have another and more subtle influence. It is less direct, but it has a wider relation to the well being of the city, not only affecting the laborer who lives on the lowlands, but affecting all citizens alike. The rivers and their tributaries near which Pittsburgh and the surrounding towns are situated, furnish these in most instances with their water supply. The character of this water affects the health of the users, and their working efficiency.

All the drinking water used in the Pittsburgh District, except that from artesian wells or similar primarily pure sources, has been contaminated by the sewage of towns and villages higher up the rivers. Through such contaminated water typhoid fever and other zymotic intestinal diseases are widely disseminated. Scarcely a town in the steel and coal district has not been devastated by an outbreak of this dread scourge. The condition of Wilkinsburg is typical, its water supply being contaminated by the sewage of more than twenty towns. The new filtration plant for Greater Pittsburgh delivers to most of the city a drink much superior in quality to the highly polluted waters generally used. But filtration is only a first step toward purity, and toward decreasing typhoid fever and the other water-borne diseases. Filtration removes a high percentage of the pathogenic bacteria by which these diseases are transmitted; but a highly contaminated water, such as that of the Allegheny River, purified even by the best methods of sand filtration, is not pure water. Intelligent users must at length realize this and demand for their own health not a purified water merely, but a primarily pure supply, safeguarded by sedimentation and filtration against occasional contamination. Within easy reach of Pittsburgh and nearly every one of its satellite towns, lie abundant sources of primarily pure supply, in the forest-protected mountain streams.

Hitherto the cost of purchasing a forested watershed and holding it as unproductive property has deterred cities from seeking such sources. That difficulty no longer exists. Forest lands have now a recognized and constantly increasing earning power. If a watershed is purchased at a reasonable price and is well managed, it will become, as stumpage further appreciates in worth, a valuable municipal asset. Or if a town is small and unwilling to assume the responsibility of such management; it can well co-operate with the state in developing a system which will secure to it pure water, and at the same time preserve to the state the earning power of its forests which are among its most valuable natural resources.

Domestic water supply, however, is largely a matter local to each town or each group of towns. But the wage earners of the whole Pittsburgh section are yearly vitally affected by the rivers in a different way. The earnings and even the lives of thousands, especially of those living in the low districts of the larger cities, are threatened by the winter and spring floods. These floods frequently result in losses to wage earners aggregating several million dollars a year. In the flood of March, 1907, it is estimated that more than 2,000 families in the river districts of Pittsburgh, and an equal number in the low lying sections of nearby cities, were forced from their homes or their stores by high water. Quantities of personal effects were injured or destroyed; lives were lost; and much suffering followed the winter exposure. The effect of the flood in increasing certain kinds of disease is shown by a comparison of the pneumonia and typhoid records in the flooded wards of Pittsburgh. Dr. Beaty of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health gives us the number of cases of these two diseases in certain wards on the North Side, which are largely tenanted by laborers, and were partly inundated.

In March and April, 1906, when there was no flood, there were fourteen cases of pneumonia and forty-eight of typhoid fever.

In March and April, 1907, when the flood had a height of thirty-six feet, there were forty cases of pneumonia and 118 cases of typhoid fever, more than twice the number of the preceding year.

During the flood the water and dwellings in these districts became badly contaminated by human waste, since the flooding of toilets and sewers prevented their use. At the same time many families usually dependent upon street hydrants for domestic water had to make use of this extremely impure river water. This affected large numbers of people, many of them recently arrived foreigners unacquainted with methods of securing ready relief. But a more general suffering was occasioned by the loss in wages through the closing of large establishments whose plants were flooded. It was estimated at the time by one of the local newspapers that more than 100,000 people in the Pittsburgh District were idle for an average period of a week on account of the March flood of 1907. A typical example is the National Tube Works, where different departments were closed from ten to fourteen days, throwing about 10,000 men out of regular work. About 4,000 of these were employed for three days as laborers, cleaning up after the water subsided. The same thing is yearly repeated in many other large factories as well as on the railroads. It is no exceptional occurrence. A similar, though less severe flood occurred two months earlier the same year and another in March, 1908. It is indeed an exceptional spring when there is not a flood. The losses to laborers by curtailment of wages from this cause are seldom so excessive as they were in the flood of March, 1907, but they amount annually to more than $100,000. Moreover, this loss takes place in the winter, when the wage earner can least afford it.

The river floods cannot be prevented by local effort. Their damage is by no means confined to Pittsburgh; it extends the entire course of the Ohio River and its most important tributaries; its causes originate in other states besides Pennsylvania. Although the state and even the cities might well co-operate in certain ways, the prevention of these floods is a problem for the Federal government to consider.

The cause of a flood lies partly in natural conditions. The run-off of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers is naturally concentrated and the highest floods occur when a deep snow on a frozen soil is suddenly melted by heavy warm rain. But their height has been accentuated by human agency; and this points to the two necessary phases of river flood control work. One is the re-establishment of normal forest conditions. This means not so much a great extension of the forest area, although there are many steep slopes now cleared which should be re-wooded; but it means the restocking as densely as possible of lands which have been cut or badly burned and are thinly or partially wooded. This is a means to an end. The forest produces a deep mat of leaves and mould, the humus which not only has a high water storage capacity itself but determines largely the porousness and absorptive power of the underlying soil. This function of the forest is not incompatible with the use of its timber. The most rapid growth of timber is secured by maintaining the deepest humus; but the cutting of it must be adjusted under skilled direction in order not to jeopardize the water storage function of the soil.