The Steel Industry's Search for Urban Order

(2004) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
(2004) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
In the 1890s the Apollo Iron and Steel Company outside Pittsburgh ended a bitterly contested labor dispute by hiring replacement workers from the surrounding countryside. To avoid future unrest, the company also drew upon social reform philosophies from Europe and elsewhere in the United States to create a formula for gaining tighter control over the workers—at the steel mill and at their homes. The firm decided that providing low-cost loans to workers to build and purchase good housing in a well-planned urban environment would make labor more loyal and productive. In 1895, Apollo Iron and Steel built a new, integrated, non-unionized steelworks and hired the nation's preeminent landscape architectural firm (Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot) to design the model industrial town: Vandergrift.

In Capital's Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855-1916, Anne E. Mosher offers the first comprehensive geographical overview of the industrial restructuring of an American steelworks and its workforce in the late nineteenth–century. In addition, by offering a thorough analysis of the Olmsted plan, Mosher integrates historical geography and labor history with landscape architectural history and urban studies. As a result, this book is far more than a case study. It is a window into an important period of industrial development and its consequences on communities and environments in the world-famous steel country of southwestern Pennsylvania.

  • The 2011 Westmoreland Library Network's One Book One Community common reading.
  • Featured book at the 2007 Arthur St. Clair Lecture, University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg

 

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