CLOSING OUT

BY RALPH HORGAN

My dad grew up in Hazelwood, on Gladstone Street high above the mills. All his siblings raised their families in Hazelwood. I had two uncles who worked on the MonCon and one uncle who worked in the mills. My dad somehow got a white-collar job Downtown for US Steel, or as he called it, The Corporation. Everybody up and down the valley worked in or for the mills.

I remember as a kid sitting on my Aunt Mary’s front porch at night watching the flames fly off the J&L mill down below and sucking in that sulfurous smell. As a young kid taking Ecology classes, I once had the temerity to say to my dad that the mills spewed out a lot of pollution. He said, “There’s a lot of men working down there and feeding their families’.” I never mentioned it again.

Now it’s all but vanished. And left a great deal of despair and destruction in that void. So where do we go in this region? What fills the void? How does Pittsburgh grow or find new industries where many people, up and down the socioeconomic scale, can make a decent living? There is a great deal of hope that tech, advanced manufacturing and ‘eds & meds’ are the future. I share that view.

I am fortunate to work in Oakland at Carnegie Mellon University. I manage the design and construction group. In my time here we have constructed well over a billion dollars of facilities for the university. Our friends across the hollow at the University of Pittsburgh have exceeded that multiple, is my guess. Each of these institutions, with the generous support of the R.K. Mellon Foundation, are on the road to developing very significant new structures down at the Hazelwood Green site. Yes, the very place that I marveled at as a kid. Pitt is leveraging its strength in life sciences and CMU is leveraging its robotics expertise to construct these new facilities. And it is not an accident.

The financial and philanthropic community, the universities, and local and state governments are pushing to create and enhance those new industries – that new ecosystem – that will pull the region forward. This region is catapulting the magic that has been created in the 21st century by the enormous advances in crossdisciplinary technologies. Remember, the iPhone was only introduced in 2007! Who knew that the entire world would be using mobile devices for every conceivable aspect of business and society? Indeed, there are also negative consequences to these new things, just as there is with all new technologies (think nuclear energy or cars, for that matter). Finally, the federal government leaders are creating funding and policies to invest in these efforts to drive a new American economy. I think it has taken a couple generations to shake the notion that there is one big new-to-the-region company that will “bring back the mills.” That is not a winning strategy. There is no going back. We must look to the future. I think the leaders in Pittsburgh are following the old hockey adage, “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” This increasingly interconnected (did I mention the Internet?) world is dynamic and fastmoving. To compete, this region needs sound policies, available capital, and risk-takers. That is clearly what is happening at Hazelwood Green and elsewhere.

Life science advances, robotics, and other new industries in virtual reality and artificial intelligence are here. Pittsburgh has the expertise, the talent, and the work ethic to be global leaders in these new industries. Our leadership in the critical areas of education, research and creativity positions us to be trailblazers in the global community of knowledge creators in the 21st century. We are in the midst of creating a sustainable innovation ecosystem with global impact., kind of like what the steel industry produced for Pittsburgh throughout the 20th century. Onward and upward!

Ralph Horgan is the associate vice president for campus planning and facilities development at Carnegie Mellon University.