I had railed against John Tierney's New York Times column ripping Pittsburgh's redevelopment history, but it was nothing compared to the rebuttal by Mayor Tom Murphy of the "many inaccuracies and misrepresentations about the city."
OK, folks who are neither present nor former Pittsburghers may not care much about this parochial food fight (Murphy, Tierney and I are all natives). But Tierney's casual relationship with facts once again brings up the question of factchecking and correcting errors of NYT columnists. His original July 5 piece was specifically against eminent domain, and how Pittsburgh had messed itself up with the overuse of eminent domain. Except that Pittsburgh had done neither. Says Hizzoner:
Eminent domain was never used in any of the major recent projects described in Mr. Tierney's column. The site assembly for our new convention center, PNC Park, Heinz Field and the Lazarus development was done amicably. In the case of Lazarus, the public subsidy was not $50 million, as Mr. Tierney states.
Ditto the Heinz plant expansion: no use of eminent domain.
As for Mr. Tierney's assertion that "the city's finances are in ruins," the mayor says, "Pittsburgh's financial situation is quickly turning the corner. All three New York independent bond rating agencies have recently upgraded Pittsburgh's financial outlook, and we will end 2005 with an $11 million surplus."
It does seem that John Tierney is following in the footsteps of his predecessor, William Safire, who flogged the Mohamed-Atta-in-Prague-to-meet-Iraqi-spy story as "proof" of a Saddam-9/11 link long after the tale was discredited by Czech officials up to and including President Vaclav Havel, and even the news pages of the NYT itself. Why bother with facts when they don't fit your argument?
And a note to commenters on my original post: The various urban renewal projects of the '50s and '60s may not all have been unqualified successes, but neither were they "examples of taking things that worked and making them broken." The rapid growth and popularity of suburban shopping centers was the primary culprit in the demise of so many urban retail centers, especially those catering to middle- and working-class families (the "carriage trade" did just fine). East Liberty was already on the skids before the daring and ultimately disastrous makeover of the late '60s, but we don't know what would have happened otherwise. At least it was spared the fate of another, very similar large urban shopping district a few miles away in Braddock. By 1976, the once-prosperous mini-downtown of shops, movie theaters, department stores, etc. had decayed to become the perfect "blue-collar wasteland" setting for George Romero's vampire film, Martin. And the place doesn't look any better today.