Editor’s note: Pittsburgh’s role as a top center for research has been challenged by federal cuts to science funding but also highlighted in an artificial intelligence summit. The city’s transition to eds-and-meds from heavy industry is often traced to the 1990s. The concept, though, goes back further, to a decade in which the mills were still dominant — and to a plan that would have resulted in a different Pittsburgh — and a much different Oakland — than we see today.
In an excerpt from his upcoming book “Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation,” Christopher P. Briem looks at one of the earliest plans for a Research Triangle-style innovation park in what was then the Rust Belt’s heart. Panther Hollow, a wooded ravine between the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, wasn’t ultimately given a roof and a nuclear reactor. But the ambitious and expensive plan to transform Pittsburgh, starting with Pitt’s backyard, may be among the most-overlooked moments in the city’s metamorphosis.
Though much older than Carnegie Tech (later Carnegie Mellon), with roots dating back to 1787, early 1950s Pitt was primarily a regional teaching institution. In 1955, it hired Cornell University business school dean Edward Litchfield as its 12th chancellor, a role he assumed the following year.
Pitt’s board of directors recruited Litchfield to make Pitt “one of the world’s great universities.” In his inaugural address to the university in 1957, the new chancellor emphasized a “more systematic attention to the creation of research institutes in all of our schools and colleges.”
It was a vision far from reality at the time. The year Litchfield was hired, Pitt’s total research contracts with the federal government amounted to just under $2.5 million, an amount that would grow fivefold over his tenure and pass $1 billion by early in the 21st century.
Litchfield’s strategy evolved into a more comprehensive plan for Pittsburgh’s future. In May 1962, he proposed that a major new collaborative research center be established in the city. He argued that a new omnibus research park was critical to “ensuring the diversification of industry which has become essential to our economic progress.” The plan was explicitly modeled on the prototypical academic-corporate research collaborations at the Stanford Research Park, in Palo Alto, California, and the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
An essential part of Litchfield’s concept was not to place the new research center in the suburbs — similar to the locations of the region’s many corporate research centers at the time — where land was readily available. He believed the crucial factor in the success of similar research centers was their proximity to established research universities, and in Pittsburgh, those institutions were in the city.
He proposed a new research park be built in Oakland, literally between the city’s two largest educational institutions, Pitt and what’s now CMU. The challenge was that Oakland was already densely packed and lacked space for any major new development, let alone an expansive new research park.
The solution was placing the new research center within the Panther Hollow ravine that ran through the neighborhood and separated the universities. The early design was to literally place a roof over much of the mile-long ravine with a multistoried construction effort transforming it into “the world’s greatest research park.” Litchfield created the Oakland Corporation, a private development company to pursue the ambitious project.
The full project was expected to take a decade to complete, with an initial cost of over $250 million — the equivalent of nearly $2.6 billion in 2025 — making it at the time one of the most ambitious developments ever proposed by an academic institution. If the entire project were built out as Litchfield envisioned, projected costs would have reached $750 million. The “Valley of Tomorrow” — as the Panther Hollow project was called — was projected to eventually include a nuclear reactor as well as a computing center and computer data bank, all to be used collectively among both academic and private-sector tenants.
As visionary as the geotechnical engineering was, the greater leap was in the connection being made between sheer technical talent and regional prosperity. Litchfield believed that “scientists need — and insist on — close contact with academic institutions and other cultural resources.” With Panther Hollow, the chancellor aimed to “unite all the research facilities in the Oakland area . . . to help solve Pittsburgh’s economic problems.”
Unclear is how much of Pittsburgh’s business community believed it had any fundamental problems to be solved.
The plan for the Panther Hollow Research Park proved too ambitious to implement. It was only one part of a costly expansion of research infrastructure at Pitt, which led to budget crises that compounded later in the 1960s. Coupled with tepid support among regional business and academic leaders, these difficulties meant the scheduled inauguration of the project was deferred. Eventually, operating deficits at the university proved difficult to overcome, a factor that contributed to Litchfield’s resignation as chancellor in 1965.
Nonetheless, the seeds for a far greater academic research enterprise in Pittsburgh had been planted, alongside an even greater shift in economic development policies nationwide. At the federal level, the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 gave university research a fundamental role in regional economic development. At the same time, state governments began new efforts promoting advanced technology as a means of generating economic growth. In February 1981, Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh’s administration proposed the creation of the state’s Ben Franklin Partnership Challenge Grant Program, which would become a model for state-level technology-based economic development programs. Strategies taken for granted today were visionary when proposed for Pittsburgh six decades ago.
“Beyond Steel” will be published by Kent State University Press on February 3, 2026, with a launch event at White Whale Books in Pittsburgh.
Chris Briem is a regional economist at the University Center for Social and Urban Resarch [UCSUR] at the University of Pittsburgh and can be reached at cbriem@pitt.edu.
MOST READ STORIES
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
