The creation of public parks in Pittsburgh was strictly related to the rise and fall of this city as a leading center for the production of steel. In the face of a convulsive industrial growth in the last few decades of the XIX-century, parks were established to offset Pittsburgh’s unhealthy and smoky environment with bucolic settings that aimed at both letting residents relax and pacifying the city’s allegedly disruptive working class. Following the emergence of deindustrialization in the postwar years, the construction of Point and Mellon Parks became part of a broader program that intended to rescue Pittsburgh from urban blight and economic decline, to prevent the flight of corporations, to attract new investment, and to help the transition of the city to a service economy by improving, modernizing, and reconstructing its central business district.