In Memoriam

Neal R. Peirce, Who Put Spotlight on Urban Innovation, Dies at 87 on December 27, 2019.

As a columnist and author he turned local affairs into a national subject, focusing on how alliances among leaders produced showcase projects.

Neal R. Peirce, a Washington-based urban affairs columnist and author who explored nearly every corner of the United States to identify innovations in local government that helped cities recover from decades of blight, died on Friday at his home in Washington. He was 87.

His daughter Andrea Peirce said the cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, which was diagnosed in the fall.

In the tradition of urbanists Lewis Mumford andJane Jacobs, Mr. Peirce carved out a new national beat covering the affairs of local governments and states. He paid close attention to fresh approaches that were succeeding in economic development, transit, housing, public education, recreation, public safety and government management.

In facile prose and with airtight reporting, Mr. Peirce found unlikely drama and fascinating detail in government process — the steps local leaders take to produce showcase projects. Streets that became safer and livelier. Public schools that improved. Rivers and harbors that got cleaner. New transit systems that got built. Deteriorated neighborhoods that recovered. New economic sectors that developed.

Mr. Peirce’s work, spanning six decades and encompassing hundreds of communities in every state, reflected his optimism about the capacity of cities to reinvent themselves. He paid particular attention to the alliances among elected leaders, nonprofit groups, neighborhood organizations and business executives. Such groups, he reported, formed a hive of ideas that generated unorthodox strategies to enhance local quality of life.

“Today the best talent is found in the metropolitan centers, and their creative new partnerships and idea organizations,” he told an audience in Houston in 2009. “The collective intellectual willpower of regions is immense. And we’ve just begun to tap it.”

His reporting focused not on the causes of urban deterioration but on the solutions to it. He was among the first reporters to recognize the usefulness of nonprofit economic development corporations in guiding business investments in communities and neighborhood reconstruction. In 1993, Henry G. Cisneros, the secretary of housing and urban development, called Mr. Peirce “the best writer on urban affairs in the country.”

For decades, Mr. Peirce was virtually alone among national writers in covering local and state affairs. His reporting filled nine books, and he was a co-author of nine more. In 1975 he produced the first national column focused on trends in state, regional and local governance. Three years later the Washington Post Writers Group began syndicating the column to about 50 newspapers. Mr. Peirce ended it in 2013.

From 1986 to 2011 he collaborated with Curtis Johnson, a former regional government official in Minneapolis, on 26 comprehensive reports on the economies and operating practices of nearly two dozen American cities. Each report, based on hundreds of interviews and published as multipart series in metropolitan newspapers, featured ideas on how to make improvements. His report on Dallas, for instance, recommended building new transit lines, a suggestion that led to the city’s 93-mile light-rail streetcar network, which started construction in 1990 and was completed 24 years later.

Local government leaders came to embrace Mr. Peirce’s guidance, and he received countless invitations to deliver keynote speeches at conferences on city planning, urban redevelopment and growth development strategies.

“Neal did this work for years and years, well before others took notice, and well before it got popular,” said Richard Florida, a professor of urban studies at the University of Toronto and the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life” (2002). “He attracted national attention to innovative local government. Smarter government.”

Neal Rippey Peirce was born in Philadelphia on Jan. 5, 1932, and raised in a wealthy family in the city’s Chestnut Hill section. He was the youngest of four children of parents who were direct descendants of families that had emigrated on the Mayflower.

His father, John Trevor Peirce, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1926 joined two other M.I.T. graduates — his brother, W. Grant Peirce Jr., and Charles M. Phelps — to found Peirce-Phelps, one of the largest electrical equipment distribution companies in the nation.

His mother, Miriam deSteiger Litchfield Peirce, graduated from Vassar College and earned a degree in psychiatric social work at Smith College. As a young woman during World War I, she treated wounded soldiers in Canada.

Mr. Peirce always knew what he wanted to do. When he was in the third grade at the private Westtown School in Pennsylvania, he used a tiny press to briefly publish a paper in the early 1940s on the news of the day. Administrators told his parents that the publication had to cease because their son’s opinions on politics, war and other contentious topics were not welcome at Westtown, a Quaker school.

Mr. Peirce attended Princeton University, where he was editor of the campus newspaper The Daily Princetonian. He graduated in 1954 as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society with a bachelor’s degree in history and humanities. That same year, he enlisted in the Army, attended Intelligence School in Maryland, learned German at the Army Language School in Monterey, Calif., and was assigned to the 66th Counter Intelligence Corps in West Berlin.

“C.I.C. duty in West Berlin was dangerous,” Joseph Foote, a lifelong friend, said by email. “Neal told me stories of our agents being kidnapped, taken off the streets and stuffed into a car, and driven off to the Russian zone to be interrogated.”

West Berlin was where Mr. Peirce met Barbara Sabina Mathilda von dem Bach-Zelewski, a weaver, textile artist and dress designer trained at Meisterschule für das Kunsthandwerk, a design school in Berlin. They married in 1959.

She survives him, as do their children, Celia, Andrea and Trevor Peirce; four grandchildren; a brother, Everett; and a sister, Jan Woman.

After the Army, Mr. Peirce set a course for Washington. In 1957, while taking up postgraduate studies at Harvard University, he was introduced to Silvio O. Conte, a future 16-term Republican congressman from Massachusetts. Mr. Peirce worked for Mr. Conte on his first election campaign, in 1958, and then as a legislative assistant in Washington.

In 1960 he was hired to be the political editor of Congressional Quarterly. A year later he and his wife moved to a townhouse in southwest Washington, where he lived for the rest of his life, commuting to work by bicycle.

Mr. Peirce published his first book, “The People’s President: The Electoral College in American History and the Direct-Vote Alternative,” in 1968. In it he called for a direct vote by the people in choosing a president and warned about close presidential elections being decided by the Electoral College.

In 1969, he and several colleagues left Congressional Quarterly to found National Journal, a weekly magazine. He was a contributing editor there until. 1997Writing about the magazine in 1982 in The New York Times, the journalist David Shribman called Mr. Peirce “among the most gifted observers of the Washington scene.”

By then, Mr. Peirce’s transition from Washington politics to covering cities, states and regions had begun with his 1972 book, “Megastates of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Ten Great States.” It was the first of a 10-book series published by W.W. Norton that focused on the cultural, economic and political distinctions of every state in the country. The series culminated in 1983 with “The Book of America: Inside Fifty States Today,” written with Jerry Hagstrom.

In 1995, Mr. Peirce founded and became chairman of Citistates Group, a network of American journalists that specialized in reporting on towns and cities. In 2014, he founded and became editor of Citiscope, a news service that reported on cities internationally, which subsequently became part of Place, a Thomson Reuters project. He received numerous awards and honors for his work on local governments.

Mr. Peirce made his last public appearance in September, at a forum on the Electoral College at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. Noting that in two close presidential elections in the 21st century, the candidate with the most votes — Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 — lost, he reprised the central argument of his 1968 book.

“The national popular vote would make every vote in every city, in every state, important,” he said. “I can’t think of any measure one could possibly adopt that would indicate to every citizen of the United States they have an equal role, and an important role in the election of the president.”