Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Wellness Wednesday for May 13, 2026

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Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait

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This installment rounds out a loose trilogy discussing gentrification. In the first installment of the trilogy, we looked at the factors that unexpectedly made Lawrenceville the trendiest neighborhood in the city. In the last installment, we looked at how those factors applied to three nearby neighborhoods that have seen gentrification to some degree, along with the additional factor of there being a spillover effect. In this installment, we will look at East Liberty, a large neighborhood to the east that epitomizes a much different kind of gentrification, one that is not the result of natural demographic change but of deliberate planning. In terms of an urbanist narrative, this is the quintessential city neighborhood, not just for Pittsburgh but for the whole country, as its history runs the entire gamut of urbanist talking points: Rise, halcyon, stagnation, urban renewal, white flight, ghettoization, gentrification, and, finally, NIMBYism.

Series Index:

13. East Liberty: Gentrification Defined

East Liberty is located directly to the east of Friendship and Garfield, which thus makes it the easternmost neighborhood we have discussed thus far. Its western boundaries with those neighborhoods are Negley Ave. and Black St., and the northern boundary with Highland Park is at Stanton Ave. I generally prefer not to draw boundary lines down streets where each side is in a different neighborhood, but it makes sense to do so here. Negley is a busy thoroughfare without a cohesive business district and feels like a dividing line. Stanton is a little mushier, but the northern boundary is mushy to begin with and moving it elsewhere would make even less sense. Black is the only controversial one, as I put that entirely within Garfield last time, and will keep it there, though the argument can be made that it's in East Liberty.

The other boundaries are more controversial in the sense that they differ from the official boundaries. The southern limit is officially at Center Ave., but the ravine that holds the busway is a more natural dividing line and the one people tend to use colloquially. At least until it crosses Penn Ave., at which point Penn becomes, for the most part, the southern boundary. Here in the southeastern corner I am including the entirety of Bakery Square and the associated development that, while technically split between Larimer and Shadyside is almost always described as being in East Liberty. That exception aside, East Liberty Blvd., a wide, four-lane road, and the Negley Run Valley form the eastern boundary.

13A. Pittsburgh's First Exurb

The Upper Ohio Valley was of such importance to the English of the 18th century that control of it was the catalyst for the first global war in world history. The advantages were clear, as its waterways would provide cheap, easy access to the interior of the continent, from Canada south to the Gulf of Mexico. The disadvantage was that 300 miles and a wall of mountains stood between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and the situation wasn't much better with respect to Baltimore. Accessing the raw materials of the interior was easy, but accessing East Coast markets meant paying exorbitant rates to have goods shipped on rough, dangerous roads. When Pittsburgh was founded, the only improved path east was the old Braddock Road, which was improved when going through towns but in remote areas was nothing more than a path through the woods. The earliest solution was an improved turnpike, the Pittsburgh and Harrisburgh Pike, known locally as the Greensburg Pike, which survives today as Penn Ave. in Pittsburgh and as US 30 for much of the distance between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

I don't want to dwell too much on etymology, but once again, I've run into a folk etymology that just won't die. Most popular histories state that the area is called East Liberty because "liberties" was an older word referring to free grazing areas on the outskirts of cities. I had no reason to question this until I started researching the area's history and discovered that East Liberty is actually one of the older outlying neighborhoods. It seems highly unlikely that people in Pittsburgh would have driven their animals several miles out of town to graze. Sure enough, I can't find any evidence that any of this land was used in that way, and I can't find any old dictionaries that define "liberties" as such; indeed, I can't find any reference to that usage whatsoever. Liberties were a generic name for freely awarded land grants in Pennsylvania. Some of these had been given out by William Penn at the colony's founding, but land in the West was frequently given as compensation to Revolutionary War veterans.

The land was originally owned by Alexander Negley, who settled in the area at the time of the Revolution. His son, Jacob, laid out a town just to the south of the family farm, which was initially known as Negleystown but was alternately known as East Liberty early on and was almost exclusively known as such by the 1840s. Jacob Negley's daughter, Sarah, would marry one Thomas Mellon, who learned early that if one is to marry it's just as easy to marry rich as to marry poor. While inheriting a fortune may be the old-fashioned way to make it, Mellon realized that you don't have to be that lucky. Anyway, Negley was proud of the small village he had founded, and when the pike came through town in 1818, he made sure that it was paved to double width.

It should be noted that, at this time, East Liberty was not a suburb or even an exurb of Pittsburgh. Per Google Maps, East Liberty is about an hour and 45-minute walk from Downtown. In an age when the horse represents the fastest mode of transportation and one's own motive power the preferred mode for most everyday activities, it was too far away to have much influence. Instead, it existed to serve the farms in the area, as well as travelers on the pike. With the arrival of the railroad in 1852, however, transit time to town would be cut to 20 minutes, and annual passes were available for frequent riders. It wasn't long before Pittsburgh's wealthy began fleeing the crime, smoke, and mud of Downtown for the bucolic charm of the East End. Even the lower classes would get a bit of a reprieve, as the rich required servants, and the growing town would need ancillary businesses. This trend only accelerated as the 19th century wore on and electric streetcars were introduced. Located far from the smoke and squalor of Downtown and industry, with cattle being driven up Amberson Ave. as late as the 1890s, East Liberty became a prestige address, and the entire East End became the refuge of the well to do.

The area comprising present-day East Liberty was not the most desirable, as its smaller houses and denser construction were meant for the working to middle class employees of the ancillary businesses, but, with its 100-foot wide main street, it was well positioned to become the commercial heart of the entire East End. By its peak in the 1920s, East Liberty had become Pittsburgh's second Downtown, home not to just businesses, but upscale businesses. The higher-end neighborhoods nearby had their own small business districts and scattered storefronts, but East Liberty was a destination. To map the idea onto the modern conception of suburban America, it would have had the same focus as a suburban mall and the surrounding businesses. There may be other commercial areas nearby, but they serve a more local population, and don't have the big box retailers that need a large catchment area.

East Liberty's peak was simultaneously long and brief. It was the premiere commercial district in the East End for nearly 100 years, but the first several decades it was simply in a state of growth, as the greater East End grew up along with it. By the time it had solidified into an urban neighborhood, the writing was already on the wall. As the 20th century was getting underway, the Gilded Age was coming to a close. Deteriorating class relations and increased Federal spending influenced the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, dealing a blow to the upper classes. Meanwhile, the early industrialists who had turned Pittsburgh into an economic powerhouse were slowly dying off. The grand houses they built were split among several heirs, who would just as soon sell them. When the stock market crashed in 1929, many fortunes were lost entirely, and with the Depression affecting outlying areas more than Pittsburgh itself, the city became inundated with economic migrants. Italians replaced the Germans in Bloomfield, and Italians, blacks, and Slavs moved to East Liberty. This coincided with a housing shortage, as the lack of available capital ground new construction to a halt. The upshot is that the grand houses would be converted into apartments, and the business district would no longer serve the same clientele. Nonetheless, the population was still increasing, and while it might have no longer been upscale, the East Liberty business district was still the commercial heart of the East End.

If the Depression masked one thing, though, it's that East Liberty's eventual decline was inevitable. The neighborhood's status was due to its transportation infrastructure. It developed as a village along the old Forbes Road, then the Greensburg Pike, then the railroad, and then electric streetcars. It was well suited to take advantage of each of these developments, but with the introduction of the automobile, it would be unable to maintain its advantage. East Liberty had begun as a rural village, became an exurb with the introduction of the railroad, and developed as a suburb. By the 1930s, however, it had been completely urbanized but still retained suburban infrastructure. Penn Ave. may have been East Liberty's main street, but a "three dimensional" business district had built up around it, as the commercial core also contained other major thoroughfares that passed through or terminated there, sometimes intersecting at odd angles—Highland, Center, Baum, Negley, and Larimer all carried a substantial amount of traffic. The Depression may have delayed the adoption of the automobile, but even then, it was clear that the area was not well-suited to efficient vehicular circulation. This wouldn't have been a problem had the neighborhood been built with density and walkability in mind, but that simply wasn't the case. As the streetcar gave way to the motorcar, East Liberty, with its traffic snarls and lack of parking, simply could not compete as a regional shopping destination.

By 1945, it was clear to East Liberty's businessmen that the situation was not sustainable. While the vacancy rate was still low, it was growing and persistent. There was no indication that the trend was going to reverse itself on its own. When the housing shortage turned into a boom after WWII, residents weren't interested in dense housing in urban areas but were looking to get a piece of what Thomas Mellon and other early East End residents were looking for a hundred years earlier. What the railroad had made possible for Mellon the auto made possible for ordinary Americans, who fled to the suburbs in droves. Obviously, not all Americans were able to do this, and not all wanted to. I don't want to speculate, but had East Liberty developed as a natural extension of industrial Pittsburgh, as Lawrenceville and the South Side had, East Liberty may have been able to stumble along until the industrial apocalypse of the 1980s and then ride it out for a couple of decades until people started moving back into cities. But as a suburb, it was always reliant on drawing business from beyond the local area. And to make matters even worse, the suburban nature of the early development meant that little industry, and thus little employment, was located in East Liberty itself. Even residents who lived nearby might prefer to do their shopping Downtown or wherever it was that they worked. At least the South Side could rely on thousands of mill employees to sustain a business district that was too big for the neighborhood. With no light at the end of the tunnel, drastic action needed to be taken.

13B. The Tragedy of Urban Renewal

It's easy for armchair urbanists to retrospectively criticize city planners and architects of the 1950s for not being able to predict the disasters that their ideas inflicted upon communities. But if one takes a step back and looks at things as they appeared at the time, it's difficult to see them arriving at another conclusion. Imagine you're of my grandfather's generation, born in the 1920s to immigrant parents and raised in a 4 room apartment with 6 brothers and sisters. Everyone burns coal for heat, and when combined with heavy industry, the winters are unbearably smoky. There are public sewers, but they discharge into the nearest watercourse, as do chemicals from the various industries. If you happen to live close to the river, flooding is a frequent concern, as there are no upstream reservoirs holding back the spring rain and snowmelt. Half the streets aren't paved; they turn to mud every time it rains and turn to dust when it doesn't. You look enviously at upscale neighborhoods where these issues are at least mitigated and assume that you'll never be able to live in a place like that. And then it becomes possible. Maybe your house will be modest by comparison, but it will be on a large lot with lots of separation from your neighbors and far from the smoke of the city.

And, perhaps most importantly, everything is new. What we now call historic charm was once representative of poverty and substandard living conditions. Add in 15 years of depression and war, when new construction was virtually nonexistent, and one can only imagine what it was like for someone who had always lived in old, crowded buildings to suddenly be able to have a shiny new house with gas heat, a garage, and conveniences like hose bibs and outdoor electrical outlets. And when they went shopping, it was at large, bright, modern stores where they could get everything they needed in one trip. This was not some conspiracy by Gulf Oil or whoever to trick people into thinking this way of life was preferable. They had lived the kind of lifestyle modern urbanists dream of their entire lives, and they rejected it.

But to suggest that urban renewal was an attempt to suburbanize the city, as most of the armchair urbanists do, would ignore the complex realities of what occurred. Slum clearance and urban freeway construction were two very different things. The Point project, which transformed a largely abandoned industrial area into a park and mixed-use development and heralded the beginning of urban renewal in the US, wouldn't seem out of place today but for the modernist architecture that no one seems to complain about. Coming out of WWII, American cities found themselves facing a crisis that seemed existential. In an era of unprecedented prosperity, they found their populations dropping, and their remaining population becoming poorer. Business districts were becoming increasingly low-rent, with large retailers consolidating and moving to the suburbs as well. Highways seem like intrusive eyesores now, but with tax bases dwindling, cities were more reliant than ever on downtown office space for revenue. If downtowns became too inconvenient for commuters, the corporate tax base might decamp for the suburbs as well. Highways aside, in Pittsburgh they were threatening to do so anyway.

The armchair urbanists argue that cities should develop in an organic, laissez-faire manner, as they had done in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But this assumes that citizens prefer to live lifestyles conducive to those eras and not our own. If that were the case, the cities of Texas, California, Florida, and the rest of the Sun Belt would be touted as exemplars of good urbanism, and not the sprawling hellscapes that they're depicted as. The current avatars of urban renewal and good urbanism, respectively, are Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. This is fitting, because neither is a particularly good choice. Moses was a politician and bureaucrat, but he never wrote anything save official reports; there is no monograph explaining or defending his planning philosophy. The primary text through which he is represented is Robert Caro's biography The Power Broker, which everyone cites but nobody reads; despite being over 1,000 pages long, everyone mentions the same four or five examples from it. Jacobs did write a book, but she had no formal training or professional experience in planning or any related discipline, except as a columnist for an architectural magazine. As sociologist and contemporary critic of renewal Herbert Gans put it in 1965, her "intent has been to save the city for people (intellectuals and artists, for example) who, like tourists, want jumbled diversity, antique 'charm,' and narrow streets for visual adventure and aesthetic pleasure."

Gans would know; Jacobs accompanied him for part of his research on the Italian community of Boston's North End. But he was largely dismissive of The Death and Life of American Cities when it was published in 1962. While he agreed with many of her objections to specific aspects of renewal programs, he felt that her evaluations of what made good neighborhoods were based on the assumption that everywhere should be like Greenwich Village. The urbanists today fall into the same trap when they look at places like Lawrenceville, or Wicker Park, or Williamsburg, or other urban neighborhoods they find desirable, and turn them into a Platonic ideal that should be superimposed everywhere. Less charitably, they are predominantly young, single, white, somewhat hip aspiring professionals who don't understand why everyone else shouldn't live like a young, single, white, somewhat hip aspiring professional. Gans and other theorists of the urban renewal era understood, whether they were in favor of it or opposed to it, that if cities were to survive the 20th century, they had to adapt to the pressures of the modern era. But they weren't dense enough to think that this would be accomplished by wholesale suburbanization, and they weren't naïve enough to think that they could lure suburbanites back to the city. Robert Moses, the paragon of urban renewal, built Stuy Town. People have described it in any number of ways over the years, most of them not particularly flattering, but I've never heard it described as suburban. Removing things people found distasteful was one part of urban renewal, but there was another side to the coin. Because, while the era is often criticized for its love affair with the wrecking ball, wholesale clearance was for slums that were beyond repair. But what about areas that weren't slums, but were heading in that direction? Would it be possible to save them before it was too late?

In East Liberty's case, city planners thought so. The problem, it seems, was the automobile. While armchair urbanists act like midcentury politicians had a love affair with the car, the reality was more complicated. There were certainly some who thought that the car was more important than the passengers or their destination, but many likewise felt threatened by them. The location of East Liberty, on a primary east-west artery, meant that it saw a lot of through traffic. The business district, which had developed long before the introduction of the auto, was ill-suited to heavy car traffic, with several main thoroughfares intersecting, often at odd angles. Coming to East Liberty to shop meant navigating this traffic nightmare and not having anywhere to park when you got there. On the other hand, residents of nearby affluent neighborhoods could easily drive to suburban shopping plazas on wide roads and find acres of parking. Saving the East Liberty business district would require simultaneously welcoming the auto and waging war against it.

Furthermore, the vacancies were making the business district unattractive. In the 1950s East Liberty had approximately 3 million square feet of retail space. That’s roughly equivalent to three average-sized shopping malls. Or one average size mall plus 15 or 20 Targets. Think of an average suburban shopping mall, and add all of the various plazas and big-box stores that surround it, and you get an idea of what 3 million square feet looks like. The East End could not support a shopping district of this size by the late 1950s, and demographic trends did not show the situation improving. The problem would only accelerate if the vacancies made the district less attractive to consumers. It needed to be right-sized so that it could serve the population that would realistically exist in the coming decades.

The plan was not simple, and it was not cheap. But it was clever, and it was bold. A new four-lane road, East Liberty Boulevard, would be constructed to the north of the business district. This would reduce congestion by allowing through traffic, which accounted for 70% of the total, to bypass the area with minimal stopping. Next, several streets on the perimeter would be converted into a four-lane, one-way traffic circle, the outer lane being used by cars wishing to exit the circle, the inner one by cars looking to park, and the middle two by those circumnavigating. Land on the circle would be cleared for parking and new, larger developments. A smaller inner circle (which was never completed) would be constructed to allow trucks to make deliveries. Finally, the core business district—parts of Penn, Highland, and Broad—would be turned into a pedestrian mall. Unlike in the Lower Hill, there would be no wholesale slum clearance; properties would only be marked for demolition if they were uninhabitable. Nevertheless, almost all of the wood frame residential structures in the development area were demolished, the ring road serving to delineate the residential parts of the neighborhood from the commercial. No great loss, though, as these would be replaced with massive apartment complexes designed by the emerging Pittsburgh "court architect" Tasso Katselas (who would design more notable buildings between 1960 and 2000 than anyone else).

It's ironic that almost everyone these days views the East Liberty development as a surrender to car-brained planning, as that was decidedly not the case at the time. There was a period from about 1959 to 1974 when pedestrian malls were all the rage and were implemented in several cities across the country. Pittsburgh's inspiration came from a temporary one built in Toledo in 1959 and 1960. The experience of street life there, where one could waddle, and dawdle, and enjoy the vibrant atmosphere, stood in stark contrast with the rest of the downtown, which was a traffic-clogged mess. That was only a temporary experiment though, and city officials soon reopened the street. As far as a permanent mall went, planners in Pittsburgh looked to a Fort Worth proposal developed by Victor Gruen. Gruen was an opponent of the large-scale renewal projects that were fashionable at the time but understood that there were certain realities he could not ignore. For inspiration, he looked to European cities with their narrow, medieval streets and abundant plazas. Like medieval cities, he thought a system of fortifications was needed to keep the enemy, automobiles, out of their cores. He viewed ring roads and systems of lots and garages as castle ramparts or city walls. Of the Fort Worth plan, Jane Jacobs wrote:

The plan by victor Gruen Associates for Fort Worth… has been publicized chiefly for its arrangements to provide enormous perimeter garages and convert the downtown into a pedestrian island, but its main purpose is to enliven the street with variety and detail… To these ends, the excellent Gruen plan includes in its street treatment sidewalk arcades, poster columns, flags, vending kiosks, display stands, outdoor cafes, bandstands, flower beds, and special lighting effects… The whole point is to make the streets more surprising, more compact, more variegated, and busier than before—not less so. One of the beauties of the Forth Worth plan is that it works with existing buildings, and this is a positive virtue, not just a cost-saving expedient.

Victor Gruen, it should be noted, was the Father of the American Shopping Mall, probably the most conspicuous symbol of a suburbanized retail environment. But Gruen was no suburbanist, and he doesn't fit neatly within the Moses–Jacobs paradigm. On a broad level, his overarching philosophy emphasized many of the ideas that have since become emblematic of the follies of midcentury planning and its influence on contemporary NIMBYism. He strongly believed that older cities had become outdated in the age of the auto and that their failure to properly adapt was largely the reason for their ongoing implosion, and he favored heavy-handed municipal planning, revised traffic flows, and segregated land use. On the other hand, his particular solutions emphasized increased housing density, better public transit networks, and keeping private autos as far away from centers of activity as possible. While the Fort Worth plan was never implemented, East Liberty would test the theory. If automobiles cannot be eliminated, they can be domesticated. Why allow our streets to become stroads when we can build roads to divert them? If consumers insist on adequate parking we can give them adequate parking, but when they leave their cars they can enter a pedestrian paradise, where they don't have to wait at crosswalks, worry about children running into traffic, or inhale carbon monoxide fumes. And we can also make it easier to go without a car entirely, by constructing large housing complexes on the periphery of the commercial area, within easy walking distance.

The three apartment towers built as part of the East Liberty renewal project—East Mall, Penn Circle Towers, and Liberty Park—were not built as housing projects and were not intended to house low-income residents. But changes in Federal housing policy in the mid-1970s made that a distinction without a difference. Public housing projects, as they were originally conceived, were intended to house both low- and moderate-income people. Policy changes and other factors made it so by the 1960s, these projects would only house the poorest of the poor. There was still a shortage, however, of housing for people whose incomes exceeded Federal caps but could nonetheless not afford housing in the private market.

By the 1960s, local housing authorities had little interest in constructing new projects, and Federal policy as a whole turned toward encouraging private developers to construct housing that would be available at affordable rates. Early programs focused on mortgage subsidies. The way these programs worked was that the Feds would partially subsidize mortgage interest on developments that were made affordable to those making 80% of the area median income. The developer would pay an effective rate of 1% on a mortgage that was fully insured by the government, but the units could only be rented by qualifying tenants at rates equal 25% income or a HUD-approved minimum, whichever was greater. While these programs showed early promise, enthusiasm cooled when developers found that the subsidies only lowered monthly rents by about $150/month in today's money, and they were superseded by the Housing and Community Development of 1974.

The 1974 act replaced mortgage subsidies with the much more widely known Section 8, which directly subsidized rents up to a HUD-determined fair market value. While some earlier projects operated as late as 2018, there was an option to convert to Section 8, and the Florida-based developer that owned and operated the East Liberty properties, Federal American, exercised that option. While most of us are familiar with voucher-based Section 8, where low-income families are given vouchers that can be used with any landlord who will accept them, prior to 1983 there was also a project-based Section 8 option. Rather than simply get a break on mortgage interest and hope that the things worked out economically while being tied to HUD rules, Federal American would get a flat per-unit payment from HUD to cover the cost of managing the properties and make a small profit. And any resident making up to 80% AMI would qualify. The upshot was that, by the mid-1970s, East Liberty was rapidly becoming a low-income neighborhood. Pennley Park and Penn Plaza, two unsubsidized low-rise apartment complexes that were constructed on the neighborhood's western edge in the mid-1960s, met a similar fate. While Pennley Park opened as an expensive luxury development that was home to Roberto Clemente and other Pirates when they still played at Forbes Field, its association with the towers was such that even at market rates it was only attractive to lower-income tenants.

Assuming that you read the title of this subsection, it should be obvious by now that the East Liberty redevelopment plan did not work out as expected. The first lesson learned, which should have been obvious to anyone, is that these projects aren't completed with a snap of the fingers. The project was officially announced in 1960, and plans were finalized in 1966. In the meantime, the city had begun infrastructure upgrades before construction began in earnest, and by the time the project was complete in the early 1970s, the merchants, complaining of reduced traffic since the 1950s, had endured nearly seven years of construction. Things would have to get worse before they could get better. And in the meantime, Eastland Mall opened in 1966 and Monroeville Mall in 1969, both enclosed suburban malls located on major roads an easy drive from the East End.

Nonetheless, the pedestrian mall was a short-lived success when it opened. Many businesses took the opportunity to renovate or expand operations, and the public space was frequently used by senior citizens and students from nearby Peabody High School. But the problems quickly became apparent. East Liberty Boulevard had been intended as a bypass for through traffic, but anyone familiar with the area who looks at a map can explain why it was ill-suited for that purpose. Its eastern end is well-situated, but on the west, it terminates on North Negley Ave. a few blocks north of Penn, which narrows considerably before entering Garfield. Baum and Center, to the south, see more through traffic than that part of Penn does, but are a long way from East Liberty Blvd. Assuming someone is headed in that direction, it made more sense to circumnavigate Penn Circle than to take a long, confusing bypass.

The above is my own interpolation and is based on my own observation of the current street grid (or at least of the pre-rectified street grid) and not the 1950s street grid. But I can tell you that I've been driving through there for 20 years and didn't know East Liberty Blvd. was supposed to be a through route for Penn until I was researching this installment. In any event, it was a mini-highway to nowhere before undergoing a road diet in the past few years. Penn Circle not only saw the bulk of the traffic, but at four lanes turned into a racetrack. Anyone wishing to access an interior parking lot would have to cross three lanes of high-speed traffic to get to the inside track. If you weren't in a car it was even worse, since it meant crossing four lanes of high-speed traffic on foot, across a road designed to minimize intersections and traffic signals. With the business district closed to cars and difficult for pedestrians to access, it succumbed to what architectural historian Anthony Paletta calls "strangulation by ring road".

Those with the most convenient access to the remodeled business district, the residents of the apartment complexes, could not afford to shop there. While the project was driven by business interests, these tended to be large, well-connected business interests, not small business owners. The smaller owners who were forced to relocate could often not afford the new real estate in the pedestrian mall, and those who did found it hard to survive the prolonged construction period. The resulting lack of diversity only served as an additional impediment to the project's success; the business district was dominated by three furniture stores, six banks, numerous five and dimes, and several department stores, all of which competed with one another more than they complemented one another. And then there was the aesthetic problem.

I mentioned earlier that Herbert Gans, the professional sociologist, accused Jane Jacobs of being more concerned with aesthetics than anything else, and I feel the same way about the armchair urbanists, whose arguments often boil down to aesthetic arguments about the kinds of neighborhoods they find pleasing or repulsive as opposed to the kinds of neighborhoods that work for the people who actually live in them. Similarly, one finds a similar discrepancy between Jacobs' praise for the Fort Worth proposal and an interview Gruen gave to Business Weekly in 1955. Jacobs discounts the practical advantages and gushes about the aesthetic elements. Gruen doesn't discuss aesthetics at all, aside from noting that the project would be landscaped. As critical as I may be of Jacobs, aesthetics are more important than some people realize. Gruen may not have though much of aesthetics when being interviewed, but they were nonetheless part of the plan. The problem with East Liberty wasn't so much that the developers ignored the aesthetic element as much as that their appreciation for its importance didn't go deep enough. Hiring award-winning landscape architecture firm Simonds and Simonds and including lots of public art checks off the box on paper, but what happens after the project is complete, and what other aesthetic elements come into play?

If we look at the history of pedestrian malls in America, a clear pattern emerges. The temporary malls of the 1950s and early 1960s did well. The permanent malls of the '60s and '70s were largely failures. But some succeeded, and those invariably tend to be in areas with a lot of tourist traffic. Fremont Street in Las Vegas is the most obvious example, but the pedestrianized part of East Fourth St. in Cleveland is probably a better one. While the city gets nowhere near the number of tourists as Vegas, Fourth is a single block downtown between Rocket arena and Cleveland Public Square, with Progressive Field within walking distance. A pedestrianized city street is no longer a functional city street, but an attraction in and of itself. The temporary malls were exciting because a lot of people were visiting the malls themselves and not any of the stores they contained. Once made permanent, they can't operate as retail districts unless there's some outside impetus to drive people to there independent of whatever the retailers are selling.

As such, aesthetics take on a more pressing importance, because as attractions in and of themselves, the malls are viewed by the public as curated spaces, and higher standards apply than to typical city streets. For example, if you're walking down a typical city street with shops and the like there is going to be some amount of litter that's tolerated, some amount of evident vandalism that's tolerated, some amount of griminess that's tolerated, and some amount of graffiti that's tolerated as a consequence of the urban environment. Different people will tolerate different amounts of it before it makes them uncomfortable, but no matter how sensitive you are, that amount will be a lot higher than what you would tolerate in a traditional enclosed mall. Seeing a lone graffito on the side of a building in a typical downtown might not merit a second glance, while seeing the same thing in a mall food court would cause serious unease. In an enclosed mall, we expect the environment to be controlled and maintained to a degree we don't out in the real world. A pedestrian mall operates somewhere between these two extremes. What the midcentury designers failed to understand was that if you turn a street into a tourist attraction, people expect it to be Disneyland. You can't design a pretty landscape and walk away; you have to be willing to provide maintenance and security. Likewise, private malls and tourist attractions have the ability to exclude people, and parks can post closing hours. A city street that has been pedestrianized is like a park that's open 24 hours a day and has more amenities than a typical city park, and will thus attract people with nowhere else to go, like bums and drunks. Especially if services meant to assist these people exist within its limits.

The East Liberty renewal project took a business district that was already in decline in a neighborhood that was already in decline and subjected it to construction for the better part of a decade, created a confusing, high-speed traffic pattern and relied on it for vehicular access, virtually cut off pedestrian access, effectively turned it into a park for which they made no accommodation for increased security or maintenance, and expected people to treat it like a normal shopping area. Such an effect may work on a bright, beautiful Saturday afternoon, consider the following: It's 6:30 pm a Tuesday in late February, it's rainy and cold, and there's some lingering snow on the ground. A mostly outdoor shopping experience where you'll be several minutes from your car by foot does not look good compared to the convenience of a suburban shopping center, where you'll have to walk 100 yards at most before you're within the comfortable surroundings of a store. Even a traditional business district looks better in comparison, despite being outdoors; you may get lucky and be able to park near your destination, and even if the business district has seen better days, the traffic at least makes things feel safer and more alive.

The question going forward is whether we've learned the aesthetic lesson. While aesthetics were a large part of the East Liberty project's failure, they were also what made it so attractive in the first place, and that aesthetic pull hasn't abated. The failure of pedestrian malls wasn't unique to Pittsburgh, and most of the streets around the country that were pedestrianized during the height of the fad in the 1960s and 1970s have since been either wholly returned to traffic or at least scaled back. New pedestrian projects have been selected with greater care to ensure that they won't meet the same fates as the older ones. The most obvious difference, aside from the smaller size and tendency to put them in tourist areas or college towns, is that they aren't centered around retail. The park-like atmosphere these places are trying to inspire, even if done well, works better with bars and restaurants than with Levin Furniture and Kohls. The lessons surrounding pedestrian malls have been learned, and the issues they have the potential to create are well-recognized among professional planners.

Among the general public, particularly the armchair urbanists, they have not and are not. East Liberty stands second only to the Lower Hill as an example of urban renewal gone wrong in Pittsburgh, and nearly everything written on the subject emphasizes the pedestrian mall as a large part of the problem, but there is nonetheless a contingent of people who either insist that this wasn't the problem or naively suggest pedestrianizing other parts of the city. A while back, Bike Pittsburgh posted an article absolving the mall of responsibility for East Liberty's decline and instead blaming the ring road. To be fair, the road should, and does, bear its share of the blame, but the pedestrian mall couldn't exist without it. The early temporary malls, like the one in Toledo, were experiments, and one of the lessons civic leaders learned was that you couldn't simply block off a major street without making accommodations for the change in traffic flow. Personally, I don't much care for pedestrian malls, except perhaps in certain areas where allowing cars would be obviously ridiculous, in which case nobody would ever suggest building roads. I dislike them precisely because they tend to create a sterile, touristy atmosphere that seems apart from the main city. But that's, admittedly, an aesthetic preference.

13C. The Kingdom of Forgetting

The years 1977 to 2000 were ones of continual decline for East Liberty. That the project had failed to preserve the neighborhood as the East End's premiere shopping destination was self-evident. The question of what to do moving forward wasn't as clear. The businessmen who had spearheaded the endeavor had too much invested to cut bait, but there was no obvious intervention. The urban renewal era was over, and the $100 million of largely Federal money spent on the redevelopment would not be forthcoming to undo the mistake. In light of East Liberty's subsequent gentrification, there's a tendency to identify a specific turning point and assume that it was all downhill before and all uphill since. What tends to be forgotten is twenty years of repeated small-scale attempts to jumpstart the revitalization process that ultimately led nowhere.

While the project's failure may have been apparent by the mid-1970s, the first official recognition of it came in 1979, when Mayor Richard Caliguri authorized that city funds be spent to address some of the problems. Police presence was increased, a promotional campaign was launched, and, most importantly, surveyors began looking at how the streets could be reopened to traffic. By the end of the year, part of Baum Blvd. saw cars. Bus lanes that had penetrated the pedestrian mall would be opened to traffic and widened. More streets would be quietly reopened in the ensuing years, and in November of 1986, Penn Ave. finally saw regular traffic again. By the end of the decade, East Liberty began to resemble a typical urban neighborhood. In 1982, abandoned rail lines in the ravine at the neighborhood's southern boundary would be converted into the East Busway, situating the neighborhood on a prime transit route.

But there was little the city could do in terms of infrastructure improvements to save the business district, which was the prime target of the renewal efforts. Three department stores closed in 1979, and East Liberty's place as Pittsburgh's second downtown was by then a distant memory. The residential towers had become typical Section 8 projects, the unsubsidized low-rise developments weren't faring much better, and the outlying residential district was a shambles of houses cut up into apartments run by absentee landlords. In other words, East Liberty had become a ghetto, the refuge of people who had nowhere else to go. As an East Liberty resident put it in a 1984 letter to the Pittsburgh Press:

East Liberty has more drug rehab centers, homes for special citizens, half-way houses, homes for unwed mothers, senior citizen homes, housing for low-income, housing for elderly and nursing homes per square mile of area than the remainder of Allegheny County.

But the merchants weren't giving up. Members of the Chamber of Commerce formed East Liberty Development Incorporated in 1979. With urban renewal in the process of being undone, ELDI would attempt to revitalize the neighborhood not through the gargantuan redevelopment projects that had characterized the previous era but through bottom-up, grassroots economic development and aesthetic improvement. But while they were able to attract a series of investors, none of these projects bore fruit. I'm not going to detail every instance that someone started a project that was heralded as East Liberty finally turning the corner, including an abortive attempt at turning it into an arts district, but I think the story of Motor Square Garden is illustrative.

Motor Square Garden was built as a sort of market hall in the 1890s and in the years since had variously been a boxing arena, Cadillac Dealership, convention center, beer garden, and office complex. In 1984, developer Joseph Massaro announced his intention to turn the space into a high-end mini-mall with 84,000 square feet and room for up to 40 stores. Following renovations, the complex opened in April 1988 with 20 stores and much excitement. It seemed that East Liberty had finally turned the corner. Coming out of its first Christmas shopping season, the retailers agreed that sales had met or exceeded expectations, though Massaro admitted that more tenants would be needed if the project was to turn a profit. Still, this was good news, and there was hope.

On March 1, Massaro failed to make a payment on a $12 million mortgage, and Equibank filed court paperwork to become a mortgagee in possession. Massaro emphasized to the media that the building was not in foreclosure and that the same management company was running the property, which was true for about a week, before foreclosure proceedings were initiated. It's unclear if what happened next was due to poor sales or uncertainty over ownership, but by Summer only 15 stores remained open, and by November that was down to six, with two announcing they were on their way out. A newspaper writer reviewing luxury mini-malls in the city wrote in mid-July that she counted only two other people on the concourses, store employees looked bored, and that some of the kiosks were unmanned and had notes to alert employees in another store for assistance. She concluded "…there is something downright creepy about wandering through the mall. You can smell the desperation and despair of the small merchants, and you feel conspicuous for just being there." By 1991, the only business left operating was, fittingly enough, an Equibank branch. Even more fittingly, the building now serves as AAA's regional headquarters and a Driver's License Center.

The luxury mini-mall craze is a trend that has largely been forgotten. There were no fewer than a half-dozen of these places in Pittsburgh in the late '80s, almost all within the city limits, the remainder not far outside. Today, only one of them is still open, and the owner wants to turn it into a Wegman's. At the time, malls were at their peak both in terms of economic and social influence, and were seen as a form of mass culture. I think the idea developed that upscale stores weren't suited for traditional malls with their hordes of teenagers, and that their customers would want a more exclusive experience where they could avoid the hoi polloi. Two of the ones in Pittsburgh were in Downtown office towers.

If one were looking at Motor Square Garden the way a 1980s retailer looked at it, the idea made perfect sense: It was close to wealthy neighborhoods, parking was cheap, and it was a beautiful beaux arts building. Massarro, like the others who attempted to revive East Liberty during this period, was not doing it out of a sense of charity; he was a true believer. Was fear of crime the problem? Maybe, but you can park right next to the building, and it didn't have trouble attracting customers initially. Massarro admitted that he didn't have any experience in the leasing business, and that he assumed the management company he hired would take care of that for him.

My theory as to why it failed goes deeper than that, and isn't wholly unrelated to the large-scale urban renewal efforts of midcentury. If retail districts are heading to the suburbs, you have two options to combat the loss of business: You can replicate the suburbs, or you can offer something the suburbs don't. The first option is a losing proposition, because duplicating a suburban shopping mall in an urban area just offers the same thing with paid parking and less room for expansion on the periphery. The second option looks more attractive, but is fraught with its own perils. The first is that you may simply be beating the suburbs to the punch, and will end up losing out when a developer realizes he can do the same thing elsewhere. The bigger problem, and what I think happened here, is that the idea might not be economically feasible wherever it is tried.

The upscale mall concept mostly flopped. Of the six that were profiled in the Post-Gazette article, the only one still in operation is the Galleria of Mt. Lebanon, which has a few upscale stores but is frequented more for its movie theater and non-upscale restaurants. What we now call "upscale malls" are really just regular malls that have a number of upscale tenants. What happened with Motor Square Garden was really just a microcosm of the retail environment of the old pedestrian mall and its lack of retail diversity. If a mall is nothing but a bunch of high-end clothing stores, you get nothing but customers looking to buy high-end clothing. Every single store is now competing for the same small pool of customers, and not all of them will be able to survive. When the options start dwindling, customers have less and less of a reason to show up in the first place, and the development enters a death spiral. Now drop five or six of these developments into a market where things aren't great economically, to put it mildly, with a developer who has no idea what he's doing, and you can guess the outcome.

ELDI spent most of the 80s and 90s pursuing projects like this. Some true believer really sees the potential in East Liberty, launches a small development that's supposed to turn things around, then either gets nowhere, fails, or achieves the immediate goals but makes no lasting impact. Because let's face it, even if Motor Square Garden were successful, it would have done absolutely nothing to address the neighborhood's larger problems. An upscale shopping plaza on the neighborhood's periphery would have been exactly that, with patrons a short walk from their BMWs to the safe, clean, aesthetically pleasing concourses inside, oblivious to the blight surrounding them. By the mid-90s ELDI was in shambles, having gone through a parade of executive directors and having lost the trust of the neighborhood they represented. They were viewed with suspicion, a consortium of white business owners trying in vain to resurrect the glory days when East Liberty was the commercial heart of the East End. Meanwhile, community leaders in neighboring Shadyside, Highland Park, and Bloomfield were demanding new leadership be brought in from outside of Pittsburgh, as the crime and drug problems were starting to spill over into upscale communities.

Maelene Myers is an Akron native who ran a similar community organization in Cleveland before becoming Executive Director of ELDI in 1996. After 15 years of sputtering, the hope was that a black woman with experience as a community organizer would be able to heal the rift that had developed between the organization and the community and figure out the best path forward. Her first move was to tear ELDI down to the studs, reorganizing its corporate structure and rejecting the haphazard manner with which it had operated in the past. Her second order of business was to hold a public meeting where she allowed residents to speak for as long as they wanted about whatever they wanted. Over the course of several meetings, she go a sense of what kind of community the residents wanted East Liberty to be, and she organized volunteer committees to figure out how to make it happen.

At this stage of the game, where expressions like "community empowerment" have become meaningless buzzwords, I'm almost embarrassed to have typed the preceding paragraph in a tone that sounds like what she did was revolutionary. But imagine you're among the demographic of older, mostly black, residents of East Liberty that was likely to attend these meetings. You remember what it was like in the old days, when the neighborhood really was Pittsburgh's second downtown, and you remember Richard King Mellon, and several mayors, and several councilmen, and the Urban Redevelopment Authority, and the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, all tell you about how radical reconstruction of East Liberty would save the business district, which you didn't see anything wrong with, but whatever. Then you endured years of construction and demolition, and the project flopped so hard they started tearing it out only a few years after it was finished. And all the while the neighborhood got poorer, and less diverse, and the businesses that they warned would close if the project didn't get done now actually were closing despite the project being done. And then there's a parade of guys with money who swear they're going to turn things around but before you know it their properties are in foreclosure, one after the other, and now there are drugs and gangs and shootings and no middle-class person in their right mind would want to live here and the big apartment buildings that looked shiny and modern when they were new are now called the "crack stacks". And of course they all had their money and statistical reports and sociological theories that told them that this is what was best for the community, and they proved themselves wrong, but they're all dead now so what are you going to do about it? You can understand how after 40 years of bullshit, someone finally asking the actual residents how they felt and what they wanted to see would seem revolutionary.

Following years of meetings and workshops, ELDI produced a long-range plan in 1999. Again, this seems anodyne, but East Liberty had never had such a document. Even the original renewal plan was too focused on a specific project to really count; by it's own terms, the project was a success because everything in it got built, never mind that it had the exact opposite effect that it was supposed to. The 1999 plan did not propose any specific projects beyond what was already in development, but acted as a framework for future development. What was in the plan? In a nutshell, it called for development of vacant parcels, restoration of the street grid, and demolition of anything that could plausibly be described as "mid-century". Now Myers only had to Draw the Rest of the Fucking Owl.

13D. The G-Word

In the late 90s, there was a lot to be excited about in East Liberty. A Home Depot had opened on the site of an old Sears, marking the first investment in the community by a national chain in decades. Spinning Plate Lofts brought in artists-in-residence. There was a farmer's market. And Pennley Park had been demolished and replaced with New Pennley Place, a mixed-income development. By the middle of the next decade, you could buy expensive groceries at Whole Foods, eat dinner at Abaya Ethiopian (the first Ethiopian restaurant in the city), go soul dancing at Shadow Lounge or see a jazz show at the sister club Ava Lounge, and top off the night with a waffle from an all-night waffle stand whose name I can't remember. For a dazzling young urbanite, East Liberty might not have been a residential option, but it was increasingly a commercial one.

For anyone less adventurous, it was still synonymous with drugs and crime, and that stigma would have to be broken for any further progress to be made. The actual crime rate was never as high as it was made out to be. It wasn't appreciably higher than upscale areas nearby, and was nowhere near the level of Pittsburgh's worst ghettos. But perception is everything, and for people who associate poor, black areas with a history of drug problems with crime, statistics will be of little comfort. The same is true in reverse, though. On the ground, it looked like things were finally changing, and like many big changes, it began to induce anxiety.

At the heart of the issue were East Mall, Penn Circle Towers, and Liberty Park South. East Mall in particular loomed over the neighborhood, straddling both sides of Penn Ave. where it joined Penn Circle West. They dominated the skyline, and anyone who read the 1999 report knew that their days were numbered. The plan showed an artist's rendering of the East Liberty skyline dominated not by the towers but by East Liberty Presbyterian Church. The parish was founded by Jacob Negley back in East Liberty's pike town days, and the current structure was built with Mellon money in 1935, coincidentally the last structure completed in the neighborhood prior to urban renewal. Along Penn Ave., in place of the low-rises stood new, small-scale row houses, meant to invoke the spirit of the city's architectural past. Of course, being a mere roadmap, the plan, and the rendering, were purely aspirational. In any event, ELDI was sensitive to the displacement concerns that had plagued redevelopment efforts in the past, and as an organization that was supposedly sensitive to citizen needs, they couldn't put a concrete proposal forward anyway unless they had plan to relocate residents within the neighborhood.

I did not discuss the towers much in earlier sections because there is a tendency in some circles to blame them for the failure of renewal in East Liberty, much as there is a tendency in other circles to blame the redesigned road network. While both undoubtedly played a part in accelerating the decline, the pedestrian mall concept was doomed to failure regardless of whatever else happened. But once that decline was total, the towers did stand as an impediment to the future revitalization of the neighborhood. If there was one overarching theme to the 1999 plan, it was that all vestiges of urban renewal were to be eliminated. The plan itself lists practical reasons for wanting this, but there is a crucial subtext: The entire project was deemed a failure before the paint was even dry, and any remnants of the project would only remind people of that failure. And the most visible remnants were the three towers that stood at East Liberty's periphery, looming over the neighborhood, symbolizing all that was wrong with it.

There were also more immediate, practical concerns. In recent years, affordable housing proposals from various cities often state eye-watering sums; it is somewhat of an oxymoron for "affordable" housing to cost $500,000 per unit. When public money is involved, there is often grumbling that an apartment for a poor person shouldn't cost that much, and that the public shouldn't be paying for unproductive people to live in luxury. That same argument, however, was a matter of public policy in the 1950s and 1960s, and the results spoke for themselves. The East Liberty towers were constructed using an innovative method that did not require a steel or concrete superstructure. Instead, they were made with prefabricated concrete panels and brick buttressing walls, tied together with steel rods. An entire floor could be constructed in three days. While this method cut costs, it limited the expected life of the buildings to 40 years, of which only ten were left when the 1999 plan was released. To make matters worse, the owner, Federal American, had allowed the buildings to deteriorate.

By 2000, pretty much everyone wanted to see the towers gone. Residents complained about lack of security and maintenance. Police had dubbed them the "crack stacks" and saw them, and East Mall in particular, as breeding grounds of crime. ELDI saw them as symbols of urban renewal and incompatible with their vision for the neighborhood as a small town within the East End. Councilwoman Valerie McDonald said she would pull the lever on the wrecking ball herself if given the chance. Mayor Tom Murphy was willing to back any big project that he could take credit for. Legislative aide, future mayor, and part-time real estate agent Ed Gainey thought that demolishing them would cause property values to go up enough to allow long-time homeowners to get loans for necessary improvements, increasing the neighborhood's desirability even further. Most importantly, Federal housing policy was increasingly in favor of eliminating these kinds of projects, and absentee landlords like Federal American were squarely in the crosshairs.

The only sticking point was that over 1,000 families still lived in the towers, and there was nowhere else for them to go. If immediate demolition wasn't an option, then kicking out Federal American was an acceptable consolation prize. The Community Builders, a developer out of Boston who had recently purchased Pennley Park and rebuilt it into New Pennley Place, was enlisted in the late 1990s to begin negotiations with Federal American and HUD to purchase the properties, with the goal of stabilizing them so that they would remain inhabitable while newer projects were under construction, at which point the residents could be easily relocated before the towers were demolished. They purchased East Mall and Penn Circle in 2001, and intended to purchase Liberty Park shortly thereafter. However, in early 2002, the deal unraveled after HUD declared that the conditions at all three properties had deteriorated below minimum standards and pulled their operating subsidies. Residents were given Section 8 vouchers, allowing them to remain in their homes, but since the money went with the tenants, TCB now found itself without a reliable source of income and with a black mark on its record that could jeopardize its ability to get Federal funding for future projects.

The plan in danger of collapsing, Tom Murphy met with Rick Santorum and HUD Secretary Mel Martinez, and was able to secure a $40,000/unit redevelopment subsidy. But he was unable to restore the HUD subsidy in its entirety, and there was no guarantee that TCB would be the developer. Worse, the specter of urban renewal was once again rearing its head. Neither residents of the towers, nor the developer, nor ELDI had a seat at the table; once again, politicians were deciding their fate. HUD foreclosed on Liberty Park (still owned by Federal American) in May and the other two properties in November. They then turned them over to our old friend the Urban Redevelopment Authority, who at that time could ill-afford to run them.

What happened next is notable if only for the unintentional comedy of it all, as the mayor decided to celebrate the demolition of East Mall with an event called Get Down!, which featured food, live entertainment, and a "public art" exhibition that involved lobbing water balloons filled with paint at the tower with a slingshot. The event was eerily similar to the opening scene from Season 3 The Wire, which had aired about six months prior. I haven't talked about Murphy since way back in the installment on Downtown, but by 2005, he was on his third term and possibly the most unpopular person in the city. While I have no doubt that he was sincere in his intentions to revitalize Pittsburgh, he believed the way to do so was through 60s-style public boondoggles, particularly favoring public-private partnerships where the private leg got all the profit while the public leg took on all the risk. He was quick to take credit for dubious accomplishments, most notably pushing through a backup plan for a taxpayer-funded stadium deal after the taxpayers had already rejected Plan A in a public referendum.

As far as East Liberty was concerned, he personally escorted the CEO of Home Depot to the site of the old Sears where he wanted them to build a store, before offering them millions in incentives. After the store, which opened in 2000, was successful, and things began improving over subsequent years, he took credit for East Liberty's revival, calling the store a "catalyst" for redevelopment. Sorry Tom, but there had been various catalysts thrown at the wall over the course of the previous 20 years, all of them leading to nothing. The Home Depot just as easily could have failed in the same manner the Lord & Taylor he gave a boatload of money to to build a location Downtown failed. Or it could have been successful and still failed to do anything for the neighborhood around it.

Yes, everyone wanted East Mall to go. But the circumstances surrounding its demise were stressful to those who lived there, and Murphy's role in the deal didn't make him look good. Granted, he probably did all he could, but selling a bad deal as a cause for celebration just because you were powerless to do better is rather tone deaf. The original plan was that housing developments on other sites would be built, the residents of the towers gradually relocated, and the towers demolished once they were empty. Instead, there was a mad dash to find residents housing, preferably in East Liberty or a majority-white neighborhood nearby. Instead, relocation efforts ran into a tight housing market and neighborhoods where landlords refused to accept Section 8 vouchers.

This is around the time that the idea of gentrification first entered the public consciousness around here. Even by this point, East Liberty's revitalization was not a bottom-up increase in demand as outsiders discovered the charms of a long-neglected neighborhood. Instead, it was a deliberate effort by politicians, business owners, and developers to remake an area that they thought was undervalued. If the towers had been in a hopeless ghetto, there would have been complaining, but the circumstances of their destruction wouldn't have precipitated the same anxiety. It appeared to many that the Powers That Be wanted East Liberty for themselves, little people be damned. Those who were more thoughtful did say that those involved did the best they could and were unusually successful given the circumstances, but there was still a lingering mistrust.

East Mall and Liberty Park were demolished in 2005. By the time Penn Circle finally came down in 2009, a switch had been flipped, and the neighborhood's development went into high gear. By that time, Target had announced they would build a store on the site, and Google would be moving into an abandoned Nabisco factory that was being converted into a mixed-use development. Philips Respironics would be constructing an office building across the street. It seemed like every time I drove through, something was under construction, and the southern half of the commercial district was inhabited almost completely by semi-casual upper-middle-class restaurants.

By this point, ELDI had developed a close relationship with developer Walnut Capital and contractor Mosites, and had a seemingly uncanny ability to sell the remaining low-income residents on whatever bougie development project they wanted to push through, only asking that the developers occasionally throw a few affordable units their way to make it look like they were doing something. By now, it had been nearly 20 years since Maelene Myers sat in a church basement and asked a desperate populace what they wanted their neighborhood to look like, and memories of the bad old days were beginning to fade. The genius of ELDI at this time was that they could run seemingly parallel systems where they'd push whatever headline project Walnut Capital was pushing while at the same time working on their own affordable developments elsewhere.

At the same time, evidence that the neighborhood was changing was difficult to ignore and began to instill a feeling of uneasiness among some. In the first half of the 2000s, changes had started but the negative reputation persisted and it still seemed like the big change was just around the corner. In the second half of the decade, the stigma had faded but the look and feel of the old East Liberty still persisted. In the first half of the 2010s, however, development went into high gear, and before anyone knew it, the idea that the place ever had a negative reputation seemed like a distant memory. With ELDI continuing to buy distressed properties and convert them into safe affordable developments, residents and activists could feel as uneasy as they wanted to, but couldn't point to anything specific. But it was only a matter of time before that would change.

In July 2015, 200 residents of Penn Plaza received 90-day eviction notices. Penn Plaza was built in the 1960s under a mortgage subsidy program, but the mortgage was paid off in 2000, and the owners, LG Realty, had converted it to a market rate development. By 2015, the outdated building was only attractive to the low-end of the market, and rents were accordingly low. While the owners accepted Section 8 vouchers, the complex was also home to working people whose incomes were too high to qualify for rental assistance. With East Liberty now being considered prime real estate, these people would have difficulty finding anywhere nearby that they could afford.

LG had planned to build a new, larger site for Whole Foods in one of the buildings, that would be topped with several stories of office space. The rest of the property would contain 200 market rate apartments. In the process, they planned on buying the adjacent Enright Parklet from the city, as the development would cut off access. The building's residents, forced to relocate on short noticed, appealed to the city, and that December, mayor Bill Peduto was able to negotiate a memorandum of understanding that would extend the relocation period and provide residents with relocation assistance. A further snag developed when residents of the area to the south of the site protested the elimination of Enright Parklet. Most of the residents had relocated by March of 2016, though, and the city said that they would not be letting go of the park and would work with the developer to ensure that access would be maintained.

In a sane world, that would have been the end of it. In the real world, the abrupt notices to vacate in 90 days mobilized a small army of activists and protestors, bemoaning the actions of LG Realty. For their part, LG responded in the worst way possible. The size of the development required two community meetings, which are normally routine informational sessions with Power Point presentations, architectural drawings, and question-and-answer sessions. Fearing protests, LG scheduled these meetings at the last minute, with no handouts, in an attempt to railroad the proposal through. The tactics didn't work, as the meetings became shouting matches with protestors anyway, and their stance pissed off both the staunchly pro-development ELDI as well as city hall. There were also still about 20 holdouts living in one of the remaining buildings, and LG initiated a pressure campaign by beginning demolition work on the site.

The result of this circus was that, in January of 2017, the city Planning Commission unanimously rejected LG's preliminary proposal for the site. LG responded by suing, alleging that they had followed the letter of the law and the Planning Commission had no legitimate basis on which to reject the proposal. The city responded by suing LG and obtaining a stop-work order on the demolition, alleging that asbestos abatement was going on in occupied buildings and that the work was creating other dangerous conditions and did not have the necessary approvals. Meanwhile, the NIMBYs to the south weaponized the park issue as a means to block the development, taking the position that the development would unacceptably limit public access. This was a particularly rich position to take, because the park was already only accessible from one street without any parking; the Friends of Enright Parklet, as they called themselves, had essentially lucked into having a semi-private park and wanted to keep it that way. Most of the original opponents to the project were mollified by the city's agreement for a land swap that would see the park renovated and reconfigured to ensure more access, but a small group (led by a guy who lived in New York but owned a house nearby) continued to cause trouble. The remaining tenants were out of Penn Plaza by the end of March, but the city and LG would be stuck in arbitration for the next six months, during which time Whole Foods pulled out of the deal.

The result of the arbitration was that LG would agree to commit some money to affordable housing and submit a new preliminary proposal. But the advocates had demands of their own. They wanted LG to commit to some percentage of affordable housing on the site, which they refused to do. A billboard saying "There are Black People in the Future" went up on a building in March of 2018, and a small controversy erupted when the landlord removed it a month later following complaints. On May 15, nearly three years after the eviction notices were sent out, the Planning Commission approved LG's preliminary plan, amid a charged atmosphere where the names of all 1500 people who had written letters in protest were read. LG had made it clear that they were prepared to head back to court if approval wasn't granted. With preliminary approval secured, Whole Foods was back on board, and construction of the first phase began a year later. The store opened in 2022, and the Enright Park reconstruction finished last year. The adjoining lot, that was meant for luxury apartments, sits vacant. Development is supposedly in progress, but not much seems to be happening with it ten years after the eviction notices went out.

In the aftermath of the controversy, the relationship between the city and developers changed markedly. Inclusionary zoning policies were implemented, and ad hoc community groups could now become registered Community Benefit Organizations, ensured a seat at the table. The result is that East Liberty has lost some of the luster it had a decade ago. From the perspective of LG, it was a private company trying to develop its own property. It was not taking land by eminent domain, and it wasn't managing subsidized apartments that required HUD involvement. They followed the letter of the law and got vilified for it. For the activists, what LG did was an object lesson in the harms of gentrification, which was really just urban renewal in a new guise. The only thing that mattered was that people were being displaced, and the fact that it was a private company doing it and not the government wasn't relevant. ELDI was caught in the middle. They weren't consulted on the matter, and understood that while LG was within its rights legally, if they had come to them first they could have put a plan together that would have gotten the community and politicians on board and thus avoided the mess. But ELDI's unabashedly pro-development stance got them in trouble with the activists anyway; LG's behavior was the natural consequence of ELDI rolling out the red carpet for any developer who wanted to build anything. Any of their commitments to community engagement were just cover so the business owners who ran the organization could run wild. The city was caught in the middle as well. Peduto bent over backwards to provide relocation assistance in what he described as the only time the city had ever done that for private tenants, but was roasted by the activists anyway because of the occasional hiccups and his inability (or unwillingness) to bend LG to their will.

East Liberty has thus become synonymous with gentrification. The final irony is that the process seems to have stalled. As the Penn Plaza saga was raging, there were already concerns that the market for luxury apartments was becoming saturated. At the same time, The Buncher Company was putting up building after building in the Strip District, where pissing off long-time residents wasn't a problem because there weren't any. Interest rate hikes in the early 2020s made new construction less attractive, and by this point, East Liberty has been doing well enough for long enough that there are NIMBYs to deal with as well. Just last year a developer withdrew a proposal to redevelop Mellon's Orchard North, another mid-century complex that was abandoned in 2018 after ELDI successfully relocated the residents to the new Mellon's Orchard South. In the meantime, Maelene Myers is still in her position after 30 years. When asked about whether she felt her actions led to gentrification, she responded:

All the people who couldn’t get out of East Liberty were the ones that built East Liberty’s community plans. The seniors, the veterans, the unemployed, all the people from the high rises who said, “I want better. We deserve better.” That’s how the plan was written, why it became important, and why ELDI became the steward of that plan. When I walk outside now and see a new population that some people say are “gentrifying” the neighborhood, well that wasn’t what people thought back in 1996. They used Shadyside as a model of what they wanted—walkable streets, stores, family friendly. They didn’t want to see the drug wars. They wanted to be able to walk down their street. They wanted the heyday that they had become accustomed to before Urban Renewal. They wanted to be able to enjoy the East Liberty, that in their minds, was Pennsylvania’s third downtown. And they wanted me to help them figure out a way to fix that, never going back to those dark times that shut down the neighborhood and made them feel like Black people didn’t matter. East Liberty today was built for those legacy residents who stayed course, who lost so much to be able to benefit from this. People coming in now are probably not going to know how bad it was. They probably aren’t going to understand what those residents went through to make it possible for them to enjoy now. The families that stayed the course are very grateful, because their home values increased, they have equity, and the neighborhood is walkable and beautiful. It’s everything that they said they wanted to me in the 90s. And I made sure that it was their vision, not mine. I try to make sure everyone that I work with understands that they’re working on behalf of the community and that we’re simply a tool to get things done.

At the start of the 2010s, Penn Circle took on the names of the streets that had preceded it. At the end of the decade, work began to restore those streets to two-way traffic, which is now complete. In 2024, the last original remnant of the pedestrian mall was demolished and updated. The work of eliminating the remaining vestiges of the urban renewal era is nearly complete.

13E. The East Liberty of Today

Now that we've finally reached the present, I'll give a rundown of the various subsections. This isn't like Oakland where there are well-recognized subsections with different names, but the area is large enough that there is some variation in feel. First, there's the area bordering Friendship south of Enright Park and home (or not) to its notorious "friends". This is similar to Friendship itself in that it is mostly large brick houses built between about 1890 and 1910 which, due to their size, have often been split up into apartments. Like Friendship, this area never had substantial white flight, and also like Friendship, it nonetheless went through a "sketchy" phase. This area is almost entirely residential, but there are a few businesses on the southern end near Baum. Back in the days when it was hard to find craft beer in the wild, one of those restaurants with 500 beers on tap opened here, and advertised itself as being in Friendship, in order to not scare off their target demographic. But this area was never considered part of Friendship, despite the similarities.

Next we have Downtown East Liberty, the commercial core which is within the bounds of the old Penn Circle, present day Euclid St. , Station St., and Center Ave. The commercial district is notable because was historically one of Pittsburgh's few "three dimensional" business districts that encompasses multiple streets rather than a single strip as in Lawrenceville or the South Side. Though this has been lost to a certain degree due to the urban renewal, there are still three major commercial streets (Penn, Highland, and Center), two minor ones (Broad and Baum), and a few other random storefronts scattered around. The most gentrified portion of the business district is along Center and South Highland, near the border with Shadyside (in some cases officially in Shadyside). This is where gentrification began, with the original Whole Foods location, and things took off from there, and have now gotten to the point where there's none of the old East Liberty left. Nearby portions of Baum are a mix of long-time stable but unfashionable businesses and new gentrified ones.

Penn, while the traditional commercial heart of East Liberty, is still remarkably similar to the way it was prior to gentrification, with many of the businesses still catering to a lower-class, black clientele. Target is on one end and the new Whole Foods is at the other, but a lot of the rest is dollar stores, vape shops, hair salons, and the like. North Highland seems to be mostly a failure, with a lot of newly renovated but still vacant storefronts. There are a few bougie businesses, and Hotel Indigo, but one gets the sense that The Rent Is Too Damn High for anyone to take a chance on it, and the vendors that are there complain about a lack of foot traffic. Broad St. seems to be mostly the offices of small nonprofits, with a few low-income businesses thrown in for good measure. I get the impression that since there's no reason to take a car down this street most people don't even think to come down here.

The business district stands between two old project areas that remain deliberately mixed-income residential areas. The smaller one, across from the Whole Foods is New Pennley Place, along with the vacant, hazardous Mellon's Orchard buildings that the local NIMBYs prefer to new ones (they may occasionally catch fire, reek of dead animals in the summer, and harbor rodents, but at least they don't generate any traffic). On eastern side, north of the Target, are mixed income developments on the sites of the former Liberty Park and East Liberty Gardens, as well as some new ones on East Liberty Boulevard extending into adjacent Larimer. There are obviously better places to live if you have a choice, but none of these areas are anything approaching dangerous, and are absolutely nothing compared to what they replaced. There's also one of the few remaining midcentury remnants, Enright Place, a collection of rather dumpy townhomes that ELDI sold for cheap to encourage home ownership for people with moderate incomes. Since gentrification has taken hold, there is a vanishingly small number of people who are complaining that the neighborhood's legacy of mid-century architecture is being lost. Those people can take comfort in the fact that, being condos, these will exist until the sun swells into a red giant and engulfs the earth.

There is a small residential area in East Liberty which is west of N Highland and South of East Liberty Boulevard. The area is a somewhat confusing mix of different developments—everything from apartments to houses, with a lot of unfortunate mid-century infill mixed in. I've walked these streets quite a bit, and there has been some infill construction over the past decade, along with quite a few rehabs. The majority of the residential portion of East Liberty is north of here, between East Liberty Boulevard and Stanton Ave. The housing quality changes as you go north, going from frame to brick, similar to those in adjacent Highland Park. One notable exception is N Beatty, which has the Alpha Terrace historic district, made up of stone rowhouses. This area suffered a lot through East Liberty's bad period but was a big focus of ELDI in its neighborhood reconstruction. Virtually every single empty lot in this zone had some sort of single-family infill. That said, the area is lacking in walkable amenities. Aside from an auto garage and a barbershop, there are no businesses in this area, and it takes around 15 minutes to walk into East Liberty's commercial district. Thus it will never be "hot" in the same sense that Lawrenceville is.

To the east of here, Home Depot and the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary occupy large parcels that span several city blocks and cut down on the neighborhood's continuity. Further east, on the neighborhood's edge, is a small residential zone. I have no historical sources to back this up, but you can tell from walking around that this area was never as wealthy as the rest of East Liberty, and it has accordingly been slow to gentrify. The houses are frame, many of them small, and some are still boarded up. ELDI has built some small infill houses on vacant lots for people with moderate incomes, but much of the rest is too unattractive to any significant investment. Finally, on the opposite side of East Liberty, there are a few blocks west of Negley in a no-man's land between East Liberty, Garfield, Morningside, Highland Park, and Stanton Heights. This area has historically been called Negley Place, presumably by residents who didn't want to be associated with East Liberty but wouldn't be accepted as Highland Park. This area never fell as hard as the rest of the neighborhood, but the level of gentrification isn't as high either. I suspect that the stability of the neighborhood has something to do with it, as the houses that were owner-occupied or owned by responsible landowners were never targeted by ELDI for refurbishment.

Neighborhood Grade: Gentrifying, though how far this goes remains to be seen in the coming decades. While much has happened over the past 20 years, there is still plenty of buildable land on the old Penn Circle, and whether this is developed depends on market conditions. The one odd thing about all of this is that, for all the talk of gentrification, East Liberty was never "hot" in the way that Lawrenceville was and is. When the neighborhood was first starting to turn the corner, it was hip to patronize some of the trendier businesses, but these were the ones that moved in early due to the cheap rent. While many of these still exist, most of the development has focused on well-financed chain operations. The same is true on the residential side. While in Lawrenceville the focus was on rehabbing old row houses, in East Liberty it has been all about new luxury apartment complexes.

Who is inhabiting these? I don't know. I've honestly never actually heard of anyone living here, or even aspiring to live here. The only conclusion I can come to is that it's tech workers from out of town who reflexively get places close to the office and can afford to pay for them, especially since they're probably cheaper than in other cities. If this theory is true, then the future of East Liberty is ultimately tied to the future of the commercial real estate market and the expectation that employees will work out of the office. On that front, things aren't looking good. Philips vacated their office space two years ago after a lawsuit settlement forced them to downsize their Pittsburgh operations, and as far as I know the 208,000 square feet they had is still available for sublet. Meanwhile, Walnut Capital recently announced that they will not be building the additional million square feet of office space as part of a project to redevelop a strip mall adjacent to the Google offices. Supposedly more residential will go in there, but I don't know if there's much demand left for stuff renting over $2,000/month.

Part of East Liberty's revival can be explained by the myth of Pittsburgh's affordability. While average rents here are indeed lower than in other cities, that comes with an asterisk. Due to massive population loss between 1970 and 2005 or so, very little was built, particularly multi-family residential. Getting an apartment in a building likely meant something rather old with thin walls, no AC, no dishwasher, no in-unit laundry, no parking, and no updates. And since Pittsburgh was always more a city of houses than a city of tenements, most of the multifamily market was large houses that had been chopped up. The result of this was pent-up demand that resulted in a construction boom focused on East Liberty and the Strip District. This wasn't so much the result of the city growing, however, as much that it simply stopped shrinking. Population went from a peak of 676,806 in 1950 to 305,704 in 2010. By 2020 it had dropped to 302,971, but after posting double-digit losses percentagewise for half a century, this felt like a win. Current estimates show it above the 2010 number, which is an increase for sure, but still only about 5,000 people.

The question going forward, then, is how much of this backlog has been filled and to what extent will population increase be necessary to induce future development. Since the Mellon's Orchard project was put on semi-permanent hiatus, the only development I can find currently in the works is LG's Pennley Park South development on the third parcel of the old Penn Plaza site and the scaled down Bakery Square expansion I just mentioned. There is still plenty of unused retail space in the commercial core, and much of this still caters to the low-income population. The city is still pushing the area as a tech hub, but they seem to be pushing every area where they want to see development as a tech hub, along with every other city in the country.

So what does the future look like? It's hard to say, but let me give you a tour of some things I've noticed over the past decade and a half.

2011: East Liberty gentrification gets going, Zeke's coffee opens on Penn Ave. Also 2011: East Liberty still home to small businesses found in low-income areas 2015: East Liberty gentrification gets stronger, Zeke's moves to new location, replacing the low-income business 2022: East Liberty gentrification loses momentum. Zeke's coffee closes, and is replaced by a low-income business.

2011: East Liberty YMCA vacant. 2016: East Liberty YMCA becomes the Ace Hotel, including a bar, restaurant, coffee shop, and events. 2022: Ace Hotel replaced by The Maverick by Kasa, a "tech-enabled boutique hotel". No restaurant, no coffee shop, no events.

2014: East Liberty Whole Foods. Park-like parking lot full, store busy. 2022: Old East Liberty Whole Foods: Park-like parking lot vacant, store empty. 2023: New Whole Foods parking garage full, store busy. 2026: Old Whole Foods replaced with The Fresh Market, a store that makes Whole Foods look like Aldi.

How to design a building to activate a corner: East Liberty Target How to design a building to deactivate a corner: East Liberty Whole Foods

That last one is part of an interesting but infuriating phenomenon I've noticed. The Whole Foods does activate a corner, just not the busy one. The put a secondary entrance a block away at Penn and St. Clair, which is an intersection that only exists because of this development. The main entrance is farther down on St. Clair, facing what is now a vacant lot. The developers have no interest in the community as a whole and want the main entrance to face the self-referential neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood they plan on developing on the vacant parcel. Walnut Capital did the same thing with Bakery Square, where they chopped off half the old Nabisco factory so they could build more buildings on the back edge of the property and create a private lot. Meanwhile, the part fronting Penn Ave. is nothing but wall and windows. Ditto the South Side Works; back in the installment on the South Side I talked about how the place had vacancy issues from the beginning, except for the shops on Carson.

The logic behind this, I suspect, is the same logic that had underlain the pedestrian mall idea way back in the 1950s, except with a twist: Developers love the idea of curated spaces. The difference is that instead of trying to tame an existing urban commercial district, with all the messiness that comes with being part of the urban jungle, it's better to create a walled-off enclave. When the project was announced in 2007, East Liberty was still widely perceived as dangerous. Luckily, the spot they chose was bounded to the east and south by wealthy areas, and the north was protected by the Port Authority's East Liberty bus garage. The only real connection with the neighborhood was to the west, and there it was protected by an auto-oriented shopping complex and the East Busway. In other words, it was far removed from the natural flow of foot traffic.

If Bakery Square were developed in the 1970s, 1980s, or even the early 1990s, I could sympathize (slightly) with this decision. But by 2007, that mode of thinking was passe. With the opposite side of Penn developed and the shopping plaza slated for demolition, Bakery Square could have, in the long term, extended the commercial district beyond the busway. Instead, it exists as an isolated ersatz town square that doesn't even work well for what it is. At least South Side Works attempts to connect with the rest of the neighborhood.

But all that's beside the main point. My assessment based on 60 years of hindsight is that the intentions of the 1950s retailers would not have been realized no matter what they did. They were correct to be concerned about the business district's impending decline, but the actions they took to forestall it only exacerbated the problem. But there was ultimately zero chance that they would be able to compete with suburban malls, which ruled the roost roughly from the time the East Liberty mall opened in the early 1970s up until the towers closed in the mid-2000s. Since then, though, the situation seems to be reversing itself, with suburban malls struggling. Eastland Mall closed in the early 2000s and had become nothing but a big flea market towards the end. Monroeville Mall still survives but it was sold last year and is slated for demolition. Of the dozen or so malls that used to be in the Pittsburgh area, only two can be said to be doing well, and both of those have only survived because they've catered to upscale stores. Neither of these is easily accessible from the East End or eastern suburbs. Another factor in the decline of urban retail that's often underappreciated is that it coincided with the rise of national chains that didn't have an urban store format. Legacy businesses couldn't compete on cost, and the chains weren't interested in moving to declining downtowns when more lucrative opportunities existed in the suburbs.

The reason I bring this up is because I wonder if there may be some call for a revival of urban shopping. The Target seems to be doing well, as it's always busy every time I'm in there, and the Whole Foods definitely drives traffic. These days, the safety and allure of the suburban shopping experience may be outweighed by the sheer inconvenience of having to drive to the suburbs, especially when there are no convenient malls to anchor the seas of big box stores that sprung up around them. I don't see any obvious reason why a Best Buy, or Kohl's, or Petsmart, or TJ Maxx wouldn't do well in an urban format, or why a store like Bath and Body Works couldn't open a location on a normal street. I think the problem may be largely conceptual, as stores that were traditionally mall-based may not be familiar with navigating a rental market outside a planned retail development, and many big-box stores don't have any concept that doesn't involve in a standardized building surrounded by huge parking and loading facilities. The Home Depot was built where it was because the store at that time had no concept of building anything other than a suburban store. I have no doubt that if such an idea were to gain popularity in retail, East Liberty would be in prime position to take advantage of this, as there is still plenty of space available.

Postscript That's probably the longest one of these I've done yet, and I hope I don't have to do another one like that again. Luckily, it feels like I'm over the hump, and as writing that coincided with the busy season at work, I hope to get these out more quickly in the coming weeks. As a reminder for the road ahead, next time we'll look at the wealthy East End neighborhoods of Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, and Point Breeze. Then we'll look at some of the miscellaneous areas to the north of East Liberty: Highland Park, Morningside, and Stanton Heights, followed by a trip to the bad parts of the East End, Homewood, Lincoln-Lemmington, Larimer, and East Hills. We'll round out the East End (almost) with a look at the hodgepodge of remaining neighborhoods to the south: Greenfield, Hazelwood, Swisshelm Park, and a few miscellaneous areas. After leaving the East End we'll look at the North Side, excepting the North Shore, which I covered about 2 years ago. I have no idea how much I want to say about the rest of the North Side or the rest of the city so I won't make any predictions about how many installments that will involve. After that we'll cross the Mon and look at the southern neighborhoods, and then travel into the mysterious and forbidding West End. I plan on rounding out the city back in the East End with Regent Square, because it's special.

Tinker Tuesday for May 12th, 2026

15 comments - 198 thread views 22hr ago by ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad (text post)

Baby Don't Fear the Reaper

63 comments - 764 thread views 1d ago by ThomasdelVasto Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου (shapesinthefog.substack.com)

Full text here, go to Substack if you want the pictures and links and such.

The basic case for Universalism, or why hell must be temporary

Let’s talk about where your soul is going after you die.

A heavy way to start the article, eh? Unfortunately, this type of heavy handed language is often used by Christians to imply that non-believers or even Christians with the ‘wrong’ theology will go to hell. Not just go to hell, but go to hell FOREVER!

This frankly insane strategy has been quite successful, especially in Protestant culture. The threat of hellfire and brimstone and being poked by a demon’s trident for eternity is extremely effective at scaring some people into a brittle, false kind of faith.

Especially sensitive, neurotic, and generally imaginative types like myself.

Sadly though, while it may bring some people back to faith and have use on the margins, it tends to drive people away from Christianity more than anything. Almost every Christian apostate I’ve talked to has some story of religious trauma, where their parent or friend or pastor told them if they didn’t live a perfectly saintly life, they were going to hell.

They then obsessed over their eternal fate until they got so neurotic, so afraid, so twisted up inside they had to decide that the whole damn religion was fake. And honestly, I don’t even blame them.

So this article is meant as a quick overview of the idea of eternal hell - where it came from, and whether or not it’s valid. To be clear, this is just my own research to get a basic understanding, I’m not a theologian and I won’t be going extremely into the depths on this one.

I’ll also admit up front that even before I did this research, moral intuition insisted that eternal hell is not a true teaching. I can’t conceive of a good and loving God who creates a universe in which legions and legions of His creations, made in His image, are tortured brutally for all eternity. It simply makes no sense whatsoever.

After living as an atheist/buddhist for over ten years, I followed my moral intuition and the voice of God in my heart to Christ and the Orthodox church, so I was conflicted when I first started wondering about the fate of the damned. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many others in the Orthodox and Catholic churches felt the same way, and that the argument against eternal punishment had a long and storied history.

Some basic definitions:

Universalist: Holds that all will ultimately be saved

Infernalist: Holds that some face eternal punishment from God

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The Bible Said So

If you were raised by a certain type of Christian parent, you’ve probably been threatened with hell.

It’s sadly common in Christian circles: “do X or you’ll go to hell!” The fact that we casually threaten children with eternal torment is a bit crazy, but hey, culture is weird sometimes.

Where does this come from? Well, there are a lot of admonitions in Scripture about how sin leads to punishment in the afterlife:

Matthew 25:45

Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Thessalonians 1:7

They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…

Revelation 14:10

And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.

Now, a straightforward reading of the English here would indicate okay, yes, if we are sinners in this life, or at least don’t pass the bar for God, we go to hell forever. To suffer, and be tormented, over and over and over, without ceasing.

Pretty scary stuff.

However, many scholars have argued that these translations are… faulty, to say the least. The argument typically hinges on the translation of the Greek phrase “kolasin aiōnion,” which has often been translated as “eternal punishment,” and the Greek phrase “eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn,” translated as “forever and ever.”

The problem comes in when you realize that the word “aiōnion” has a dual meaning in ancient Greek - it could either mean:

A really long time! Literally “until the end of the age,” which in practice just meant a really long time
Actually forever, infinite, eternal. Will never cease. Trillions and trillions of years go by and it’s still happening

The debate hinges on which of the two time periods these phrases actually refer to. Universalists are not just pulling this out of their rear ends, so to speak. There are uses of aiōnion in the Old Testament that clearly refer to a temporary happening, such as when Moses blessed the “eternal hills” of Joseph’s land in Deuteronomy 33:15, or the “eternal fire” of Sodom in Jude 7.

Another major debate is over the doctrine of “apokatastasis,” or the promised restoration of all things in eternity. Many classical writers, most notably Saint Paul, talked about this concept. Specifically:

Colossians 1:19–20 “through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven”.

1 Timothy 2:4 “God desires all people to be saved.”

2 Peter 3:9 “not wishing any to perish.”

1 Corinthians 15:22–28 “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ… that God may be all in all.”

I could go on and on. There are all sorts of minor debates over other terms, and theological minutiae. Suffice to say, there is no clear cut, black and white answer as to whether Scripture declares eternal punishment, and the popularity of the infernalist versus universalist position has oscillated back and forth throughout Christian history depending on when and where you look.

The Church Said So

For the Orthodox and Catholic (and some Protestant) believers, we luckily have an institution to interpret Scripture for us: the Church!

Pretty much every infernalist, when backed into a corner and made to doubt their understanding of eternal torment, will immediately turn and say, “well the Church teaches that the damned suffer in hell forever!”

As in the section above, they aren’t necessarily wrong, but they also aren’t completely right.

So, what does the Church actually say? I’ll focus on the Orthodox church here, but ultimately the major decision point was well before the schism of 1054, so this section applies mostly to both Catholic and Orthodox doctrine.

This discussion centers around the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553. Imagine a room full of men with long beards, in fancy robes, full of the Holy Spirit, conferring in the heart of Constantinople, at the Hagia Sophia. (Arguably the most beautiful church in the world at the time, though sadly a mosque now.)

So all of these guys get together to discuss some problems in the early church, and figure out what was going on. A side character in this drama, a man by the name of Origen of Alexandria, had caused some problems with interpretations of his teachings a while back, and he was on the list to discuss.

Specifically, Origen believed in the pre-existence of souls before birth, and reincarnation after death, as well as universal reconciliation or the restoration of all things and beings. Even the devil, and fallen angels!

The council ruled definitively that this specific system of Origen’s belief as a whole was condemned. The line that is often trotted out, which I admit looks quite bad, is as follows:

“If anyone says or thinks that the punishment of demons and of impious men is only temporary, and will one day have an end, and that a restoration [apokatastasis] will take place of demons and of impious men, let him be anathema.”

The way most universalists combat this objection is that:

This was referring to Origen’s overall system, not specifically claiming that the damned are tormented forever or even giving a concrete definition of punishment in the afterlife
The ‘restoration’ discussed here is actually referring more to Origen’s belief that humans existed somehow outside the body before birth, and would be ‘restored’ to that state afterward. Not how most universalists use ‘restored’, to mean reconciled to God.

To be absolutely clear on this point: there is no specific Church dogma that definitively declares the damned are punished eternally. In fact, glorified saints such as Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Saint Isaac the Syrian explicitly taught universalism and held universalist positions until they died, and have not been condemned by the Church.

I emphasize this because when you wade into online discussions of universalism versus infernalism, the argument via doctrine is by far the most common problem infernalist argument you see. Sadly many people see this argument then simply take it at face value that their church believes the damned will be tortured forever, not being bothered enough by that teaching to actually check for themselves.

So again, in terms of actual church doctrine, just like with interpretation of Scripture, we have a somewhat murky picture in which neither the universalist or infernalist position clearly wins out.

I’ll add as well that at least in the Orthodox tradition, church doctrine is not strictly binding forever and ever as it is in the Catholic church. The councils are not perfectly infallible. Through consensus and the living tradition of the Church, our dogmas and doctrines can be updated as new information or revelations come out.

So even if there was a strong consensus that infernalism was what a council taught, it could be changed!

Sadly, many ‘Orthobros’ in America have converted from Protestant backgrounds where “sola scriptura,” or a strict black and white, legalistic understanding of the faith, is the default worldview. Even after conversion, this way of seeing the faith is carried over, and they tend to try and use church councils as a bludgeon, with a liberal use of the words “heresy” and “heretic.”

You’d think if they cared so strictly about the rules they would let the bishops decide who was heretical instead of taking it upon themselves, but that’s how it goes on the internet.

Meaninglessness or the Noble Lie

Finally I will give a notable mention to another couple of arguments.

The first goes something like: “life has no meaning if there isn’t eternal punishment.”

Another argument is that the doctrine of eternal hell acts as some sort of “Noble Lie,” where it’s not really true, but the masses just aren’t ready to understand the truth and they will act up if they learn that they’ll eventually go to heaven.

Speaking about universal salvation online, I’ve gotten well over a dozen responses forwarding these lines of belief. They aren’t very compelling to me, so my only guess here is that these people have a misunderstanding of the actual universalist position.

When a universalist argues that God will reconcile all things in the end, they are not saying that hell doesn’t exist. Instead, simply that hell is not eternal.

For instance, if you have somebody really bad like an unrepentant serial killer die and go to hell, they may be there a long, long time. Perhaps hundreds, thousands, or millions of years, subjectively. That still constitutes an extremely strong reason to avoid sin, and work out your salvation! Just because hell isn’t fully, forever eternal, does not mean hell has no value as a deterrent.

Eternity, forever, infinite, etc. are complicated concepts, and it makes sense as to why people wouldn’t really grok it or be able to reason about it well. Heck, I don’t even understand it fully, and there are some tricky arguments about how true Eternity is “outside of time” that make eternal punishment make sense. I don’t want to get into that here.

In conclusion, if you are a Christian of any stripe, even Orthodox or Catholic, and you want to hope for universal salvation, you are well within your rights to do so. No church has explicitly condemned it, and there are very good reasons to believe it. As I owned up to in the beginning of this article, I see it as a requirement to satisfy my own moral intuitions about the goodness of God. How could a loving Father create children in His own image knowing many, or even most, are condemned to eternal torture?

Be warned however that if you decide to hope for universal salvation, you may want to keep it close to your chest. The infernalist position tends to correlate with extremely dogmatic, rigorist, and frankly spiteful believers who are often extremely difficult to have open and productive conversations with. I’d caution you against arguing too much, unless you’re like me, and simply can’t help yourself.

All this being said, I also want to emphasize the fact that not all universalists are going to heaven, and not all infernalists are going to hell. Having the ‘right belief’ does not give us a free pass. We must love one another, and purify our hearts to the best of our ability. As a wise friend cautioned me during this discussion:

Where is the heart? are there tears of longing for light, and love, and holiness, for the capacity to heal others? on either side of the universalist/infernalist debate, there are people whose hearts are longing for God, and people who are just manipulating words with pride and worshipping their minds.

I hope this article has been helpful or at least interesting for you, and may we all move our hearts closer to God.

Shapes in the Fog is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe, or you’ll go to hell forever! (Just kidding)

Why successful people often have bad opinions online

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 10, 2026

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Recursive thinking, Newcomb's problem, and free will

51 comments - 709 thread views 3d ago by felipec unbelief (felipec.substack.com)

Weekly Finance Thread

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Friday Fun Thread for May 8, 2026

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Transnational Thursday for May 7, 2026

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Wellness Wednesday for May 6, 2026

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An Article Slamming us Wordcels

21 comments - 999 thread views 7d ago by ThomasdelVasto Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου (shapesinthefog.substack.com)

Another blog post, reproduced here in full, but go to substack if you want the pictures and such.

On Writing, Fiction, and Modern Escapism

Do our stories bring us down to earth, or keep our heads in the clouds?

“Interesting Reading” by Theodor Kleehaas, c. 1890

Dear reader, it’s time to read my writing about writing.

I’ve got a complicated relationship with the ol’ written word. I grew up having my parents read Lord of the Rings and other classics to me before I could even speak. While I come from a long line of rural southerners without a ton of education or wealth, I truly admire that my parents were both readers, despite the anti-reading social stigma in their class, and worked hard to pass that on to me.

As soon as I could read, I became obsessed with the written word. I remember clearly how my mother would always brag about how I could read and pronounce the word ‘indubitably’ by the time I was three years old. (She still brags about this, occasionally.)

Growing up, I lived a typical ‘millennial nerd-life’ so to speak. Both of my parents were working, and I had no siblings, so I spent a lot of time alone. As I’ve written elsewhere, much of my time I spent gaming; the time I didn’t spend gaming was mostly spent with my nose in a book.

Fantasy and science fiction, speculative fiction as it’s now called, gripped me far more than anything else. I still read non-fiction, especially scientific reading, since my mother had a career in laboratory science, so it felt relevant to me.

With hindsight, it’s obvious that my obsession with fantasy in the broader sense - worlds beyond the one I am actually in - was perhaps not the most salutary way to spend my time as a child. Instead of playing outside, socializing, or learning discipline, I took every spare moment I could to escape the physical realm and into the realm of imagination.

I’m not attempting to bemoan my situation overmuch though.

Since the 70s or so, the two-income household has been the norm, and leads to the majority of kids spending very little time with their parents. Historically, this was not the norm at all. We live in a society of orphans, raised by the state more than their parents.

Either way, one concept that helped me make sense of what I was doing as a kid is the emotional pattern sometimes called the ‘Leaving Pattern’. I first encountered it in the book The Five Personality Patterns, but it’s an older psychological pattern first typified by Wilhelm Reich, the schizoid typology. Whatever you call it, the basic idea is as follows:

A child, for one reason or another, grows up feeling unsafe in their body / in the physical world
As a defense, they end up ‘leaving’ their body, often going into an imaginary world, or physically withdrawing into themselves
In order to function in the world, they create a persona that is split off from their ‘true self,’ and keep said true self in the fantasy world

Now I’ll be the first to admit that psychology is a spotty science at best, and it’s good not to read too much into these sorts of types. You can quite easily become trapped by an abstract concept, and psychology can never capture all of what a human being is. However, I still find myself relating to this pattern quite strongly, and thinking about it has helped me combat some of my problematic habits.

Okay, But… Writing?

“A Man at his Desk” by Salomon Koninck, c. 1655

Now you might be thinking, ‘Ok thanks for the dramatic sob story Thomas, how does this relate to writing again?’

Growing up, due to my love for and even obsession with reading, my career dreams such as they existed revolved around becoming a writer. I felt that good books had taught me so much, had saved me from a difficult world, and truly given me a reason to live, when I didn’t have much of one during the worst parts of my youth.

I dreamt of writing a book series that could reach out to other young children and grip them the same way. Teach them good values via stories, help provide solace in their pain, and save them the way I thought good books and stories had saved me.

Ironically, I’ve come to question this story a bit.

As I outlined above, I’m not so sure that getting deep into fantasy, science fiction, and gaming was good for me as a youth. In fact, I’m pretty confident it led to some bad outcomes for me later on. When you always cope by retreating into fantasy, you set yourself up for delayed maturation in the ‘real world,’ at the least.

Many young people who get obsessed with fantasy worlds essentially never grow up, permanently stuck in an adolescent phase. You see this quite often nowadays with Marvel, or Disney, or other major commercialized fantasy worlds.

So I have had to take a step back and ask myself: is it truly helping the world to add yet another fictional realm for people to escape into? What if I simply perpetuate the tendency for people to ‘leave’ themselves and cause the same problems I’ve had to deal with as I grew up and was forced to confront reality?

These musings are a large part of why I ended up starting this blog, and done much of my writing in a more non-fiction, ‘serious’ realm so to speak, where I’m trying to confront real problems instead of go into a fantasy realm.

I’ll also admit that, having tried to write speculative fiction, it is quite difficult. I’ve started more novels than I can remember, only to peter out a little ways into them. Part of what has stopped me is my philosophical wranglings above, but it would be dishonest not to admit that a lack of discipline and commitment plays into it as well.

And if we zoom out from just writing, looking at the modern world as a whole, it seems to me that with the rise of phones, social media, and the digital realm generally, we are increasingly plunging ourselves into the abstract, the mental, the imaginary. We are leaving our bodies en masse in favor of intellectualized distractions, artificial connection, and disembodied dopaminergic entertainment.

A large part of my own path to healing has been learning to embrace my body, the sensations from it, and ground within the physical world, instead of spending all of my time running away from uncomfortable sensations.

While I love fantasy, science fiction, video games, and other imaginative delights, I can’t help but see these things more and more as junk food, as an unhealthy indulgence that may be good to have occasionally, but certainly should not be the core of an adult life.

And yet… I still remember being a young child, and diving into my first few fantasy worlds. I remember being exposed to depths of being and understanding that I had no conception of beforehand. I remember learning about heroism, about sacrifice, and about the depths of love that human beings can attain, with the right measure of wisdom and courage.

I remember finding something holy within the pages of these fictional worlds, something that I still feel resonates deep in my heart to this day.

Ultimately, as Jonathan Pageau, Jordan Peterson, and many other Christian writers have discussed, stories are fundamental to who we are as humans. When Christ was presented with dilemmas during His teaching, He would often teach others by telling stories, or parables. There’s a way in which stories can get at a truth deeper than ‘reality’ can, a way in which the narrative realm speaks to the deepest parts of us, makes us come alive. We desperately need stories just in order to make sense of the world.

So perhaps the problem isn’t whether fictional stories as a whole are good in themselves, but the types of stories we choose to tell, and whether they keep us trapped in our heads, or ground us in reality.

Tinker Tuesday for May 5th, 2026

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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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1701

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A Nineteenth Century Troll, or These Jokes Were Better in the Old Days

4 comments - 772 thread views 15d ago by JTarrou (text post)

This past weekend we took a short couples trip to an away game in Cincinnati with some good friends. The Tigers got trucked. Anyway, while wandering the downtown, we ran across a huge public fountain. There was an earnest white girl singing folk music in a corner of the plaza, and we took a few minutes in the shade to let the girls rest. I got looking at the fountain and realized it was a giant middle finger to the city it sat in. The most brilliant troll job I've seen in recent memory.

The fountain can be seen here. It was donated to the city by some robber-baron hardware magnate back in the day, and includes drinking fountains around the edge of the pool. An example of the smaller fountain sculpture can be seen better here. Four of these ring the pool of the fountain. Each depicts a nude young male in the Greek tradition, with an animal head hanging between his legs. In one, the young man rides a dolphin, in another, has a snake coiled around his thighs, etc. The head of the animal is the drinking part of the fountain itself. The water stream issues from the mouth.

Might be a history buff, but I had no idea who Henry Probasco was. Apparently he was a wildly wealthy purveyor of tools and traveled to Europe to find an artist to build the fountain he donated to the City of Cincinnati in honor of his deceased business partner, one Tyler Davidson, whose name graces the monument. I imagine it went something like this:

Probasco blames the city for his partner's untimely demise.

Probasco: “Goddammit Jenson, fuck this city! The whole place can suck my dick. Is there any way to make that happen?”

Jenson the faithful butler: “Perhaps figuratively sir, I could not say. Almost certainly not literally.”

Probasco: “Figuratively eh?”

TWO YEARS LATER

Jenson: “Sir, the city council is refusing to accept the design with actual dicks.”

Probasco: “Will their infernal complaining never end? I'm offering them free clean drinking water for all time in the middle of town, and these whiny cunts don't like my design?”

Jenson: “Perhaps they object to putting their mouths on a bronze penis to get water, sir. I've taken the liberty of speaking to the artist. He suggests something a bit more....metaphorical.”

Probasco:”Like what, man!”

Jenson: “Well sir, he suggests a series of animal motifs with........elongated necks.”

Probasco:”Be direct, Jenson! What are we talking about here? Are you saying I have to make it a real snake rather than a trouser snake?”

Jenson: “Essentially, yes sir. Among others, such as goose and a turtle.”

Probasco: “Well, it's not quite what I had in mind, but making the children of this city drink out of the head of a snake dangling between my statue's legs is probably as close as we're going to get eh?”

Jenson: “I fear so, sir.”

Fin

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

1742 comments - 24920 thread views 16d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

1742

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026

234 comments - 2580 thread views 17d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Converting to Catholicism

122 comments - 1225 thread views 17d ago by PyotrVerkhovensky (text post)

Since @ThomasdelVasto has made a couple "main-Motte" religious posts I thought I'd join in the fun.

I'm a Protestant with strong Reformed leanings. My wife, on the other hand, has just converted to Catholicism. This has led me to explore aspects of Catholic teaching, though necessarily at a surface level given the rich history. Aquinas alone would take months if not years to digest. I expected to disagree on Mary (perpetual virginity, immaculate conception, assumption) and the Pope (infallibility); and I still do (though I was surprised how recently these have become "dogma": I would have found it much easier to be a Catholic in 1800 than today). I am pleasantly surprised at how much weight they place on Scripture, Christ, and Assurance: there are far more shared hymns than I had anticipated, as as an example.

What follows is some of the reflections I had to this surface exploration. I would be thrilled to be corrected or critiqued by any of the Motte's Catholics, if nothing else to better understand my wife's flavor of the Christian faith. Many of these are reactions to "Catholicism" by Bishop Robert Barron, which my wife kindly bought to introduce me to the titular topic. While I presume he is orthodox Catholic, his interpretations may not be universally accepted by Catholics. If I challenge particular arguments from Barron, it should not be interpreted as an argument against Catholicism unless Barron is arguing for Church Dogma. His "Catholicism" is also meant as an introduction and for popular consumption, and his actual beliefs may have more nuance.

As part of this journey (which is certainly not over yet!), I also read (the dense and repetitive) "Divine Will and Human Choice" by Richard Muller and "Christus Victor" by Gustaf Aulén. These, too, have varying degrees of rigor. Muller and Aulén were both Protestants.

God’s freedom

While Reformed theology would affirm that God predestines both those who are saved and those who are damned, Catholics balk at this concept; arguing that this implies a God who would cause sin. God cannot will that which is against his nature. Catholics would appeal to God’s provision and common grace that allows humans consciences to (partially and weakly) discern good and evil. Yet we cannot perfectly discern this apart from divine revelation (scripture). And scripture states multiple times in the Exodus narrative that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Aquinas (as if often the case) provides the most rigorous Catholic argument I’ve heard for this hardening. God through an act of his will withdrew what grace was granted to Pharaoh. Absent God’s grace Pharaoh drew more into his sin. While Aquinas argued this case for the individual case of Pharaoh, it seems consistent to assume that were God to withdraw his common grace more broadly that all would fall into a state where our consciences are no longer capable of even partial discernment of good and evil. This is also consistent with God giving humans over to their lusts in Romans 1.

So far, this interpretation is consistent with scripture, though I am discomfited by the constraints this threatens to place on God: constraints that come perilously close to being primarily informed by our own interpretation or perspective of scripture and sin. God works and wills, including in sin.

Barron, if I read him correctly, goes a step further. He puts the "problem of sin" as one of the best arguments against God. I’ve never understood this as a problem for Christians. It is a deep problem for atheists, who have to explain or excuse their visceral (though often mis-aligned) desire for justice despite no objective basis for these judgments. Christians have no such need to explain or excuse: of course we are all deeply desirous for justice since we have (again, weakly and with great room for error) a sense of what transcendent goodness could be. A consistent perspective on the problem of evil would be that God defines good, and if we don’t understand his actions to be "good" that is a fault (a mis-calibration) of our fallen nature. The fact that Barron does not take this tack hints that he believes humanity’s desire for a "good" God is compatible with humanity’s definition of "good". This runs the grave risk of putting ourselves as a "judge" or external arbiter of God’s behavior.

Barron continues to put a soft face on hard truths. Later in the book, Barron says "God sends no one to hell, people freely choose to go there". This sharply contradicts scripture. Jesus talks about casting sinners into the outer darkness. Peter says the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. John’s Revelation describes those who receive a mark on their forehead drinking the wrath of God, mixed in the cup of his anger, and tormented with fire and brimstone. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. Again, God is not passive: he works and wills.

How does God work and will (1)? Does God have a an array of potential actions, any of which he can actualize? Yet this runs the risk of these potential actions being "outside" God. Does God create the potentials as he actualizes them? Thus no "possibles" exist for God, simply "actuals"? This also could be seen as a constraint on God and limit his radical freedom. Both these potential concepts of God’s will and freedom (of which I’m sure there are hundreds of alternative concepts) seem to be operating at a level above how Barron conceptualizes God’s freedom. Put crassly, Barron seems to be hinting that God could not "make a triangle a square", that is, that God is constrained by logical impossibilities. But this is such a small view of God. God creates our minds and universe. Our minds invent or discover things like logic, or define things like squares or circles. Whether spawned by our intellect or embedded in the structure of the cosmos, these concepts (including logic!) are part of Creation itself. God created the conditions under which we can model physical reality with math, structure, and logic. Logic is a model. Logos is Truth. Logic is created. Logos is the Creator.

God’s atoning work

The freedom God enjoys in his omnipotence has implications for a theological understanding of Atonement. The "big two" theories of Atonement, Satisfaction and Substitution, emphasize the sacrificial nature of the cross. This sacrificial interpretation retains God’s complete sovereignty with Christ’s death being an act of perichoretic propitiation. The incarnation and death was necessary because of God. It was not necessary because of anything external to God.

Catholics consider Substitution theory, which is the most common concept of Atonement in Reformed circles, to be heresy. Belief in the other concepts of Atonement are allowed. In the Satisfaction theory, which my understanding is that most if not all Catholics affirm, Jesus is our great high priest and a perfect offering, but does not receive the judgement of God. Christ died for our sins, but not in our place.

"Christus Victor" makes the historical case for Ransom theory. In principal, this theory could bring Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox together: the church Fathers at least strongly hinted at Ransom theory being the primary lens through which they interpret the cross, and the church universally recognizes the importance of the church Fathers. Aulén makes the case that Luther was also an adherent to Ransom theory. Yet this theory risks making God subservient to morality or law, proposing that Jesus was paid to Satan in exchange for humanity (2). Uncharitably, this theory makes God beholden to the "laws" of commerce, even transaction with a brigand.

However, I do find Ransom theory to have its merits. In heavily Reformed theology Satan is almost considered an afterthought. Satan plays no necessary role in the arc of human redemption and salvation. Ransom theory, on the other hand, puts Satan in a prominent place: he is either the kidnapper of human souls or is the (legitimate, in some sense) owner of human souls. The exchange of Christ for humanity and the subsequent torture and murder of Christ was simultaneously Satan’s crowning achievement and his destruction. This interpretation echos Jesus’ parable of the landowner who sent servants to collect from the tenants only to have them beaten or killed. The frustrated landowner finally sent his own son, but the tenants murdered him hoping to take his inheritance. At the conclusion of the parable, the chief priests react that the landowner will bring the tenants to a “wretched end”. Christ’s death and resurrection was the ultimate victory over Sin, Death, and the Devil, bringing this triumvirate to a “wretched end”. Indeed, this victory can be interpreted as more complete than Satisfaction or Substitution theories: it not only removes the penalty of sin, but defeats the sin itself.

Conclusion?

I plan to read and think more on this topic. Next on my list is "Deification through the Cross" by Khaled Anatolios. Any other book recommendations are welcome. I'm particularly interested in Catholic perspectives Atonement that go deeper than Barron's book.

(1) As I read "The Divine Will and Human Choice" I had to continuously bite my tongue. My mathematical training was screaming "But Kolmogorov!". Yet Kolmogorov is but a model, and Muller was trying to describe reality. Muller, though, had merely words to try to describe reality and I kept mentally begging for a more rigorous algebraic representation to more clearly and concisely communicate. Of course, the algebraic representation is itself a model, but so are words: anyone who uses ChatGPT or Claude is implicitly recognizing that words are not reality but just a map or model of reality.

(2) In CS Lewis' The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan (representing Christ) is beholden to the "deep magic".

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The basic case for Universalism, or why hell must be temporary

The Bible Said So

The Church Said So

Meaninglessness or the Noble Lie

On Writing, Fiction, and Modern Escapism

Okay, But… Writing?

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God’s freedom

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