The Rich Side of Town
In this installment we will look at five East End neighborhoods that form a center of gravity of sorts for the city's wealth: Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, Point Breeze, Park Place, and Point Breeze North. While gentrifying areas may be more attractive to a certain demographic, this part of the East End was the traditional seat of old money, and that is reflected in the neighborhoods' development. To be clear, this isn't a complete list of wealthy areas as much as it is a convenient grouping for the purposes of this series, as I've been trying to group these installments thematically as much as geographically. I could include Regent Square in here as well as it fits both thematically and geographically, and it would tie everything up in a nice little package, but I'm not, because of reasons that I will vaguely hint at until I get to it at the very end of this series.
Series Index:
- Intro
- Downtown
- Strip District
- North Shore
- South Side
- Hill District: Lower Hill
- Hill District: Middle Hill
- Hill District: The Projects
- The Hill’s Environs: Uptown, Sugar Top, and Polish Hill
- Oakland
- Lawrenceville
- Bloomfield, Friendship, and Garfield
- East Liberty
14. Shadyside: Pittsburgh's First Hip Neighborhood
Geographically speaking, Shadyside starts, so to speak, at an indeterminate point on Fifth Ave. somewhere in the vicinity of WQED or the Rodef Shalom Temple where Oakland claims the public landmarks, but the private residences associate with Shadyside. The city puts a hard boundary at Neville St., which is a good general guide, but I've tried to account for the minor colloquial variations. The northern boundary is similarly fuzzy, as the whole Baum-Center area is enough of a no man's land that there was a period in the 80s when some were advocating that it be recognized as a neighborhood unto itself. Despite the similarities, I've given Baum to Bloomfield and Center to Shadyside in this stretch, mainly because Shadyside Hospital is on Center, but that otherwise comes with an asterisk. I hand Center over to East Liberty east of Negley, where the northern border of Shadyside follows the busway ravine until Penn, ending where Fifth and Penn, which ran parallel from Downtown, improbably intersect at Mellon Park. The southern boundary is much more legible; it's officially on Fifth, but as I'm wont to do I run it slightly to the south to give Shadyside both sides of the street.
As much as Pittsburgh's industrial development is associated with the rivers, the city's first experiment with iron smelting occurred about as far from one as you can get. In 1792, a furnace was established in the vicinity of what is now the Winchester Thurston School, the intent of the founders being to produce stove grates. The enterprise only lasted a year before folding due to a lack of charcoal and iron ore, and while the city would later be the nation's capital of steel production, it would be the last industry Shadyside ever saw. In the mid-19th century, Shadyside, like most of the East End, was farmland. Pittsburgh, like all cities at the time, was a walking city, and there was little call for settlement anywhere that wasn't within walking distance of business or industry. After the railroad jumpstarted East Liberty's growth in 1852, it became clear that suburban existence was feasible, particularly for the wealthy, and in 1860, Shadyside Station was established at the northern end of what is now Amberson Ave.
Like the rest of the East End, Shadyside soon became the refuge for professional men who wished to live far from the smoke and squalor of Downtown and the mill districts. The farms were subdivided beginning in the 1860s. At first, larger, irregularly sized lots were sold as mini-estates for business and professional men, but in anticipation of increased demand, Thomas Mellon laid out the old McFarland Estate in the pattern of a traditional urban neighborhood. Development was slow to take off, as commuting costs made the area too expensive for all but the wealthiest. With the arrival of the electric streetcar in 1890, however, it became feasible for the average upper-middle-class professional, and growth exploded. The neighborhood was almost completely built out by 1905.
In the 1910s, the automobile began to present serious competition to the electric streetcar. While this was of little consequence for poor, immigrant-heavy places like Lawrenceville or the South Side, the lack of accommodations for cars presented a serious impediment to Shadyside's status as a neighborhood for the upper and upper middle classes. Even at this early date, newer city neighborhoods like Squirrel Hill and suburbs like Mt. Lebanon were offering amenities like garages and larger lots that were only possible if the houses did not need to be spaced too closely together. By the 1920s, Shadyside appeared to have peaked and was in decline. Larger houses in the western part of the neighborhood were protected by zoning and thus never subdivided, but the same could not be said of the eastern part, which already had several small apartment buildings.
While the decline was limited, one only has to look at an original grand homes and the midcentury infill built next to it to understand that, even if things weren't exactly bad, they were still downscale compared to what they had been previously. This is especially true in the western part of the neighborhood, where massive Victorian edifices stand cheek-by-jowl with positively modest 1950s homes. But it says something that the neighborhood was seeing new construction at a time when the rest of the city was dealing with population loss. Shadyside was still a prime address and the home of some of the city's most prominent citizens, but it was now an accessible address, particularly to Pitt and CMU students who began inhabiting the apartment complexes and divided single-family dwellings in the eastern part of the neighborhood, as well as the newer apartment houses built on the sites of razed mansions along Fifth Ave.
Walnut Street had always contained a business district, but when East Liberty was the retail center of the East End, it was small and scattered and mostly contained the kind of stores that didn’t merit a second glance from anyone who didn't live there—a deli, a hardware store, a grocery store, a movie theater, a drug store, a post office, a pet store, a few bars, and a few coffee houses and bookstores. There were a few destination businesses like William Penn Hat and Gown, which sold what can only be described as "ball-ware", but the street was half residential, and the only people who shopped there were Shadyside residents. In the mid-1950s, the coffee shops began attracting a bohemian crowd, which begat more coffee shops, and the street was dubbed "Espresso Row". Seeing the neighborhood's potential, businessmen Will Shiner and Dick Handler opened a series of live music venues and what had been a sleepy, slightly bohemian neighborhood had become the Place to Be.
In the early 1960s, Shadyside had a sort of triple identity. By reputation, it was the kind of place where guys with beards would spontaneously start playing bongos in a coffee shop. By day, it was still a sleepy neighborhood business district with an unusually high concentration of fine clothing stores, bookstores, and art shops. By night, it was a jumping nightlife spot with packed clubs and movie theaters showing Antonioni's "Blow Up" and other films that couldn't be seen anywhere else in town. Beer, not coffee, was the beverage of choice, and the young men weren't scruffy beatniks but wore jackets and ties. As Shadyside's popularity continued to grow throughout the 1960s, it began attracting a less sophisticated element, and while the neighborhood was far from being sketchy, the more upscale residents began complaining of the hippies moving in. Head shops, waterbed stores, bikers cruising Walnut St., and "bohemian junkies" marked a somewhat seedy period in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even the movie theater had started showing smut films.
By 1975, however, the action had moved on. Oakland took center stage as the Pittsburgh's happening spot, and things in Shadyside calmed down a bit. There were still a few hangdog places for sure, and the live music scene was still strong, but the overall vibe was more upscale, especially as the first wave of urban pioneers began restoring the Victorian houses. The hippies were slowly becoming yuppies, as was evident in the chi chi boutiques, cocktail lounges, restaurants, and art galleries that proliferated on Walnut St. Demographically, residents included everyone from Richard Mellon Scaife and mayor Pete Flaherty to a diverse collection of professionals, blue collar workers, students, professors, artists, and old-timers. Jane Jacobs would have loved it.
The result, which now seems inevitable, was that Shadyside gradually lost its edge. Chain stores like Banana Republic and The Gap moved in in the late 1980s, driving out many long-time independent merchants. Bars and restaurants in particular were targeted, and Walnut St. became increasingly retail. The smaller merchants initially thought that this would lead to ghettoization, like in nearby East Liberty. The theory was that the business model the chains were operating on—right down to the inflated rents—required the kind of sales that a small neighborhood business district couldn't hope to ever meet. This theory was ridiculous 35 years ago and continues to be ridiculous now, but people still seem to believe it. Every 5 or 10 years a chain store or two closes and it spurs headlines like "Is This the End for Shadyside?" and the local news interviews someone from the Tepper School of Business who offers bland platitudes about the changing retail landscape and people freak out on Reddit about how there are already two vacant storefronts. And within a year those chain stores have been replaced with other chain stores.
14A. The Lay of the Land
I mentioned an East-West divide in the previous section, and while I wouldn't go as far as categorizing them as different sections, there's an obvious transition around Aiken Ave. The street grid west of here is made of large, irregular blocks that contain opulent single-family homes that were never subdivided into apartments. Some of these were originally part of larger estates, but as demand for property grew at the end of the 19th century, developers began looking for ways to maximize the size of house they could fit on a small lot and came up with the dead-end street scheme. Shadyside's dead ends seem like something the neighborhood should be known for, but they instead exist as a historical curiosity. The first of these was Colonial Place, dating from 1897, but the most famous is Roslyn Place, which is celebrated for being the last remaining street paved entirely with wood blocks.
East of Aiken, the neighborhood is more streetcar suburban in feel. This is Shadyside qua Shadyside and contains the Walnut St. business district. From a business perspective, it's still dominated by chains, but there are enough local businesses to keep things interesting. Kards Unlimited, a bookstore/stationer has been continuously operating since 1968, and Mardi Gras, dating from 1954, prides itself for being one of the last Old Shadyside bars. The district's cuteness has led to modern armchair urbanists single it out for that old favorite of mid-century meddlers, pedestrianization. Every so often I hear it described as a "no brainer", or there's an /r/Pittsburgh post titled "Can we turn Walnut into a pedestrian mall already?" And when anyone points out that they already tried that in East Liberty to disastrous results, a chorus of people respond with "This argument has already been debunked! East Liberty only failed because they built a superhighway around it!"
Okay, maybe. I don't think it would be that bad. But here's a cautionary tale: An earlier draft of this installment contained an extensive discussion about the 1992 construction of a parking garage and the longstanding NIMBY opposition thereto. I'll spare you the sordid details, but it was a battle between merchants who insisted that their customers needed parking and residents who had no problem with the customers provided that they didn't build the garage or park on the street in front of their house. They felt that if outsiders wanted to access their exclusive domain they should park in a lot on the outskirts of the neighborhood and take a free shuttle bus in, like the tourists they are.
The online urbanists who advocate for a Walnut St. mall do make some reasonable points to differentiate it from East Liberty. Walnut is not a major thoroughfare with through traffic that would need to be diverted. Cross streets could remain open. The garage can handle whatever on-street parking is lost. The last point may be true, but I lied, nobody ever says that. What they do say is that if suburban tourists want to visit their exclusive urban enclave they can take the bus like true urbanites. Which is funny because there is no bus. You can get within 5 minutes, but there is not direct connection to Walnut St. I don't want to be one of those people who acts like the removal of three on-street parking spaces will sound the death knell for a business district, but the idea that pedestrianization is a good idea in anything other than the limited set of circumstances I outlined in the last installment needs to end. Okay, I promise not to talk about pedestrian malls anymore.
The eastern section of Shadyside also contains most of the apartment buildings and thus is the locus of the neighborhood's student population. While college students from Pitt and CMU have been living here since the 1950s, I can only speak to the motivations of a later generation. In the 2000s, Shadyside was, by far, the most popular neighborhood for grad students. When I enrolled at Pitt law school, my family just assumed I was going to move to Shadyside, because all grad students had to live in Shadyside. I did not move to Shadyside. Nonetheless, this makes sense. While buying a single-family home here requires serious dough, renting here could be surprisingly affordable, especially if you had roommates and were willing to make certain allowances regarding the quality of accommodations. And the bus service to Oakland along Fifth Ave. is nonpareil.
With all of the discussion of Walnut, I would be remiss not to mention that Shadyside has two other business districts as well. The first is along Ellsworth Ave., a street that predates intense development and winds along like the rural lane that it began life as. Like a rural lane, the businesses are more spread out, and traditionally tend more towards galleries and the like, though there used to be a few decent bars here. There was always a business district here, but the development of what architect Joe Indovina called the "not-quite-chic end of Shadyside" began in earnest in the late 1980s as Indovina and other local business owners were hoping to recreate the chill, slightly bohemian neighborhood atmosphere that was lost in the wake of Walnut's yuppification. There's also a business district on South Highland Ave., which is effectively an extension of the East Liberty business district. As such, it was traditionally more downscale than the rest of Shadyside, but when Center and Highland became the nexus of East Liberty's gentrification, gentrified businesses started creeping down South Highland as well. The result is an unusual situation where the business district gets more downscale the further you go into the established old-money neighborhood, and trendier as you move closer to the up-and-coming still-largely-low-income neighborhood.
Finally, a few miscellaneous items I couldn't work in anywhere else. The far eastern end of the neighborhood contains the Village of Shadyside, a New Urbanist community dating from the 1970s that almost gets the architecture correct, and I'm not referring to the notable lack of ornamentation. I don't understand why a lot of these developments go to great lengths to build "contextual" buildings and then put them on curvy roads with front-loading garages. Second, while the neighborhood never went through a true bad period, there were some bad pockets. For example, the Pierce Street Rowhouses were built as servant housing and are accordingly more modest than the rest of Shadyside from that era. By the 1970s, these were largely abandoned but have since been cleaned up and are now more expensive than they were ever intended to be. Finally, Fifth Ave. is a four-lane thoroughfare that lines the southern border of the neighborhood. It was originally lined with the mansions of the rich and famous, but most of these were torn down between the 1920s and 1950s. Midcentury apartment complexes were erected in their place, and these cater mostly to students, particularly Asians, whom I noticed almost exclusively live in managed complexes and not individual units. This section doesn't really have the Shadyside feel to it, but it is right on the bus line to Oakland and is only a short walk to the business district.
Neighborhood grade: Upper middle class. It's the quintessential yuppie neighborhood, but if you can deal with yuppies, Shadyside is a great place to live. But it hasn't been anything approaching "cool" since at least the early '90s. Shadyside has been more or less the same for so long that I think it represents a terminal phase where it stops evolving and starts repeating itself.
I don't want to speculate about how the stasis Shadyside has existed in for the past 35 years might theoretically be disturbed in the future, but the question remains of why it never declined. The obvious answer is that it was always nice, and nothing ever happened that would make it less nice, but that seems lazy and unsatisfactory. There were at least two occasions throughout history when Shadyside could have taken a dive, and it would have seemed logical to the point that I can already envision an alternate history. The first was in the 1920s, when automobiles became popular enough among the upper classes that properties that lacked easy accommodation for them would have seemed anachronistic and down-market compared with the alternatives available at the time. This isn't quite what happened in Friendship, but the parallels are close enough that it's easy to imagine a timeline where Shadyside increasingly became populated by working class residents who still relied on the streetcar for transportation, and the zoning that spared houses the western part of the neighborhood from being converted into apartments was revised in the 1950s, as it was in Friendship. This did happen to a degree, but the effects weren't significant enough to have made much of a mark on history.
The second possibility is that Shadyside's revival as a hip neighborhood could have backfired in the way that many residents feared that it had by the late 1960s. The penalty a neighborhood pays for being The Place to Be is that everyone wants to be there, regardless of whether polite society views them as savory characters. The trends of the early 1960s may have served as a sort of inoculation to this tendency, as jazz and folk clubs, arthouse theaters, and coffee shops weren't known to attract a rowdy crowd. The hippies that replaced them later in the decade were a different story. George Harrison described the disconnect in an interview he did for the Anthology television special. As a cultural elite in London, he viewed the psychedelic movement through the lens of other cultural elites in London and expected the epicenter in San Francisco to be a garden spot for the artistic and political ideas he thought the movement represented. But when he visited the Haight in August of 1967, which by all accounts should have been the height of the Summer of Love, he instead found it to be full of drugged-out teenage runaways who looked more like bums than members of an enlightened youth movement.
I don't want to suggest that Shadyside circa 1970 was anywhere close to Haight-Asbury in terms of how many people it attracted, but it definitely had a seamy side that didn't exist decade earlier. In this alternate timeline, Walnut St. becomes increasingly rowdier throughout the early 1970s, and as the hippie movement subsides, becomes increasingly known as a place to score drugs. Properties close to the business district become increasingly undesirable and occupied by the kind of people for whom proximity to such an area is a plus, and the more respectable establishments close as wealthy people are no longer comfortable going there. The stigma eventually extends to the whole neighborhood, and as the problems of East Liberty get worse in the 80s and 90s, they begin to spill across the tracks along South Highland.
If this seems a bit far-fetched, this is currently what appears to be happening in the South Side. When I did my writeup on that neighborhood two years ago, I graded the neighborhood upper middle class but discussed how a number of high-profile incidents in 2021 and 2022 had sullied the neighborhood's reputation a bit. I wasn't confident in my rating at the time, but I was optimistic that the reputational hit was a consequence of the post-COVID crime hangover and that things would go back to normal once the crime rate went down. This hasn't appeared to have happened. While most of the people complaining about crime in the South Side are the kind of people who wouldn't be caught dead there anyway, the impression that the area is declining hasn't abated. Like most gentrified neighborhoods, the South Side was initially revived by bohemian types, and its heyday was between the mid-90s and the mid 2010s, when Lawrenceville took center stage. To be clear, the South Side's reputation as a rowdy nightlife district precedes it, and crime there was always higher than its reputation would indicate. But one gets the feeling that since the smart set has decamped to Lawrenceville with its more sedate vibe, the only people left who want to party in the South Side or, God forbid, live there, are the kind of people for whom drinking is more than an occasional pastime.
Thus far, high property values have relegated the ne'er do wells to the status of occasional visitors, but they have also pushed out local businesses, except there are no tony chain stores waiting to replace them. Instead, they either sit vacant or attract the kind of disreputable bar owners who see the location as a license to print money and open up the kinds of places that put on an air of exclusivity despite being less particular about their clientele than the average sports bar. The result is limited lifespans and further reinforcement of the perception that the neighborhood is trending downward. It also doesn't help that commercial landlords have thus far not seen the writing on the wall, and continue to charge rents that aren't sustainable for small businesses. While I wouldn't say that vacancies are a problem yet, some properties are sitting empty longer than they should be.
But what about Shadyside? As for the 1920s, it did decline, but it was a gradual decline, and the reinvigoration of the neighborhood in the 1950s arrested that decline at a time when it likely would have otherwise accelerated. The answer to why it didn't decline in the 1970s is more complicated, and requires us to look at its neighbor, Oakland. I don't have any evidence to support this, but it's my theory that the influx in students that Shadyside saw during the 1950s was the result of the changing university landscape after the war. Pitt had heretofore resembled a European university more than an American one; it was an urban "trolley college" where most students commuted from home. Carnegie Mellon (then Carnegie Tech) was more traditional, but only had about 2,500 students, a large proportion of whom went to night school.
In the 1950s, the schools sought to shake this image and increase their on-campus populations. Pitt purchased the Schenley Apartments in 1955 for use as the first dormitories in the school's history. In the meantime, college students looking for an experience as much as an education needed somewhere to live and recreate. Oakland had cultural institutions, but from a residential and commercial perspective, it was still a working-class Italian neighborhood that didn't cater to students. Shadyside was declining but still much nicer and had a lot of old subdivided houses, small apartment buildings, and a small business district that had potential.
By the mid-1970s, though, things in Oakland had changed. More dormitories had been built, the business district had opened bars like the Wooden Keg that explicitly catered to students, and rentals were increasingly available in South Oakland. The natural habitat for what Shadyside was offering in its rowdier days was always going to be closer to campus, and when the ecosystem was in place, the focus shifted. The live music venues of Shadyside's heyday were folk and jazz places; the new places in Oakland were geared toward rock and roll. Shadyside had cocktail lounges, while Oakland had nickel draft nights. On weekday mornings, Walnut St. was filled with rich housewives in mink coats; Forbes Ave. was filled with vomit and garbage.
Shadyside became hip due to its bohemian, intellectual vibe, and only attracted a seedy element due to its sheer popularity. Once the trendsetters decamped for a neighborhood that was more downscale, the rowdy crowd simply followed them there. While we're on the subject, it's worthwhile to look at the fate of Oakland as Pittsburgh's hip neighborhood. It held this status throughout most of the 70s and 80s until it was eclipsed by the South Side around 1994. This was prompted by a dedicated effort by the universities to turn Oakland from a nighttime district into a daytime district, though the rents were already getting too high for low-margin businesses like bars to survive. It would take another decade before Oakland actually lost its edge, but the neighborhood was already too "college" for the new generation of Gen-X hipsters.
It's a bit ironic then that the South Side's popularity was initially also spurred by college students, this time from Duquesne University, whose own neighborhood was too dangerous off campus to attract much student interest. It didn't hurt that just across the 10th Street Bridge lay a working-class neighborhood on the rise that happened to have more liquor licenses per unit area than anywhere else in the city. The South Side's recent downturn is due, in my opinion, to the lack of internal forces that would prevent it. The rowdy crowd was driven out of Shadyside and Oakland at least in part due to the appeal of an alternative that was just as rowdy, if not rowdier. When the millennial hipsters started colonizing Lawrenceville in the mid-2000s, it wasn't because Lawrenceville made more sense location-wise (it didn't make any sense at all), or because the rent got too high, or because there was an institutional force that wanted the South Side bars to close. It was because a generation raised on the South Side wanted a less rowdy alternative.
The people who stayed in Shadyside through the 70s were the same kind of people who moved to Lawrenceville in the 2010s. The bearded, college educated, urban pioneer who can talk about the architectural details he's restoring on his house and would rather see Harold Betters play at the Casbah or Frank Capelli play at Loaves and Fishes than see Joe Grushecky and the Iron City Houserockers at The Decade. And the rich old ladies view him as a pleasant young man, and they don't look askance at the students, who are predominantly of the graduate variety and who may watch football games in bars but aren't drinking for the deliberate purpose of getting drunk and who won't vomit on the sidewalk or light a couch on fire afterward.
15. Squirrel Hill: Nothing Ever Happens
Squirrel Hill is a large neighborhood, the city's largest in both area (over 4 square miles) and population (over 26,000 residents). The city officially divides it into two neighborhoods, North and South, with the dividing line at Forbes Ave., and while there are differences between the two sections, most people don't differentiate unless the occasion calls for additional specificity. Because of its size, Squirrel Hill borders several city neighborhoods—Oakland, Shadyside, Point Breeze, Regent Square, Swisshelm Park, Hazelwood, and Greenfield—but due to being flanked by Schenley Park on the west and Frick Park on the East, and being significantly uphill from Shadyside and Hazelwood, it still feels separated from much of the East End, with only Greenfield and Point Breeze having relatively seamless borders.
Squirrel Hill is the only city neighborhood I've called home, and while I lived there for a long time and loved it, I have surprisingly little to say about it. The underlying goal of this series is to examine neighborhoods in detail with an eye toward change, not in the superficial sense but in a more underlying one, and to examine various aspects of urbanism and the urban environment. The problem here is that for the first 100 years of Pittsburgh's history, nothing happened here. Then the neighborhood was built, and nothing has happened since. Squirrel Hill's rise was late and brief, and its fall hasn't even been hinted at yet.
For the vast majority of the 19th century, the area was nothing but undeveloped farmland, and the wood frame farmhouses that stood there are, as far as I can tell, no longer with us. In 1893, the electric streetcar passed through on its journey from Downtown to Homestead, and there was finally some modest interest in the neighborhood. While some streets, like Murray Hill Ave., were completely built out by 1900, progress was slow. This was in the days when living in such a remote area meant having money, and there were already other more established neighborhoods for the middle to upper classes to call home.
It would not be until the 1920s, and the age of the automobile, that Squirrel Hill would boom. Streetcar suburbs needed to be within walking distance of streetcar lines, and the houses needed to be packed tightly together to maximize the use of space. The automobile came with storage requirements that these neighborhoods weren't in the best condition to accommodate, and as those with the means to afford cars looked for more convenient places to live, Squirrel Hill was next up on the list, so to speak. It was beginning to fill in and had a small business district, but there was plenty of land nearby to build homes with driveways and garages. The neighborhood would become the city's first automotive suburb.
The one notable thing that happened during this period is that Squirrel Hill became the city's premiere Jewish neighborhood. German Jews from the North Side and Homestead had moved to the area as early as 1900, but the heart of Pittsburgh's Jewish community prior to the 1920s was the Hill District. Jews here were less prosperous immigrants from Eastern Europe and began leaving en masse in the 1920s. By 1938, the Hill had lost its place as the center of Pittsburgh's Jewish community as Squirrell Hill, Oakland, and the East Liberty/Highland Park area all saw significant settlement. By 1963, the Jewish populations of Oakland and the East Liberty area had significantly diminished, and Squirrel Hill had firmly become the new centerpiece. I wish there were an interesting story about why they left and why they chose Squirrel Hill, but as far as I can tell they were simply upwardly mobile people looking for more space, and as a newer neighborhood with an existing Jewish population, it was an obvious choice.
Squirrel Hill has, for my entire life, been associated with Judaism to a degree that no other neighborhood in the city is associated with an ethnic group. The neighborhood has never been majority Jewish, but it's remained around 40% for decades, and it's home to about a quarter of Jews living in the Pittsburgh area. Beyond mere numbers, though, it's about visibility. Historically, the commercial district was dominated by Jewish-owned businesses. While this has mostly been lost, largely due to upward mobility (the children of these merchants wanted to become doctors and lawyers, not work in retail), the increasing proportion of ultra-orthodox Jews means that they're more conspicuous than other ethnic groups. Take a stroll down Murray Ave. and the chances of seeing Hasidic Jews who look straight out of central casting are close to 100%.
The first area to see development was the area north of Forbes. Some sections, like the aforementioned Murray Hill Ave., were laid out as streetcar suburbs, but as this part of the neighborhood was one of the wealthier ones in the city and had not been previously settled, auto-oriented residential districts began development early, around 1910. While the generous setbacks would be replicated in postwar suburbia, the architecture is clearly of an earlier era, and the resulting impression is one of miniaturized versions of the estates that lined Fifth at the time. The closest parallel would be the western part of Shadyside, except that the influence of planning is more notable; these are more obviously subdivisions. This is currently the wealthiest part of the city, and it shows. Murdoch Farms is a less celebrated version of Schenley Farms in Oakland, complete with underground electric lines. This section also contains Chatham College, a small school that was all women until recently. The campus is in the middle of a superblock bordered with large estates, and you could live next to it for years without knowing it was there. Hell, I lived in Squirrel Hill for years before I had to visit for work and was surprised that I lived that close to it. The campus has the feel of an opulent park combined with an old money estate and is quite charming.
Moving south of Forbes, the housing becomes more modest, though to what degree depends on which side of Murray you're on. The Jewish merchants who settled in Squirrel Hill in the interwar years were not as wealthy as the Scotch-Irish and German old stock who kicked off the neighborhood's development, and as they preferred to live close to their businesses, the housing surrounding the business district reflects that. If the area north of Forbes is a scaled-down version of a millionaire's estate, the area south of Forbes and east of Murray is a scaled-up streetcar suburb. The urban form is similar, but most of the houses have driveways. West of Murray is notable for containing several areas that were set aside for clusters of small apartment buildings, making it, along with North Oakland, one of Pittsburgh's few historical high-density areas. The housing in the southernmost part of the neighborhood, south of the parkway, is similar in style and age to the northern sections but is distinctly more modest.
The preceding descriptions are generalizations, but one of the great things about Squirrel Hill is that there are always exceptions. The fact that it developed later than other parts of the city and was never part of any housing boom gives it a charming heterogeneity. It was mostly built out by the end of the 1930s, but some of the remote sections saw development into the 1960s. In addition to random streetcar suburban streets without any off-street parking, there are also early 20th century rowhouses, two-flats, and scaled-down postwar dwellings. Some of the more remote sections even have modern quasi-McMansions.There are other areas like this where the lack of consistency makes things look shabby and ad hoc, but the diversity here is more from street to street than lot to lot, and the wealth of the area, even in the less prosperous sections, meant that nothing was built on the cheap.
Tying all of this together is the Forbes–Murray business district. It runs for nearly a mile along Forbes and Murray Avenues with small extensions onto Forward and Shady. I do not think I am engaging in any favoritism towards my former neighborhood by saying that this is the best neighborhood business district in the city. By that I mean that it contains everything you could possibly want in a business district but due to its semi-isolated status it's almost entirely patronized by Squirrel Hill residents. When I lived here, there was a grocery store, movie theater, bowling alley, several banks, several pizza places, a library, a few bars, coffee shops, bakeries, ice cream shops, and countless restaurants. And the restaurants were the kinds of places that just existed, not the kinds of places that won James Beard Awards and got on the Best of Pittsburgh lists.
This has changed somewhat as the neighborhood continues to evolve (the bowling alley has since closed, for example), but the spirit remains, and it's not like Carson St. in the South Side or Butler St. in Lawrenceville where people from across the region will go there for a night on the town. The only two businesses worthy of any outside interest are Dobra Tea, which is a teahouse that operates like a bar and stays open late, and Jerry's Records, possibly the greatest record store on earth. Oh, and there's also the classic, pointless Pittsburgh debate over whether Aiello's or Mineo's has better pizza. The answer is Mineo's, not because they have better pizza (though they do), but because the owners of Aiello's are absolute pricks. The founder was brought over from Italy by the owner of Mineo's, given a job in the pizza shop, and proceeded to steal the recipe and open his own store on the same block. He and his staff threatened me and my roommates on several occasions for bullshit reasons, to the point that I'd spit on the door handle of the manager's $50,000 Nissan Armada (lol) whenever I saw it parked on the street. That same manager, along with everyone working there, were fans of WVU over Pitt and the St. Louis Rams over the Steelers because of Mark Bulger. Then again, when I ordered pizza, I usually got Napoli's because it's just regular pizza that doesn't have to be "The Best".
Neighborhood Grade: Upper Middle Class. At a time when America was flocking to the suburbs en masse, Squirrel Hill was a dense, walkable city neighborhood that still had everything you could want in a suburb, right down to a low crime rate and good public schools. The fact that this was one of the few "nice" parts of the city for so long meant that it was also ridiculously expensive, with people paying top dollar for small, dated (often roach infested) units. With the overall gentrification in the East End over the past 20 years, rents have begun to stabilize, but are still by no means cheap, and buying is off the table for anyone but the independently wealthy.
This is true even in the less desirable far southern part of the neighborhood, for which you pay Squirrel Hill prices without many of the benefits. It's a long walk to the business district or either of the parks, the housing is far more modest, and while Minadeo Elementary is a good school, it isn't as good as Colfax. That being said, it's still incredibly safe, and since you need a car anyway, there are traditional suburban shopping options just across the river in Homestead, so it's not as if it has no appeal.
Much like Shadyside, Squirrel Hill's desirability has been stable to slightly increasing for decades at this point, and I don't see anything changing in the foreseeable future. The only notable demographic change in recent decades is an increasing Asian population. I don't, however, think this represents a true demographic shift so much as the popularity of the apartment districts among Pitt and CMU graduate students who are looking for a more sedate atmosphere than Oakland or Shadyside. I don't see it ever becoming trendy, either, because it is already set up to select for families and other people who deliberately want to live in a nice area that isn't trendy. The Squirrel Cage may be the best neighborhood bar in the city, but it's only notable as the prototypical example of a "regular" bar, and beyond that the bar scene is atrocious. Murray Ave. was also originally residential, and the storefronts were largely tacked onto houses at some point after 1930, meaning that the commercial architecture leaves a lot to be desired. As far as I'm concerned, that's fine, because Squirrel Hill is perfect the way it is, the way it always has been.
16. Point Breeze: Pittsburgh's Most Opulent Neighborhood
Point Breeze lies immediately to the north of Squirrel Hill. The southern and western boundaries of Homewood Cemetery at Forbes and Dallas, respectively, form part of the southern and western boundaries of the neighborhood. The eastern boundary is at Frick Park until the norther boundary near the Reynolds Ave. Gate, at which point it heads north in the vicinity of Braddock Ave. until Penn. The neighborhood to the north, despite being called North Point Breeze, is different enough that Penn certainly feels like a hard boundary when you're driving on it, for reasons we'll look at in the section on that neighborhood. From there, the boundary runs along Shady in the vicinity of Chatham College and then along Wilkins back to the cemetery, but this area is so notably amorphous that it's almost a sub-neighborhood in and of itself, and you have to draw the line somewhere.
Back in Penn Ave.'s pike days, the Point Breeze Tavern stood at what is now the intersection with Fifth. Like most of the East End, the area was farmland well into the 19th century, this particular area being called Homewood, the estate of judge William Wilkins. When the railroad came through around midcentury, Homewood Station was established, and a number of prominent industrialists soon settled in the area south of the railroad tracks. These were the names you learn about in school—Carnegie, Westinghouse, Frick, Heinz. Smaller lots contained the homes of professionals who were associated with these families—for example, the personal physician to the Heinz family had a house on S. Lang—and black servants built more modest accommodations to the north of the railroad tracks. Time for another nomenclature rant. We're still a couple installments away from getting to the present-day neighborhood of Homewood, but for now suffice it to say that the economic fortunes of the area north of the tracks was always distinct from that of the area south of the tracks, and that significant demographic change began to take place around the middle of the 20th century. Some sources claim that the area east of East Liberty was generally known as Homewood prior to the 1950s, and that the wealthy residents of the area south of the tracks began identifying the area as Point Breeze in the 1950s and 1960s to differentiate themselves. To the contrary, I've checked old newspaper articles and real estate listings that identify a distinct Point Breeze district as early as the 1920s. Old maps are inconclusive; Point Breeze is mentioned, but Homewood appears south of Penn, and no boundaries are given. The best I can conclude is that both names were in common usage prior to the 1960s, with Point Breeze generally referring to the areas closer to the intersection of Fifth and Penn. Things didn't get much better in the 1970s, as both the 1974 Community Profiles and 1977 Neighborhood Atlas both use Point Breeze to refer only to North Point Breeze, and lump the rest of the neighborhood in with Squirrel Hill North of Forbes. The first set of boundaries that resemble the current official ones isn't seen until the 1983 Neighborhoods for Living Center map, which doesn't include what is now Park Place. If nothing else, the topic is controversial.
Sticking to the area south of Penn for the time being, at the height of the Gilded Age this district was dubbed "Pittsburgh's Most Opulent Neighborhood", but as that era came to a close, most of these estates were razed, with Frick's Clayton the only one still standing. It's occasionally lamented that this history has been lost, but it was the only realistic outcome given the realities of the time. As American industry became increasingly corporate in the early 20th century, the fortunes of the early industrialists were diluted, with individual heirs only owning a small piece of the estate. The market crash of 1929 turned monstrosities like these into white elephants, and housing shortages associated with increased urbanization made the land on which they sat more valuable than the house itself. Fast forward today, and the wealthy of our own time have no use for these estates either. The architecture may have been interesting, but the interiors would require complete gutting to be compatible with modern lifestyles. This was as true in the 1950s as it was today, and Clayton only survives because it has been turned into a museum, with an art gallery and music hall on the grounds.
The parts of Point Breeze built on subdivided estates are similar to western Shadyside, but on a larger scale. There are more dead-end streets here than anywhere else in the city, and the development of old estates appears to have started in the 1920s and continued into the 1960s. Conversely, the area surrounding Reynolds Ave. was built out as a typical streetcar suburb beginning around 1900, and a similar area was built at the southern end of Lang Ave. later on. The upshot is that Point Breeze has a bit of a patchwork feel to it. West of the cemetery it is an extension of Squirrel Hill north of Forbes, and the streets on the old estates could contain anything from streetcar suburb to interwar suburb to some of the finest examples of residential midcentury modern architecture in the city.
Although it is for the most part a suburban-feeling neighborhood, there are a few small business districts. The most notable one is the block at the western end of Reynolds St., which packs in two restaurants, a coffee shop, a salon, and art gallery, a vintage clothing store, a vet, and several other businesses. I feel like this is one of the more underrated business districts in the city; it has a "cute" feel to it that you can't get in areas that are bigger or swarming with people. Farther east on Reynolds is there is a short row of businesses that includes the Frick Park Market, which Mac Miller wrote a terrible song about and is now full of the kind of tourists who want to visit an unexceptional business that a guy wrote a song about. To be fair to the owners, they haven't tried to cheaply exploit this fame. I don't know much about Mr. Miller, and I could be wrong about this, but when that song came out I got the impression that he was trying to equate the place to a bodega in the hood. If anyone else got this impression, I will inform you that it's a deli in a wealthy part of town, and Mr. Miller's childhood was not lacking. There are also some scattered businesses at the "Five Points" area on Wilkins at the border with Squirrel Hill; this is kind of an indistinct boundary for all practical purposes. Though much of the neighborhood isn't particularly walkable, most people can walk to a business or two.
Neighborhood Grade: Upper middle class. The western part of the neighborhood transitions relatively smoothly into the north of Forbes section of Squirrel Hill and can be thought of as that neighborhood's little brother. It has good schools, tree-lined streets, and an upper middle-class population. The downsides boil down to two things. First, apart from what I just mentioned, there is no real walkable business district. Second, the patchy nature of development on the old estates makes the housing quality uneven. There are some fine specimens, but also plenty of horrible ranches.
While Point Breeze as a whole never went through a bad period, it did suffer an obvious decline as it went from being superwealthy to merely upper middle class. Even through Pittsburgh's darkest days, it was the neighborhood of choice for professionals who were priced out of Shadyside and Squirrel Hill. Though price increases in the past 20 years have eliminated that distinction, there was never much of a distinction culturally between the kind of person who lived in north Squirrel Hill and the kind of person who lived in Point Breeze, and it will continue to be a haven for NIMBY professionals for the foreseeable future. While the current rewrite of the zoning ordinance may change this, residents in the area around Reynolds actually succeeded in downzoning part of the neighborhood where double units were permitted based on fears that student renters would move in. Like Squirrel Hill, I don't think this area will ever be "hot", if it ever was, but it will long be popular for well-off families with children.
17. Park Place: Midwifing a Neighborhood
There's a part of what is officially Point Breeze that's located in a narrow strip between Frick Park and the Wilkinsburg line, bordered by Penn Ave. on the north and Forbes Ave. on the south. For most of its history, maps, guidebooks, news reports, and official pronouncements from city hall have described it as part of Squirrel Hill, Point Breeze, Homewood, or any number of other places. Long time residents simply called the area Frick Park, or, barring that, just gave people directions to their house, only to be met with the response "Where the hell is that?"
The only semi-official evidence I've come across for the area being called Frick Park is on the 1983 Neighborhoods for Living map. It was around this time that residents of this small began insisting on an independent identity, and in 1986 they settled on the name Park Place, taken from the Park Place school, and formed a community group, the goal being to get official recognition from the city. I can't find any evidence for the city's rationale for turning them down, though I suspect that not having their own census tract stacked the deck against them. At some point they did get recognized as a sub-neighborhood of Point Breeze and were listed on a couple blue street signs. However, the ones at the intersection of Forbes and Braddock say Regent Square these days, and the ones at Braddock and Penn don't say anything anymore. There is a Welcome to Park Place sign on Braddock as you head into the neighborhood from the south, but that's all the recognition they get these days.
I had initially intended to just lump Park Place in with the rest of Point Breeze without even giving it its own sub-designation, but after reading about its history of screaming for recognition and being denied, I figure this is the least I can do. It merits its own section anyway, as its history isn't quite the same as Point Breeze. The neighborhood is essentially the eastern counterpart to the streetcar suburb that began developing at the western end of Reynolds Ave. in the 1890s. There are some small parts that sit on subdivided estates, but it's hemmed in on the west by the park, which isolates it somewhat from Point Breeze. On the other side, the street grid slops into Wilkinsburg with no obvious end point. The neighborhood group officially puts the boundary at Trenton St., which has a nice row of businesses, but the border they use includes a lot of midcentury condo and apartment developments that are more common to areas farther east than they are to the core city neighborhood. If I ever finish my discussion of city neighborhoods and get to suburbs, Wilkinsburg is near the top of the list. It has a long history of social and financial incompetence and is half-ghetto and half gentrified. It makes all the sense in the world to merge it into the city, but the local mense lords won't give up their fiefdoms that easily, so it won't happen in the foreseeable future. If that ever happens, I'd extend the neighborhood boundaries into what is currently described as "Greater Park Place". The aforementioned rough patch for Wilkinsburg and Park Place's proximity thereto has meant that historically, this place wasn't as desirable as Point Breeze and only began to turn relatively recently.
Of architectural interest, the neighborhood contains the only examples of Italianate single family homes in the city that I am aware of. There are plenty of Italianate rowhouses and commercial buildings, but few single family homes for some reason. These are clustered on Abbot, Edgerton, and Cromwell Streets, and are some of the first homes in the neighborhood to be built. There's also The Whitehall and Old Heidelberg Apartments, two apartment complexes designed by Frederick Scheibler, Jr. that are, as far as I can tell unique to the city. They eschew the boxy look of most apartment buildings and with their white-gabled facades look more like rambling country villas than urban multifamily residences. This has the effect of blending in with the existing fabric rather than standing out from it. I've certainly seen other buildings try to achieve what this actually does, but in those examples the delineation between units is obvious and trite. Here, it just looks like there are separate entrances to the same house.
Finally, there's the business district, or sort of lack thereof. If we're talking about what's actually in the (semi-) official neighborhood, we're limited to a couple auto-oriented businesses on Penn, including a Walgreens for which the local NIMBYs partially succeeded in scaling back the drive-through plans; Walgreens wanted to take three houses but the damage was limited to one. If we include what's walkable from the neighborhood, there are a couple of businesses on Braddock that are technically in Regent Square but are orphaned from the rest of that neighborhood's business district. And if we're talking what's realistically in the neighborhood and would be if politicians were sane, there's a nice little row of businesses on Trenton Ave. in Wilkinsburg, which the neighborhood group claims but I don't.
Neighborhood Grade: Gentrifying. Not in the sense that it's hot, but in the sense that it's incredibly close to getting the coveted Upper Middle-Class designation but for a couple minor quibbles. The biggest issue is that Braddock Ave. is the psychological boundary where the city stops and Wilkinsburg begins, and it feels surprising to find a pocket city neighborhood east of here. Indeed, since it's more connected to Wilkinsburg than it is to Point Breeze, and that, with one exception, Wilkinsburg has a pretty bad reputation, it feels like this area should be worse than it is, even though for the vast majority of its history it's been a safe, forgotten part of town. With the neighboring parts of Wilkinsburg improving, property values have increased, but it's still less desirable than Point Breeze.
18. North Point Breeze: The Buffer
When Point Breeze began to differentiate itself from Homewood in the 1950s, the railroad tracks served as a definitive boundary between the white, affluent areas to the south and the poorer, blacker areas to the north. Westinghouse Park, located on the grounds of George Westinghouse's former estate, Solitude, was for a long time unofficially off-limits to Homewood residents. Beginning in the 1960s, however, something happened that is, as far as I can tell, unprecedented in urban neighborhoods, and then slowly reversed itself.
The part of North Point Breeze immediately to the south of the railroad tracks had always had a small black population, mostly servants who worked in the estates of the rich and famous. As they had steady employment, they were a bit more well off than blacks in say, The Hill, who were mostly looking for labor wherever they could find it. As black neighborhoods throughout the city began deteriorating following the riots of 1968, well-off black people began looking to escape the neighborhoods where they grew up. For many, this meant the suburbs, or a working-class white neighborhood that was adjacent to the old hood. The usual pattern was that middle class blacks would move in, property values would diminish, allowing lower class blacks to follow them as whites moved out. As the old black hoods turned to full-blown ghettos and blight set it, the ne'er do wells who had turned the old hoods into uninhabitable war zones would gradually filter into these new neighborhoods due to blight-induced housing shortages. By this point the middle-class blacks had moved on to greener pastures, and the process would repeat itself.
When middle class blacks from Homewood began moving into North Point Breeze at the end of the 1960s, one would expect that the area would slowly become ghettoized. In 1970, the neighborhood was about 15% black; by 1990, that had increased to 60%. I don't want to suggest that North Point Breeze did not decline, because it certainly saw diminished property values when compared to Point Breeze proper. And I don't want to suggest that there wasn't a sense that Penn Ave., and not the railroad tracks, was the boundary you should not cross. But North Point Breeze was not a working-class white neighborhood, but an upper middle class one; housing prices would have a lot further to go before lower-class blacks could afford to move in. And while there was some measure of white flight, it was never enough to completely gut the neighborhood. Crime rates were actually lower than in places like Shadyside (which were juicy targets for burglary and car theft), and whites of a more liberal disposition could comfortably move there to show that there was nothing wrong with living among black people.
There's an old saying that it takes a lifetime to build a reputation but only a few seconds to destroy one, and while that may be true for individuals, neighborhoods don't operate like that. While those less attuned to the facts on the ground may harbor outdated ideas about neighborhoods that used to be bad, those same people are also out of touch when it comes to places that aren't as nice as they used to be. What's in a name? A lot apparently. If the black middle class of the 1970s and 1980s sought to claim a neighborhood for themselves, it would have been very tempting for them to reclaim the area for Homewood. Indeed, there was widespread desire to differentiate themselves from the whiter district south of Penn, a desire to welcome Homewood residents to use Westinghouse Park, a desire to demonstrate that they hadn't completely abandoned the black community.
But they chose North Point Breeze, a name that separated themselves from Point Breeze proper without assuming the stigma of Homewood. By the 2000s, prices were on the rise across the East End, and a new generation was living on their own that didn't immediately wince after entering a majority black area. A place is advertised as being in North Point Breeze. Well, Point Breeze is a nice area, right? There may be more black faces than you expect, but they don't look out of place in Point Breeze. And this place is affordable. And so the process reverses itself quickly, and without anyone noticing. Middle class blacks sell out to wealthy whites looking to rehab the old houses. Student renters replace the working poor. By 2020, the area is 60% white, and a mere 25% black, and that's if you include people from 2 or more races. Whatever apprehension anyone may have had about living so close to Homewood dissolves when they realize how much of a barrier the rail line really is, and how the ghetto immediately on the other side has mostly been razed and replaced with affordable housing developments that are selective about their tenants.
North Point Breeze is bounded by Penn on the South, Fifth on the west, the railroad/busway on the north, and the Wilkinsburg line on the east. Like Park Place, there is a section of Wilkinsburg between Penn and the busway that's similar enough in character to the adjacent part of the city that it makes all the sense in the world to include it here, but I won't, because it's a forbearance I simply cannot allow myself (with one exception). It is only four short blocks north to south but extends eight long ones east to west. Like Point Breeze proper, it was home to large estates, but with the exception of the footprint that is now Westinghouse Park, these have since been well-integrated into the street grid, so the neighborhood lacks the dead ends that are characteristic of that neighborhood and the western part of Shadyside.
Initial development of non-estate housing was relatively dense, consisting of semi-detached row houses from the 1880s. Mass development, though, wouldn't start until the 1890s, with the development of the blocks west of N. Dallas Ave. being completely built out by 1900. This was one of Pittsburgh's first true streetcar suburbs, complete with proper boulevards with grassy, tree-lined medians. The eastern portions of the neighborhood continued to be developed through the 1920s, with some scattered infill development continuing until the 1960s. While North Point Breeze went through somewhat of a down period in the 1980s and 1990s, there was never much blight, with the only significant demolition being some houses on Simonton St. that directly faced the railroad tracks.
While there is no proper commercial district, the area east of N. Lexington St. developed as an industrial zone, and most of the old buildings have been repurposed for a mix of uses. The most famous of these is Construction Junction, a warehouse for buying or donating reclaimed building materials. But there is also a climbing gym, Freeride Pittsburgh, the Pitt Archives, a kids gymnastics studio, a martial arts studio, and other similar stuff. There's also a huge complex spanning both sides of Lexington that was recently developed for commercial use, including a new office complex for 3M. As is usual these days, an adjacent lot was supposed to have residential, but people kept insisting that it include affordable housing, so the developer sold it to another developer (presumably because they couldn't get a loan for anything less than market rate), and the whole process started over and hasn't seemed to have made much progress. This is for a development that was announced back in 2017. Finally, this section also includes a small group of rowhouses that haven't seen the same increase in desirability as the rest of the neighborhood. These are mostly occupied by middle-class blacks and, unlike the rest of North Point Breeze, feed into the worst schools in the city.
Neighborhood Grade: Gentrifying. It's getting close, but there's still a mild stigma attached to being north of Penn, and there still more student rentals than in a typical upper middle class neighborhood of such a small size. It also doesn't help that people who visit the businesses in the industrial portion usually describe the area as being part of Homewood. The future is bright, however, and it feels like it's only a matter of time before the distinction between North Point Breeze and Point Breeze only matters as much as the other semi-bogus distinctions the city makes for planning purposes.
That's it for this installment. The next installment won't be quite as thematic, as we'll be looking at three neighborhoods to the north of East Liberty—Highland Park, Morningside, and Stanton Heights—that don't fit into any general category. Since there are only three neighborhoods to cover and I don't anticipate any of them provoking extensive discussion, I'll also look at a couple miscellaneous topics that I've been wanting to cover but haven't in service of keeping the length of these down to the point that I can get them out on a somewhat reasonable schedule.
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:
- Intro
- Downtown
- Strip District
- North Shore
- South Side
- Hill District: Lower Hill
- Hill District: Middle Hill
- Hill District: The Projects
- The Hill’s Environs: Uptown, Sugar Top, and Polish Hill
- Oakland
- Lawrenceville
- Bloomfield, Friendship, and Garfield
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.
In the last installment, we discussed Lawrenceville and the factors that led to its gentrification. In this installment, we will discuss the nearby neighborhoods of Bloomfield, Garfield, and Friendship. In retrospect, each of these had at least some of these factors at the time Lawrenceville began gentrifying in the early 2000s, and in the decades since, each has gentrified to some degree. But none has undergone the full-scale transformation that happened in Lawrenceville.
Series Index:
- Intro
- Downtown
- Strip District
- North Shore
- South Side
- Hill District: Lower Hill
- Hill District: Middle Hill
- Hill District: The Projects
- The Hill’s Environs: Uptown, Sugar Top, and Polish Hill
- Oakland
- Lawrenceville
What Is a Neighborhood?
Before we get started, I want to point out that, geographically, this part of the city has some major discrepancies regarding official boundaries versus colloquial ones, and I want to investigate what exactly we talk about when we talk about neighborhoods. I can't find any information regarding how many American cities officially define their neighborhoods, but preliminary research suggests that the number is not high. I know Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Chicago do, but I can't find anything for Boston or Philadelphia other than lists of names, and New York explicitly refuses to do so. Part of the problem is that no matter how carefully you try to collect the data, as soon as you draw a line on a map the arguments start flying. And once you make an official designation, that designation affects, to some degree, how people view the area going forward.
For a city that prides itself on the diversity and distinctiveness of its neighborhoods, it was only within the past 50 or so years that anyone really paid attention to them. Most of the published histories of Pittsburgh do not discuss them, save occasional mentions of Oakland or the Hill District. Contemporary publications aren't much better. A sense of cohesive neighborhood identity did not become established until the 1960s, when the urban renewal projects of the Pittsburgh Renaissance threatened to tear communities apart. It was then that neighborhood groups formed to provide organized opposition to the projects. However, these groups found it difficult to negotiate effectively with city government without accurate information about the neighborhoods, which was not available at the time. Census data was available, but this only covered relatively large areas that did not necessarily conform to neighborhood boundaries as they were popularly understood at the time. The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance was formed in 1969 to gather this data, and in order to do that, boundaries had to be determined. The Alliance held community meetings, where they would simply ask participants to define the boundaries in which they lived. In other words, we have NIMBYs to thank.
The city itself was taking interest. Pete Flaherty was elected mayor in 1969 as part of a backlash against Renaissance policies. He vowed instead to implement a "neighborhood renaissance" that would move away from large-scale boondoggles in favor of local civic improvement. The Planning Department drew boundaries based on census tracts and in 1974 published a series of 88 Community Profiles. In the meantime, the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance, in Conjunction with the Pitt School of Social Work, conducted neighborhood surveys in 1976 to collect the neighborhood-level data that was so sorely needed. The result was the 1977 Pittsburgh Neighborhood Atlas, which identified 78 neighborhoods. When Richard Caliguri took over as mayor in the late 1970s, he formed the Neighborhoods for Living Center, which published its own map in 1983. The planning department settled on the currently recognized 90 neighborhoods in 1990, which appear on official maps today. In the early 1990s, however, mayor Sophie Masloff implemented a program to erect street signs, which were rare at the time. Part of this program was that signs of major roads have the neighborhood name on them, which Reddit refers to as the "Blue Sign Squad".
It should go without saying that there are discrepancies between the 1976 survey, the 1983 map (which is probably the best one but didn't result in anything else so I'm not going to mention it anymore), the official planning boundaries, and the street sign designations. The 1976 survey is probably the most colloquially accurate, but includes several small, odd neighborhoods that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else. The official maps upped the count to 90 by implementing semi-bogus geographic subdivisions to otherwise cohesive neighborhoods and by giving isolated housing projects their own sections. The blue signs don't conform to the planning boundaries exactly and recognize sub-neighborhoods that aren't part of the official total, but don't recognize some sub-neighborhoods that are part of the official total when political considerations are at play (the official Hill District divisions make sense, but residents view them as part of a "divide and rule" strategy meant to inhibit neighborhood cohesion).
I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I would define the neighborhood boundaries for this series (don't worry, most of it was while driving when I literally didn't have anything better to do). It would have been really easy for me to just use the official list, but the purpose of the series would then be frustrated by my having to make a lot of caveats, and I had to come up with my own system. I think it comes down to three questions:
- What do the local stakeholders identify as? In most cases this means residents, but business owners, those who work there, and those who visit regularly need to be taken into consideration as well. This is the approach that the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance took in the 1970s.
- To what degree do the residents actually interact?
- To what degree does the neighborhood feel cohesive to an outsider driving through it? Do the street grids match up? Are there significant geographical barriers? Consider West Oakland, which we discussed a couple installments ago. It's a bitch to define. The residents in the vicinity of Robinson St. consider themselves as Oakland when it's convenient for them but as part of the Hill District for historical reasons, and different residents have different identities. Outsiders may have considered it as part of the Hill at one time but may not now. But the Hill has five different official neighborhoods, each of which is a legitimate division. If you don't view the Hill District as one neighborhood, and you don't think the area around Robinson St. should be part of Terrace Village—which is self-evident, because it's not part of the old housing project—then you either need a new name for it or you can keep calling it West Oakland, which means you have to treat it as part of Oakland. But then the second question comes into play when defining the boundaries, because the black working-class residents of the area around Robinson St. have little interaction with the Pitt and Carlow students who reside within the official boundaries. And then there's the part that's demographically similar to the area around Robinson St. but is geographically distinct from it and connected to Uptown. The line I ended up drawing doesn't conform to any of the three criteria, but nonetheless conforms to all of them.
Or look at Lawrenceville, from last time. The city officially divides it into three parts: Upper, Middle, and Lower. Old timers did so as well, but used the ward numbers instead. These aren't distinct enough to really merit being their own neighborhoods, since the overall Lawrenceville identity is stronger. But even as subdivisions, some are stronger than others. Although geographically separated, there's isn't much of a difference between Central and most of Lower Lawrenceville. The residential section between Penn and Liberty is quite different, but this is more of a no man's land than a separate neighborhood, and given the way prestige and the real estate markets work it's identity as part of Lawrenceville is solidified, but it's never going to have its own name.
For the present installment, we have to contend with the fact that a large part of what is officially Bloomfield is colloquially Friendship, which is officially quite small. And also with the common problem that the Penn Ave. corridor outside of the Penn/Main business district by the hospital is officially split between Garfield and Bloomfield, except for a small part on the eastern end where one side of the street in officially in Friendship. I consider everything south of Liberty to be Bloomfield. North of Liberty, apart from the street itself (which is all Bloomfield), the dividing line is at Friendship Park in the vicinity of West Penn Hospital. It is here that the housing stock changes significantly enough to give the entire neighborhood a different feel. Both sides of Penn are Garfield. There's also a section of Bloomfield south of the ravine that includes a residential section that feels more like part of North Oakland but not enough to deviate from the official boundary, not least of which because it's off of Baum on the other side of a bridge which most people would consider Bloomfield though it's really sort of a no-man's land.
11. Bloomfield: Little Italy
Bloomfield is located in Pittsburgh's East End, to the south and east of Lawrenceville. The main entrance, so to speak, is via the Bloomfield Bridge, which connects the neighborhood to Oakland via Bigelow Blvd. and Craig St. The ravine that the bridge crosses bounds the neighborhood to the west, though it splits and while one branch forms the border the other cuts off the southernmost portion of the neighborhood. The southern end is along the Baum Blvd. corridor, and I've taken the liberty of putting the boundary with Friendship at the complicated intersection with Liberty and Center where it's easy to make a wrong turn. From there I include the Liberty Ave. corridor to West Penn Hospital, where the line jogs north to Penn Ave. based largely on housing typology. I give the Penn corridor west of Friendship Ave. to Lawrenceville, and I include the Liberty Ave. corridor back to the bridge.
Entering the neighborhood via the bridge, one sees a sweeping vista of the entire neighborhood laid out on a plateau above the ravine. This plateau was once home to Joseph Winebiddle's farm, back in the days when it was still part of the now defunct Peebles Township. It was annexed to the city in 1868 and developed in the subsequent decades, development being mostly complete by 1900. It was originally settled by German Catholics, but around the turn of the century, Italians from the Abruzzi region began settling there. Bloomfield's reputation as an Italian district notwithstanding, it should be noted that at that time there were several parts of the city with significant Italian populations—Larimar, Oakland, parts of the Hill District and Downtown, among others, all had a legitimate claim as Pittsburgh's Little Italy, so in that respect it was not unique.
What is unique is that it retained its Italian character through the midcentury upheavals of urban renewal, suburbanization, and increasing urban crime rates, as well as through the ongoing diminution of ethnic identity in America and the continuing gentrification of urban areas. The 1977 Atlas noted that while there was still a large German presence, the neighborhood was mostly Italian, and while it's impossible to determine precisely when the Little Italy designation came into the public consciousness, a sign welcoming visitors to Bloomfield and describing it as such was erected in 1993, and the Little Italy Days festival was established in 2002. At that time, New York's Little Italy had become a shell of its former self, a façade of tourist-oriented restaurants on top of a neighborhood that had few actual Italians. Pittsburgh, by contrast, was in a different boat. When the census bureau began tracking ancestry in 1980, 50% of people in the core of Italian settlement in Bloomfield claimed Italian ancestry, a number which held into the new millennium. And there was little to nothing that would appeal to the casual tourist; there were two Italian grocers, but most of the Italian businesses were things like beer distributors, dry cleaners, and barbershops, none of which had any outside appeal. Even the Italian restaurants weren't anything special.
But alas, all things must pass. The Italian population had declined to 40% by 2010 and sits at 30% as of 2024, still double that of Pittsburgh as a whole but a far cry from where it was. The business district, which was mostly Italian-owned in 2002, isn't much different than anywhere else. Several of the mainstays have closed, not due to lack of business, but because the owners retired and couldn't find a buyer. Little Italy Days has since become county fair mainstream with both Bloomfield and Italiana an afterthought. While something like 78% of Bloomfield businesses participate, they represent a small proportion of the total vendors, most of whom are large regional companies selling things like insurance and gutter guards. There's still wine, bocce, and Italian entertainment, but the 100,000 visitors necessitate the closing of Liberty Ave. and cause parking issues. The residents hate it.
While the decline of the Italian tradition may be lamentable, I'm not going to shed too many tears for it, despite being of (non-Bloomfield) Italian extraction myself. Things change, and unless the change is unmistakably negative, I don't think we're served any better by clinging to vestiges of the past. The organizers of Little Italy Days can make a deliberate attempt to make it more Italian, but they can't turn it back into the local festival that it was prior to 2012. Do this on a neighborhood scale and we turn Pittsburgh's Little Italy into New York's Little Italy, an ersatz imitation of an ideal that probably never existed, meant to appeal to a tourist's idea of what a Little Italy is supposed to look like. As someone who remembers the old Italian Bloomfield, I can assure you that it wasn't like what you are imagining.
Let me elaborate. I first started hanging around here circa 2004; I went to a small liberal arts college where there was little to do and headed off to greener pastures nearly every weekend. Friends of mine from high school who went to Pitt moved here because the rent was cheaper than in Oakland and there was decent bus service. By cheaper I mean you could rent a 3 bedroom house for under $700/month and a 1 bedroom apartment for under $500. My impression of the place from then up until around 2016 or 2017 was that it was a stable working-class neighborhood that demographically skewed older and more Italian but had a fair amount of younger people as well. Bloomfield was a hipster neighborhood at a time when Lawrenceville had nothing worth glancing at, except for drug addicts and prostitutes. Maybe there was some nascent gentrification going on, but as I said last time, it was totally off my radar. And while Bloomfield may have had a fair share of hipsters at that point, there wasn't anything hip about the neighborhood itself. There were a few places that catered to young people, but the business district was mostly functional. Unlike Oakland, you could actually do most of your business within a ten minute walk from your house.
The Italian businesses that we frequented were not of the type that would appeal to outsiders, and there wasn't necessarily anything Italian about them other than the owner's last name. The Italian bars we used to hang out in were initially selected on the basis of whether or not they carded, which they mostly didn't because it had been a while since they had a customer under the age of 70. These places all had illegal poker machines and your chances of developing lung cancer increased by 50% each time you visited. I later learned that these places ran numbers and offered a sports book if you were willing to bet $50/week. The most famous Italian restaurant was Del's, which was so bad it was featured on Restaurant Impossible in 2012 and closed in 2015. The second most famous was the Pleasure Bar, which is still open. I'm pretty sure they used Prego brand sauce, and the only reason to go there was for karaoke. I remember seeing the waitresses at D'Amico's smoking cigarettes while they cut customers' bread. When I'd see old women drinking wine at these places, it was invariably Riunite. The neighborhood had a lot of characters. The Foodland was ahead of its time in that all of the employees looked like they were on fentanyl before fentanyl became common. It was easily the most disgusting grocery store I have ever been in.
If it seems like I'm nostalgic for the old Bloomfield, I'm not. When I recount these memories to newcomers or younger people they respond along the lines of "It sounds like it was a lot cooler then" to which I reply "No, it wasn't. We hung out at these places first out of necessity, and later out of familiarity. But we didn't feel like we were anywhere cool at the time." To put a finer point on it: When the Steelers won the Super Bowl in 2006, I remember watching the game at my friend's house and walking down to Liberty Ave. after it was over. There were a decent number of people out on the sidewalks celebrating, many of them spilling out of bars, and cars on the street honked as they went by, but when returned and saw the images on the TV news of the absolute mayhem on the South Side, we vowed that if a Pittsburgh team was ever in another championship, we were watching the game there. Luckily, we'd see two there just a few years later. If you're looking for an otherwise unglamorous neighborhood that has a not insignificant hipster population, those places aren't exactly uncommon, even today. But they aren't chic. Bloomfield is cooler now than it was then, and that's a good thing. Sure, I may get some street cred for having hung out in Bloomfield before it was cool, but I don't know why, because it wasn't cool.
When Lawrenceville really took off around 2011, Bloomfield was more or less the same as it was in 2004. The residents definitely skewed younger as the mostly elderly residents were replaced by students lured by cheap rent and excellent transit service, and rents had begun to rise in response, but it didn't show any signs of what we'd traditionally think of as gentrification. Little had changed in the business district, and nobody seemed to be buying houses to restore them. In an East End that was changing, Bloomfield seemed like an island of stability. But as the decade wore on, two things happened. The first is that, as I mentioned earlier, some of the long-time business owners retired and were unable to sell. The second was that prices in Lawrenceville started getting out of hand (by Pittsburgh standards) and Bloomfield, with its intact, functional business district and safe streets, seemed like a good alternative to those who either couldn't afford or didn't want to pay to live elsewhere. The newly vacant storefronts were soon snatched up by people catering to a younger, more affluent demographic, residential prices kept rising, and gentrification was well underway.
Part of the reason I drew the lines for Bloomfield where I did was because this is the part of official Bloomfield that housed the vast majority of the Italian population. But the main reason was because of the housing types. Bloomfield's stereotypical housing style is one that is fairly unique to Pittsburgh—the wood-framed row house. The only other parts of the continent where I know they exist in significant numbers are in the hard coal country of Northeastern Pennsylvania and in Atlantic Canada. These exist all over Pittsburgh, but in Bloomfield they predominate. These houses are almost invariably severely remuddled. In fact, I can only think of one house in the entire neighborhood that retains its original wood siding. While these remuddlings may seem like travesties to modern sensibilities, it's worth keeping in mind the context in which they were done. In the 1950s and 1960s, suburban houses with big yards were the thing to have, and remaining in a place like Bloomfield, with its small, old-fashioned houses meant that you were either too poor to move away or too stubborn to do so. Adding aluminum siding, an awning, and some new, smaller windows gave these people a measure of privacy they couldn't otherwise achieve and made them feel like part of the middle class. These homes were lovingly cared for.
As you may have guessed by now, Liberty Ave. is the main business district. It was great when I first discovered it and has only gotten better since then. While gentrified businesses have moved in, it's still mostly functional, so the presence of places like SPiLL wine bar, Fet-Fisk (Scandinavan food), and Trace Brewing add to the neighborhood rather than detract from it. While I count the Penn/Main business district as part of Lawrenceville, I will include the part of Penn [opposite the back of the cemetery](, which includes Apteka, a vegan restaurant specializing in Central European Cuisine (a gentrified Pittsburgh business idea if there ever was one). Then there's Baum Blvd., which is at the southern end of the neighborhood. This was traditionally the home of Pittsburgh's car dealerships, and currently operates as a sort of urban stroad, with car-dependent businesses, including a dealership or two. This area also includes a small residential area separated from the rest of Bloomfield by a ravine. This sort of feels more like North Oakland and is mostly students, but it's officially Bloomfield, and Oakland is big enough as it is. In reality, the whole Baum-Center Ave. corridor between Oakland and East Liberty is a kind of no man's land, a business district that skirts the edges of Bloomfield and Shadyside but which neither neighborhood claims.
Neighborhood Grade: Gentrifying. Bloomfield skipped the early gentrification phase because it never went through a sketchy period. I'd say Bloomfield's future is bright on the whole, but I would have said that 15 years ago as well, as it didn't really need to see gentrification. That being said, there's room for improvement. Particularly, the housing stock is garbage. Frame is not as desirable as brick, but I have nonetheless seen some nice frame rowhouse restorations in other parts of the city. Bloomfield is still at the stage where houses are being "improved" by replacing the aluminum siding with new vinyl, particularly in a dark color that's meant to fool the eye into thinking it's actually Hardi-Board. Aesthetics aside, most of these houses are small, with a disproportionate amount of 2 bedrooms. The streets are narrow to the point that Lawrenceville looks spacious by comparison, and there isn't a blade of grass or single tree in the entire district. Whether or not these are insurmountable barriers remains to be seen.
12. Friendship: The Suburbs of Bloomfield
As I mentioned in the introduction, Friendship is an official city neighborhood, but the colloquial definition includes a substantial part of what is officially Bloomfield. I've drawn the line at the point where the narrow alleys and frame rowhouses abruptly give way to larger brick houses and wide, leafy streets. I've drawn the northern boundary to follow the Penn business district but to exclude it, since this is traditionally claimed by Garfield, and I've drawn the southern boundary to follow the block between Baum and Center. The eastern boundary is at Negley, though some businesses used to unofficially extend it further into East Liberty in their advertising during the time when being in East Liberty was bad for business.
Historically, this area developed later than Bloomfield. While Bloomfield was largely built out by 1890, Friendship didn't start seeing development until around the turn of the century, though that development proceeded quickly and the neighborhood was built out by 1910. Unlike Bloomfield, Friendship isn't traditionally Italian. This section was originally built for the managerial and professional classes, as opposed to working class Bloomfield. As such, the houses are larger and more attractive. The period when this was considered a desirable area was short-lived, however. The Depression made many of the larger houses difficult to sell, and many of these were converted into rooming houses. Zoning would prevent this from happening on a wide scale until 1958, when a new ordinance explicitly allowed the larger homes to be chopped up into apartments. By the 1970s, 2/3 of the housing units in the official part of Friendship would be rentals, mostly targeted toward students and other young people. As the adjacent neighborhoods of Garfield and East Liberty declined in the 1970s and 1980s, vice and crime problems spilled into Friendship and triggered a measure of white flight from the neighborhood, though it never came anywhere close to being majority black.
Friendship's fortunes began to turn somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, as middle class homeowners began restoring some of the houses. It was also around this time that Friendship began taking on a more distinct identity. The area had been called Friendship since at least the 1920s, but the extent to which locals embraced the name is difficult to determine. The official part of the neighborhood was officially recognized by the Planning Department from the beginning of official neighborhood designations, but it was lumped in with East Liberty in both the 1977 Neighborhood Atlas and the 1983 Neighborhoods for Living Center map. The urban pioneers of the 1980s, drawn to the architecture and low prices, formed two associated neighborhood groups in 1989, Friendship Development Associates and the Friendship Preservation Group. In 1993, and annual home tour was initiated following a one-off event in 1988.
And thus the double-edged sword of urban advocacy. The early advocates for Friendship, many of them architects, felt that the neighborhood was an overlooked gem. Many of the historic homes had been remuddled by apartment conversions—the most notable crime against architecture was the removal of many of the neighborhood's signature porches—but that was still intact enough to make restoration worthwhile. Friendship Development Associates proceeded with the noble, bottom-up goal of restoring neglected homes and selling them. Friendship Preservation Group, on the other hand, took the top-down approach of pushing for zoning changes to limit apartment conversions and filed lawsuits to stop virtually all new development that didn't conform to their idea of what the neighborhood should look like. Most of this opposition wasn't even focused on the residential core, where multi-unit apartments were still permitted by right, but on the fringes of the neighborhood, where zoning rules were more complicated and variances were often required. Some of this was good, in that they convinced a national drugstore chain to reuse an old car dealership on Baum that they had originally planned to demolish in favor of a suburban-style box, but they were NIMBYs, through and through.
These groups also took the liberty of claiming territory beyond the neighborhood's official borders to Gross St. It was in this section, officially Bloomfield, where most of the urban pioneers actually lived, as the homes were smaller, meaning they were less likely to have been converted into apartments, more likely to come on the market, and cheaper to renovate. While their work wasn't the intentional rebrand that some sources claim it was, it did put Friendship on the map, so to speak. Actually changing the neighborhood was another story. While they repeatedly lobbied to rezone the entire district to limit residential structures to two units, the 1998 rezoning only changed a small section. The majority of Friendship remains zoned for multi-family to this day, and while the city is currently in the midst of rewriting its zoning laws, the zeitgeist is toward more permissive uses and not less, so I doubt there is much political will to eliminate multi-family where it already exists. Not that this is an issue anymore, anyway. Both groups currently exist as the merged Friendship Community Group, which is more of a social organization than a real estate developer or political advocate.
The upshot of all of this is that Friendship changed relatively little between the 1930s and 2020s. Apart from a small influx of blacks in the 1970s and 1980s and a small number of yuppies in the 1980s and 1990s, it mostly had an odd stability of middle class families combined with students and young professionals. The official part of the neighborhood went through a sketchy phase for a while due to proximity to East Liberty. Even into the 2000s, while the area wasn't exactly dangerous, it was certainly a little rough around the edges. To illustrate: Pennsylvania liquor law doesn't allow six packs to be sold anywhere that doesn't have on-premises service. Years ago, there was a convenience store in Friendship that got around this by setting up a perfunctory bar in the back with Formica countertops. No matter when you went in, there was always some raging alcoholic sitting at the bar. Occasionally there would be a few older black guys shooting the shit, but otherwise the place was sketchy as hell. We used to call it the "Grandfathered Inn". The mere existence of this place was, of course, unacceptable to the Friendship NIMBYs, who found a buyer willing to turn the place into something more upscale and convinced the owner of the building to evict. Instead, the proprietor absconded with the liquor license (which he didn't own) and the building sat vacant for more than a decade. It's now a coffee shop which is probably a more convivial location to hang out but which I imagine doesn't sell pornography.
In terms of built form, Friendship is mostly brick houses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but within this constraint there is a surprising amount of variety. Some of the blocks north of Friendship Park are reminiscent of Chicago, while other parts are more modestly streetcar suburban. Generally speaking, the houses become grander as you go west to east, with the neighborhood proper containing the grandest homes. As I mentioned earlier, this part of the neighborhood suffered most from the wave of apartment conversions, as the houses are too large to be of interest to most homeowners and absentee landlords are reluctant to sell. Many of these homes look nice enough on the outside but are dumps on the inside, but even at that, the transition between owner-occupied houses and rentals can be quite jarring.
There isn't really a business district. There are a few blocks of Baum, but they aren't as developed as the ends in Bloomfield or East Liberty, though there is an Aldi. There are also probably a few scattered businesses like that coffee shop, but in reality, Friendship doesn't need its own business district. Some old maps divide this area between Bloomfield and East Liberty, because those areas are where Friendship residents traditionally shopped, and the Penn Ave. business district in Garfield forms the neighborhood's northern boundary.
Neighborhood Grade: Upper Middle Class. Friendship passed the gentrified point a long time ago, and there's very little grit left. Ten years ago I would have kept this in the gentrifying category due to the high student population and prevalence of student slumlords, but prices have gotten high enough in the past few years that even these are starting to disappear. I wouldn't have thought there was much of a market for 6 bedroom houses at a million bucks, but here we are. Some of the apartment houses are going to stick around for a while because students will always pay top dollar to live in crap, but I don't hold this against other parts of the city, so I won't hold it against Friendship, either.
13. Garfield: Forcing the Issue
Unlike Bloomfield and Friendship, the borders of Garfield are relatively easy to define: The Penn business district on the south, Allegheny Cemetery on the north and west, and Negley Ave. on the east. The only slightly goofy boundary is on the northeast, which includes both sides of Mossfield and Black streets plus a little bit of surplusage that I threw in because it doesn’t fit anywhere else, and there are a few side streets off of Negley that don't have any road connections to the rest of Garfield and are thus more properly East Liberty, but that's not a huge issue. The most notable geographic feature is the hill that rises steeply to the north of Penn Ave.
Garfield was part of the Winebiddle farm and was named after president James Garfield, who was buried on the day the first residential lot was sold in 1881. It was built out over a long period of time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was mostly settled by Irish immigrants, perhaps becoming the most easily identifiable Irish neighborhood in the city. Garfield was never a particularly nice area, and the top of the hill was flattened in the early 1960s for the Garfield Heights housing project. The result was one of the more notable instances of white flight in the city. Garfield's minority population was 17.5% in 1960, 37.3% in 1970, 61.5% in 1980, 78.9% in 1990, and 89.1% in 2000.
Beyond mere demographic change, though, the neighborhood was clearly in decline. By the mid-1970s, while the crime rate was comparable to the city average, people's own eyes told another story. A city councilman's daughter was assaulted on Penn Ave., and the councilman himself had to flee two mugging attempts. The grocery store saw purse snatchings almost daily. The commercial district found itself without a bank, a drugstore, or a men's clothing store, and more closures were sure to follow. Perhaps counterintuitively, the housing project was easily the best in the city at the time and had a crime rate below that of the neighborhood as a whole. In 1975, Rev. Leo Henry, pastor of St. Lawrence O'Toole Catholic Church, formed the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation to stabilize the neighborhood, as he feared that if no intervention was done, the neighborhood would continue to deteriorate. The group would spend the next 25 years getting grants for property improvements, grants for cleanup of abandoned properties, appearing on the news every time a desirable business would close, appearing on the news urging the city to shut an undesirable business down, but to little avail. The neighborhood got worse, people kept leaving, businesses kept leaving, street crime turned to gang crime, and by the end of the 90s the neighborhood was a war zone.
In 2000, the BGC formed the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative in an overt attempt to replicate the Soho effect in Garfield and turn the neighborhood into an arts district. And it worked. Sort of. A number of galleries opened on Penn, along with a vegan café, Quiet Storm, that became popular among the arty set, as well as People's Indian. (There's also Kraynik's, an iconic bike shop that moved from Oakland in the late '70s when the area was starting to get really bad and has the rare distinction of being a hipster business that's part of the old neighborhood.) The First Friday gallery crawls became a popular thing. But apart from some artists, few actually wanted to settle there. The vibe of the place in the 2000s was distinctly different than anywhere else in the city. It wasn't quite full-on ghetto, but even the low-income businesses seemed to have pulled out, leaving behind a smattering of newsstands and barbershops that stood in contrast to the art galleries and ethnic restaurants. There was still enough left to support a fairly vibrant street life during the day, mostly older black men loitering in front of buildings, and the combination of the narrow street and abandoned, but extant, storefronts gave one a sense of claustrophobia. Nights were even weirder. Most of the time it was a ghost town, except on First Fridays when the street was overtaken by an incongruous mob of white people who didn't wince about going into the hood after dark. Even these contained a mild sense of unease, as when these ended I found myself rushing to the safety of Friendship a block away.
I think this proximity helped the arts district take off in a way that wouldn't have been possible somewhere like the Hill District, where one would actually have to soil one's tires in the ghetto and park in a place where their car was liable to be broken into. I never saw anything remotely sketchy on Penn in those days, but there was security in the knowledge that one could park in a middle class area and beat a retreat if things got too spicy. It's also around this time that the g-word started being mentioned, much to the alarm of the BGC, who had formed the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative just before the word entered the popular consciousness. If the success of the initiative didn't convince people to move to Garfield, it did convince them that it wasn't as dangerous as they thought. I remember several conversations during this period where everyone agreed that its bark was worse than its bite. I met one guy who actually moved here and liked it.
Gentrification eventually picked up, but it's been more of a slow burn. Some time around 2010 all the black people suddenly disappeared from Penn Ave., and the crime rate fell off a cliff. The streets around Penn began gentrifying when the arts initiative was established, but the hill was a tougher nut to crack. Garfield Heights was razed in the late 2000s and replaced with the mixed-income Garfield Commons, and while that development is safe, violent parts of Garfield still remain, though these are becoming fewer and are hyper-localized. It's only been since the pandemic that houses farther up the hill have been rehabbed, though these are more in the line of cheap flips than historic restorations. Part of the problem is that the hill poses a serious barrier to walkability, and while the area is served by several transit lines, frequency isn't good.
In terms of built form, it varies due to the length of the buildout period. The southwest corner, around Dearborn St., was built out earliest, and is similar to Bloomfield. Other parts look like a modest streetcar suburb, and there are even a few larger houses. But there's also a significant number of frame mill houses, and there is significant [blight and abandonment]( the further up the hill you go. Some areas even have a rural, ghetto in the woods feel. Meanwhile, the BGC has been constructing newer homes on vacant lots that are so ugly they seem to block gentrification by design, signaling to outsiders that the neighborhood is for poor people, no hidden gems here.
Neighborhood Grade: Early gentrification. The caveat here is that it's been in this stage between 15 and 20 years now, depending on who you ask, and while things have improved significantly over that time, the bottom was so low that there were many obstacles that had to be overcome, and still more to be overcome in the future. The crime is down dramatically; Part I crimes, which include murder, sex crimes, robbery, burglary, arson, aggravated assault, and theft, are at about 2.5 per 1,000 residents, which is comparable to better neighborhoods in the city. The difference is that when murders happen in better parts of the city, they're explained away as outliers, but when they happen in places like Garfield, they’re cited as evidence that things haven't changed. That said, the gangbanging is pretty much gone, and the safety risk to the general public is lower than places like Downtown and the South Side.
The bigger impediment at this point is the housing stock, which isn't the best. During the bad old days, there was significant blight and abandonment, particularly as you get higher up on the hill, which made the neighborhood fabric patchy in places and downright rural in others. While this may eventually present as opportunities for yuppie infill, the BGC is liable to snatch all these up for ugly affordable housing before that happens. There was already neighborhood opposition to a possible conversion of the former Fort Pitt Elementary into apartments. The BGC was founded in an attempt to stabilize Garfield when it was still largely a working-class Irish neighborhood, and they're currently trying to stabilize it as a working-class black neighborhood, though the common denominator is that it should ultimately be working class. As recently as a decade ago this wasn't too hard to do, as they would build houses for $200,000 and sell them for $140,000 in market-rate transactions. In other words, as long as they had the money to build or renovate, all housing was inherently affordable, because the neighborhood wasn't particularly desirable, especially as one got farther from Penn.
The final thing that's holding Garfield back is the business district, which has a lot of cool stuff but not many necessities, and still has more than its share of vacant storefronts. I think this is one of the things about gentrification that rubs locals the wrong way more than anything else, provided they aren't actively being displaced. I remember an interview with a Garfield resident from some years ago, a black woman in her late 30s, who said that while she supported the new development generally, she wasn't that enthused; her kids weren't interested in art and she couldn't afford t eat at any of the restaurants. I can understand the alienation that comes from waiting decades to see your neighborhood revitalized and when the day comes, it's revitalized for the benefit of other people, people who don't even live there. Politicians can get their pictures taken on a shiny main drag, but there's nothing there for you.
The inherent issue is that economics favors this approach. If I want to open a gentrified-type business, say, a crepe shop, I have two options. I can open it in an established area where I will be competing with established brands and pay a fortune in rent to do so, or I can move to an "emerging" neighborhood where I might not get as much business but where my costs will be significantly lower. I'm not just going to open a storefront in the hood and hope for the best, but if a local community organization is making an effort to bring like-minded businesses to the area, I might be persuaded. Conversely, if I'm trying to open a pharmacy or a bank branch or something where the selection criteria usually boil down to which one is closest, I'm only looking at demographics, and rent is commensurate with how many people are in a given area and how much money they have to spend. What I lose in business by opening up in the hood I might not save due to the rent discount. So people who live in poor areas without huge populations thus have to travel farther for basic services that they'd rather have access to in their own neighborhoods, and they get a bit resentful when the business district "revitalizes" with a bunch of shit they don't need. This is a problem that will be solved in time, but the only solution is to increase the population, and even then, there's going to be a lag. That being said, they do have a grocery store, the Aldi on Penn, and given the Hill District's woes on that front, that's quite the accomplishment, especially since they didn't have to incentivize anyone to build it.
What Did We Learn, Palmer?
When I started this series, the primary goal was to see what conclusions could be drawn about urbanism by systematically looking at a city's neighborhoods; all the neighborhoods, not just the ones that get a lot of press. At that time, two years ago now, I didn't have any expectations as to what I would uncover, and the early installments were filled with a lot of passing observations and deep dives into things I found interesting. Now that I'm a dozen neighborhoods in, some general themes are beginning to take shape, and I want to reflect on them for a minute.
When we started looking at gentrification in earnest last time with the Lawrenceville installment, I argued that while urbanists traditionally pointed to certain factors when making their predictions of what the next hot neighborhood would be, they ignored others, and continue ignoring them to this day. To make a list of all the factors identified thus far:
- Proximity to areas of regional importance like Downtown or Oakland
- Proximity to desirable neighborhoods
- Low violent crime rate (though not necessarily low non-violent crime rate)
- Desirability of housing stock
- Opportunities for infill construction, especially large apartment complexes
- Functional business district
- Vacant storefronts available for gentrified businesses
- Significant existing white population
- Artist presence
- Hipster/bohemian presence
I'm not going to reiterate my arguments here, and I'd caution that the list is not exhaustive, but Lawrenceville was unique in that all of the factors applied. City boosters generally treat the first factor as primary, as is evidenced by their predictions that the Hill District or Uptown should be taking off any day now, which trickles down to common people making Reddit posts wondering why neither of these neighborhoods seems to be going anywhere. Lawrenceville wasn't exactly inconvenient, but proximity was probably the least favorable factor on the list, and when that was improved with direct bus service to Oakland it only accelerated the neighborhood's rise. The three neighborhoods we discussed today, while all gentrified to some degree, illustrate what happens when some of these factors are present but not others. Bloomfield had low crime, hipsters, a functional business district, white population, and proximity to Oakland, but few vacant storefronts, modest housing stock, no room for additional development, no artist presence, and no spillover effect from desirable areas. Friendship had low crime, decent proximity to Oakland, decent proximity to desirable areas (Shadyside, in its case), and highly desirable housing stock, but no business district to speak of, and no developable land. Garfield had developable land, plenty of vacant storefronts, and an artist presence, but had a high crime rate, minimal white population, minimal hipster population, few functional businesses, mediocre housing stock, mediocre proximity to Downtown or Oakland, and mediocre proximity to desirable areas.
What changed? Time and spillover. Bloomfield blends almost seamlessly into Lower Lawrenceville, so it was a natural next step, and with time, some gentrified businesses were able to move in. Friendship uses the Bloomfield business district and has better housing, so it was an obvious location as well. Garfield, well, had the most going against it, and still does, but now exists as sort of a "donut hole" in the East End, and while progress has been slow, it's only a matter of time before it booms again, even if the boom is more muted than in other places. So proximity ultimately matters, but not proximity to centers of business and culture, proximity to other gentrified neighborhoods. What people get wrong about proximity to Downtown and Oakland is that people don't want to live in either of those places. Sure, Downtown apartments are expensive, but they're decidedly for the kind of person who wouldn't mind living in Manhattan. People go Downtown because they have to, not because they want to. And Oakland has many cultural treasures, but unless you're in college, not the kind of treasures you need daily access to. Sure, people want to live close to work, but suburbanization proved that proximity to employment is not the primary motivation in the age of the automobile.
As a final disclaimer, don't take any of these conclusions too seriously. While I thought about these factors quite a bit over the past several weeks, I only arrived at the conclusion as I was writing this. This series is a constant work in progress, but so are cities, and it seems like that's a good thing. Next time I'm going to come full circle on gentrification and talk about East Liberty. This is a very different kind of gentrification than what we've talked about so far, and the importance of the neighborhood combined with its history being a veritable cornucopia of all the things urbanists like to talk about makes it another Big One that merits its own entry. Now that this series is finally taking shape after two years, I can give you a preview for the rest of the East End. I got lucky in the sense that the neighborhoods form convenient clusters both geographically and spatially, which eases the roadmap. After East Liberty I plan on discussing the upscale neighborhoods of Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, and Point Breeze. Then it will be the East Liberty "suburbs" of Highland Park, Morningside, and Stanton Heights. Next will be the ghettos of the city's northeastern corner: Homewood, Larimer, East Hills, and Lincoln-Lemmington. We'll round out the East End by looking at a grab-bag of oddball neighborhoods to the south: Greenfield, Hazelwood, The Run, and Swisshelm Park. Actually, I lied; we won't be rounding out the East End. I'm saving Regent Square for something special. Anyway, this is a tentative plan, and is subject to change when I find myself writing 10,000 words on a little-known redevelopment plan in Duck Hollow that I found in the URA archives, but I wanted to reassure both of my readers that I intend on moving forward.
Bonus Content
Since nobody got the Easter Egg from the last installment (possibly because nobody clicks the links), the street from the COPS clip with the dispute among the kids was the same one I used to demonstrate the built form of Lower Lawrenceville below Butler. I wonder what happened to those people and if they saw any benefit from the neighborhood's improvement. In any event, I think it's safe to say that they don't live there anymore.
This time we're talking about Lawrenceville. As a housekeeping note, from here on I'm going to just keep moving east to fill out the East End. The next installment will fill in the gap between here and Oakland, discussing the neighborhoods of Bloomfield, Garfield, and Friendship. After that I haven't decided whether to cover the North Side or South Hills next, but I'll be concluding with the West End, possibly in one installment, because we don’t talk about the West End. Just forget I mentioned it. I enjoy writing these, and I realize that the limited geographic extent of the city proper doesn't tell the whole story, so I plan on continuing into surrounding municipalities after this is done as a sort of companion series.
I realized when I was making my maps this time that we're starting to get a bit far afield, and for those of you following along at home with no frame of reference, I've made a half-assed overview map showing the general locations of the areas we've discussed thus far. As usual, I've included various links to Google Streetview and other stuff that I've found worth linking. Since this is probably the last one of these I'll complete before Easter, I've hidden an Easter Egg in the links. Good luck finding it!
Series Index:
- Intro
- Downtown
- Strip District
- North Shore
- South Side
- Hill District: Lower Hill
- Hill District: Middle Hill
- Hill District: The Projects
- The Hill’s Environs: Uptown, Sugar Top, and Polish Hill
- Oakland
10. Lawrenceville: A Case Study in Gentrification
When I came to New York to live in 1970, I moved into a downtown industrial district which, because it was south of Houston St., was christened SoHo. Now, in those days, there were two art galleries in SoHo. There were two Italian bars, no restaurants, no tourists, and quite a lot of peace and quiet. Today, nine years later, there are something like 75 galleries at last count, dozens of restaurants and bars, and on weekends, when the peering hordes of dentists from New Jersey come down here to take their Gucci loafers for a walk among the bubble-top buses, there is very little peace and quiet indeed.
Robert Hughes
In the spring of 2007, like many young adults, I had what could be called standing weekend plans with friends from college, where things weren't planned so much as there was an understanding that we were all going to hang out. One Friday night, I had intended to go with the flow when I got a call from a friend from high school asking if I wanted to go to the Derek Trucks concert. After the show ended, looking for something to do, I called my college buddies, and they told me they were at a dance party at a bar in Lawrenceville. Lawrenceville? I was certainly familiar with the place, but it didn't exactly seem like the kind of place where one would hang out.
To analogize: Imagine that you're a normal, middle-class, suburban American and a couple you know invites you to go on vacation with them. When you express interest, they tell you that the destination is Azerbaijan. If you're like most Americans, you know very little about this country and probably couldn't point to it on a map, and any research you do will make it seem at least a little iffy, even if it's obviously not North Korea. We ended up going and having a good time, though on the way home my friend told me that the place had an "interesting clientele", and this was coming from a white guy with dreads.
Ten years later, Lawrenceville would be the hottest neighborhood in the city.
10A. An Historical Introduction
Like Roman Gaul, Lawrenceville is divided into three parts, the official designations referring to their position along the river, with Lower Lawrenceville being the farthest downstream, Upper Lawrenceville being the farthest upstream, and Central Lawrenceville being between them. While these official names are in common use today, old-timers refer to Lower, Central, and Upper Lawrenceville as the 6th, 9th, and 10th Wards, respectively, although the wards themselves don't perfectly match the neighborhood boundaries. As far as those boundaries are concerned, the Allegheny River forms a clear western boundary, the southern boundary is at 33rd St., and the northern boundary is at the 62nd St. Bridge. To the east, wooded hillsides and Allegheny Cemetery provide a distinct boundary for the upper section, while the lower sections trail indistinctly into neighboring Bloomfield.
The only Indian settlement we know of within city limits was a Delaware village called Shannopin's Town, which was abandoned by the early 1770s. In 1814 Colonel William Foster, father of songwriter Stephen Foster, laid out Lawrenceville around the intersection of the Greensburg and Butler pikes in what was then Pitt Township. That same year, the Federal government established the Allegheny Arsenal between what is now 39th and 40th Streets, the site chosen as it was within America's only iron-producing region. The arsenal was decommissioned in 1907, but its name still endures as a symbol of the neighborhood; there's Arsenal Park, Arsenal Middle School, Arsenal Lanes, Arsenal Cider House, the 15201 Zip Code is addressed as Pittsburgh but is formally Arsenal Station, etc. Lawrenceville was incorporated as an independent borough in 1834 and was incorporated into Pittsburgh in 1868. From there, it's history is similar to that of the adjoining Strip District; its location along the river fostered burgeoning industry, and in the latter half of the century it was populated by immigrant groups, Germans at first, followed by Poles, Croats, Slovenes, and Slovaks. Population peaked in 1900, at around 33,000.
And then began a long, slow decline. Popular histories tend to treat Pittsburgh's industrial age as a homogenous behemoth, but geography was a factor at the local level, and the Allegheny Valley peaked early and went into decline well before the region as a whole. The initial wave of industrialization was marked by a lot of smaller firms who set up shop anywhere with convenient river access, the Allegheny Valley having a small advantage due to proximity to the old Pennsylvania Canal. As these nascent industries matured, economies of scale began to favor large, integrated mills for which there was no room in the narrow Allegheny Valley. Focus shifted to the wider Mon (and to a lesser extent, the Ohio), which had the added bonus of being the primary corridor for bulk coal shipment. Carnegie Steel's Lucy Furnace, as well as the adjacent Crucible Steel, were state-of-the art when they opened in the 1870s. By the time US Steel bought Carnegie in 1903, they were showing their age, and as the 20th century got underway, they couldn't compete with the sprawling complexes at Braddock and Homestead, and the Depression killed them for good.
At this point, everyone just sort of forgot about Lawrenceville. Small-scale industry remained, but most of the skilled labor followed the mills. The housing stock was already seen as outdated by the 1930s, and when the suburbanization trend got underway in the 1950s and 1960s, residents who could afford to decamped, particularly to the suburb of Shaler, just across the river. While it never saw the wholesale population collapse of the Strip District, the Strip was able to reinvent itself as a hub of warehousing and wholesale. Lawrenceville would have no second act. It was too far off the radar to see any urban renewal efforts during Renaissance I (which was more focused on industry than history remembers), and it lacked the cohesion among its residents necessary to get redevelopment money during Flaherty's Neighborhood Renaissance of the 1970s. As a man who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s told me last summer: "I grew up in Highland Park. If you couldn't afford to live in Highland Park, you moved to East Liberty. If that was still too expensive, you moved to Bloomfield. If things got really desperate you moved to Garfield, and when all hope was lost, you moved to Lawrenceville."
When the TV show COPS first came to Pittsburgh in the early 1990s, Lawrenceville was one of the neighborhoods they frequented. The major crimes rate, which was about 4.5% per capita in the mid-1970s, had risen to 8% per capita by the early 2000s. By comparison, the Hill District was around 7% in the 1970s and was considered a no-go zone. The bulk of this increase came in the mid-1990s and is largely believed to be due to a demographic cliff that appeared to be a significant impediment to the neighborhood's improvement. In 2006, 40% of owner-occupied housing was owned by people 70 and older. While housing prices had appreciated, the city's population was declining, and the market was still soft by the standards of the city as a whole. And this appreciation was largely driven by urban pioneers purchasing larger homes with intact historical details. These homes were not representative of the neighborhood's housing stock as a whole, which was modest and had been remuddled beyond belief. Even if these homes could be purchased on the cheap, the cost of renovation was disproportionate to the value one could expect to get from a small house in a questionable neighborhood. As the owner-occupied housing became vacant, there was substantial concern that supply would outstrip the market.
Ironically enough, the time Lawrenceville was bottoming out coincided with the nascent beginning of its revival. It's hard to pinpoint when the artistic set first started taking an interest in Lawrenceville, but Art All Night, an annual event with the motto "No censorship. No juries. No admission." was first held in an abandoned warehouse in Lawrenceville in 1998. While a single annual show does not a revival make, there were other nascent signs of development. By 2002 long-term residents were noting an increase in business activity on the lower end of Butler St., but this was counterbalanced by those who were only noticing an increase in drug dealing. Mayor Murphy floated a plan to redevelop the waterfront area in 1999, but this seems to have gone nowhere, and was bundled as part of an ambitious set of plans to redevelop multiple areas, including the old J&L site that later became South Side Works.
Between 2003 and 2006, nine art galleries, five restaurants, two clothing boutiques, and two coffee shops opened on Butler St. The median home price, which sat at a mere $25,000 in 1999, jumped to $35,000 by 2004. With the benefit of hindsight, it's quite tempting to mark this period as the beginning of a turnaround and say that the rest is history. At the time, though, this was far from certain. As we will see in later installments, every neighborhood is unique, and every neighborhood has unique factors that could determine a revival's success or failure. We know now that the revival was successful in this case, but there's probably a 50/50 chance that any nascent revival fizzles. And there were factors at play suggesting that Lawrenceville's odds might have been significantly worse.
Given what was already going on with respect to housing, this had the potential to be disastrous. While the urban pioneers showed little interest in these houses, absentee landlords did. In 2003 they purchased four out of every five residential properties sold. The median price was $19,000. By 2005 it was already apparent that the neighborhood had become attractive to low-income renters. The impending market saturation of undesirable properties, combined with landlords who didn't screen tenants and only made repairs when the situation was desperate, could easily have not only increased the crime rate but, more importantly, added to the already negative perception of the neighborhood's safety. Needless to say, this did not end up happening, and I intend to address the question of why it didn't later in the essay. But I wanted to make clear up from that the turnaround was never a sure thing.
That takes us up to 2007, when I began visiting the area regularly. It was much grittier and grimier than it is now, but it wasn't seriously unsafe, except above the cemetery, where it was seriously unsafe. There were plenty of hipsters in the neighborhood, but it was mostly a working class white area with a few more black faces on the streets than suburbanites would be comfortable with. The bar I mentioned in the intro may have been a hipster's paradise at 11 pm, but at 5 pm it was blue collar workers who had finished their shift. And it opened at 7 am; it was like the bar the stevedores visit in Season 2 of The Wire, except dingier. We didn't go there because it was trendy, but because it was cheap, and we were poor.
At this point, there was no real animosity between the newcomers and the old timers. The g-word hadn't entered the popular lexicon at this point, and to the extent that it had, it referred to developer-led projects meant to bring rich white people into poor black areas. The same thing that was happening in Lawrenceville had been happening in the South Side since the 90s, and by 2007 it was just starting to yuppify. While, like Lawrenceville, the South Side's fortunes started to change after it had become a haven for artists, it also had an inordinate density of liquor licenses, due to grandfathering from the days when the J&L works was there; its popularity among young adults was credited to its prominence as a nightlife district. There was no comparison to be made. The idea that students, artists, and twenty-something bohemians would make an area expensive seemed absurd. Pittsburgh, after all, was not New York.
The inflection point was around 2011, which is also when the neighborhood got direct bus service to Oakland. At this time, I was visiting a friend of mine who lived there almost every weekend and noticed a lot more normal-looking people on the streets, and even a few yuppie types. We found ourselves mostly hanging out at his house as opposed to going out, and when we did go out, it was to a place on a residential block with a six-foot ceiling and linoleum tile floor filled with cigarette smoke and unhappy Lawrencevillians. Illustratively, one of my friends who was desperately trying to be one of the cool kids was, by that point, in Lawrenceville constantly. A friend from high school who lived in the city and didn't care for this guy said he couldn't go to Lawrenceville anymore because simply being on Butler St. meant he was guaranteed to run into him and have to talk to him. Lawrenceville was cool before, but so were a lot of other places, and the fact that my friend was going there to the exclusion of other places meant that it was simply The Place to Be.
In the fall of 2013, one of my law school classmates passed away, and her husband held a memorial benefit at Arsenal Lanes that ended up serving as a sort of class reunion. I found myself hanging out with normie friends whom I didn't hang out with as much as my non-law school friends because they always went to the South Side, or Oakland, or other places that had a more college, "loud drinking" atmosphere. Lawrenceville certainly never hosted any of the weekly Bar Review outings or any official school social events. When we were sitting in the lounge in the back, one of my friends remarked "Lawrenceville has really come a long way in the past few years." I told her that I had been coming here since law school; in fact, the reason I didn't hang out with them more was because I preferred coming here, and that I had invited them here several times but there was no interest. She said she never thought of me as a tastemaker, and I must be cooler than she thought. I wasn't going to deny this, so I nodded in agreement, but even I was late to the party.
After the event ended, we were looking for a place to have an afterparty, and I suggested one of my old haunts, to give them a taste of what had now become the new old Lawrenceville, which was a safer bet than giving them a taste of the actual old Lawrenceville. This was quickly vetoed, and instead we went to a place called Industry Public House, which they were familiar with but I, a veteran of the neighborhood (at least as a visitor), had never heard of. It was awful. It was the same kind of Loud Drinking establishment they would have gone to on the South Side five years earlier except priced for someone with a full-time job. The truth is, while my friend may have acted like she wanted to be the kind of early adopter that I apparently was, neither she nor anyone else in that group would have liked the Lawrenceville of 2007. Drinking 50 cent drafts in a place with Bob Seger blasting on the jukebox was just not their style.
I remember reading a magazine article some years back where a young, hip woman was complaining about gentrification in Brooklyn, how it used to be cool and now it was expensive and full of yuppies in SUVs. The author was keen to point out that she had no right to complain, as she was the gentrifier, the outsider who moved into a neighborhood of working-class Jews and made it trendy through her presence. It's easy to sneer about insufferable, it's-not-gentrification-until-the-Republicans-move-in scenesters, but the girl had a point. It was that night in Industry that the feeling that I was becoming alienated from the neighborhood fully crystalized. It explains why my friend and I hadn't been as keen to head to Butler St. as we had been a few years prior, even if the same places were still there. He had, in the meantime, moved to the Upper portion of the neighborhood, which was beginning to turn but wasn't there yet. The following decade would see a mad scramble for condo developments, high-end restaurants opening, older bars going non-smoking, and various other gentrification milestones passed. The press coverage changed. In the early 2000s, there were conflicting views among residents as to whether the arts scene was turning the neighborhood around or if things were still getting worse. Now it was "Best Bars in Lawrenceville" or "Best Places to Eat in Lawrenceville" and Lawrenceville started appearing on lists of best neighborhoods and places tourists should check out.
10B. Lower Lawrenceville: The Sixth Ward
As I mentioned earlier, Lower Lawrenceville is the part of the neighborhood furthest downstream. It runs from 33rd St. to 40th St. south to north, bounded by the Allegheny River on the west. These boundaries are not arbitrary. 33rd St. is the corporate limit of old Lawrenceville Borough, and is the location of a rail trestle that spans the road. A block later Butler St. splits off of Penn Ave. to continue following the river at Doughboy Square, where the neighborhood starts in earnest. The other end was the site of the former Allegheny Arsenal, which occupied all the land between the river and Penn excepting a pass-through at Butler St. While the arsenal itself was decommissioned in 1907, the area to the east of Butler St. was given over to institutional uses including a park and a school, while the area along the river was taken over by industry. The result was that there had long been a fairly large gap in the commercial district that created a natural dividing line, though this gap was recently bridged by the Arsenal 201 complex, at least on the river side of the street (the school isn't going anywhere any time soon). The eastern boundary is a little more indistinct, but it's roughly in the vicinity of the East Busway and the associated ravine. This is the first neighborhood we've looked at in a while where the official boundaries make sense. Actually, they make more sense than the traditional designation used by old-timers in Lawrenceville, which is to refer to this section as the 6th Ward, which, while true, also includes Polish Hill and part of the Strip District.
The section between Butler Street and the river, referred to as "below Butler", is mostly an extension of the same light industrial and warehouse fabric that comprises the upper Strip District. Closer to Butler, there are a few streets of Italianate row houses with some more modern infill mixed in. I initially thought this was the remnant of a larger area—the city has a history of demolishing residential areas near the river for industrial expansion—but old maps show that it was never much larger than it is today.
Butler Street itself is the commercial heart of Lawrenceville. The area began suffering a vacancy problem as early as the 1960s, when the proposed Oakland-Crosstown Expressway included an interchange in the area that would require substantial demolition, and merchants were reluctant to invest. While the project was ultimately cancelled, government leaders were treating it as a done deal until well into the 1970s, when Federal money for urban freeways dried up. In the meantime, the decade-plus of disinvestment and lack of any demand for revitalization led conditions to stay more or less the same into the 2000s. The result was that this was the earliest part of Lawrenceville to gentrify. At the time I started hanging out here in 2007, it was already rebounding, almost exclusively with gentrified businesses, though the side of the street closer to the river was still oddly blighted. Since then there have been a ton of infill projects, and while I'm not hip to any particular plans, it wouldn't surprise me if the few remaining empty lots are filled in within the next decade.
The hillside between Butler and Penn contains another residential area dominated by 19th century brick rowhouses. This is a highly desirable area due to its proximity to Butler St., though there had been significant blight and neglect in the past. As real estate prices began to rise in the 2000s most of the more desirable houses were renovated and new construction was built on vacant lots. As prices began to skyrocket in the 2010s, some of the smaller, more distressed houses were demolished in favor of modern, expensive infill. While I'm not a huge fan of the style of these, they're still superior to the dilapidated crap that they replaced, and I'd consider them an improvement on the whole.
While Lawrenceville is most associated with Butler St., Penn Ave. is also a major thoroughfare through the neighborhood, though it's a bit of a mishmash. Leaving the intersection with Butler at Doughboy Square, it once contained an extension of the Butler St. business district. While there's still some of this left right at the square, most of this was demolished in the 90s in favor of a semi-suburban housing development. While this may seem like an abomination now, at the time these were built they had no idea the neighborhood was going to stage a comeback, and the units sold for relatively high prices. The problem I have with them isn't so much with the architecture itself, as it blends in with the existing fabric, as it is with the fact that the building entrances are all on walkways on the sides. The overall effect is that it looks like you're seeing the backs of the buildings from Penn when you're really seeing the fronts. The actual rears look like suburban townhouses, since the builders didn't spring for brick or any kind of contextual detail, though this isn't really a problem since they're on an alley and obscured by garages anyway. The remaining section of Penn has random abandoned storefronts, houses, and and industrial-style buildings, some of which include destination businesses like Pints on Penn. On the whole, though, Penn doesn't have a walkable business district until you get closer to 40th St., though this is in Central Lawrenceville, about which more later.
Finally, the residential area between Penn and Liberty has lagged behind the rest of Lawrenceville as far as desirability is concerned. While there is still a fair amount of brick, the frame rows more common to adjacent Bloomfield begin to predominate here, and the housing itself is modest and particularly susceptible to mid-century remuddling. It's slowly becoming more popular as people get priced out of Lawrenceville proper, but it's a long walk to Butler St., and, as I just mentioned, there aren't many amenities on Penn. Liberty is even worse, as drivers treat it as a high-speed quasi-highway, and the only business of note is the Church Brew Works. Back in the 90s, when microbreweries were a new thing, this place was trendy, particularly because of the novelty of housing it in a disused church, with vats on the altar and the confessional turned into a large liquor cabinet. As the beer scene evolved, though, this place did not. I went to a wedding reception there a few years ago and the beer was lousy and the food somehow worse.
Neighborhood Grade: Gentrified. The Butler St. business district consists almost entirely of high-end restaurants, boutiques, and the like, and home prices are outrageous. While I'm adamant that the section between Penn and Liberty is less desirable, market momentum and the demand for anything within the Lawrenceville boundaries has meant that, in recent years, these houses go for as much as those in better parts, and while the exteriors haven't been demuddled en masse, the interiors are absolutely top hole. Prices here rival those of the most desirable suburbs. I also feel obligated to note somewhere that there was a period when they tried to brand this area as LoLa, possibly because they thought that every arts district should be named in the same style as Soho (which itself wasn't known as such until it began gentrifying), e.g. TriBeCa, SoDo (Seattle), NoDa (Charlotte), LoDo (Denver), SoMa (San Francisco), SoWa (Boston), but thankfully it never caught on.
10C. Central Lawrenceville: The Ninth Ward
The Tenth Ward boundaries are pretty analogous to the official boundaries of Central Lawrenceville, which is mostly just referred to as Lawrenceville without any geographic identifier. The river is an obvious boundary, but the northern and southern boundaries are also distinct, as the section runs from the break in the street wall at the old arsenal site up to the Allegheny Cemetery at Stanton Ave. This is another natural break, as the cemetery prevents development on its side of the street. The eastern boundary is definite as well, as it runs along the back side of the cemetery to Penn Ave., which it includes until we're back at 40th St. The only minor alteration I would make to the official boundary is that I would include both sides of the Penn Ave. business district, since nobody would ever consider one side of a commercial street to be in one neighborhood and the other side to be in another.
While all of Lawrenceville is dominated by rowhouses, this is especially true in Central Lawrenceville, the only census unit in the city where the majority of the housing is single family attached. While the city has many rowhouse neighborhoods, Central Lawrenceville is that there has little of anything else. There are some apartments above commercial storefronts, the mid-century Davison Square Apartments, and the newer The Foundry @ 41st, but those are isolated instances. The section can be further divided between the area along the river, Below Butler, and the area on the hill, Above Butler. The area right along the river is still primarily industrial, but this is mostly unobtrusive stuff like the CMU Robotics Lab and a Red Bull warehouse. The residential area below Butler is almost exclusively 19th century rowhouses, though there has been some infill in recent decades. This area was traditionally less desirable due to proximity to industry and susceptibility to flooding, a condition that remained well into the 2000s. The diminution of heavy industry combined with the flood control dams built in the decades following WWII have eliminated these concerns, and due to the flatter topography and proximity to Butler St., this is now the more desirable area. Above Butler, however, contains some of the better housing. Fisk, Main, and 40th Streets were historically occupied by the managerial class of industrial workers, and the houses are larger and more ornate than those elsewhere. This was the earliest area to gentrify, as the size of the houses combined with intact historical details made them desirable to the urban pioneers discussed in the introductory section. The remainder of the hillside is mixed, with more modest row houses. Some houses weren't built out until the early 20th century, leading to oddities like bungalow rowhouses.
As with Lower Lawrenceville, Butler St. is the main commercial district, but it differs here from other areas in that it still retains some of the old Lawrenceville feel. Unlike Lower Lawrenceville and, as we will see later, Upper Lawrenceville, this business district was historically more stable and never saw much in the way of blight and abandonment. The result is that it's much more functional than in a typical gentrified neighborhood. In the introductory installment of this series, I made a distinction between functional businesses and destination businesses. The former are the kinds of things that everyone needs nearby but that no one would travel to seek out. The latter are things that nobody needs nearby but will draw in outsiders. Most gentrified businesses are destination businesses. I would further argue that destination businesses didn't begin to take on prominence until the 1970s, and weren't viewed as widespread attractions until the 1990s.
Suppose you were designing a city from scratch, like in Sim City. We'll take that there will be large employment centers for granted, and we'll also take for granted that there will be large residential concentrations, whether clustered around employment centers (as before WWII), or spread out among bedroom communities (as after WWII). It's your job to decide which businesses will go where. The way city planners traditionally looked at these things was that they'd take an area's population and figure out their needs and the frequency of those needs, along with what the neighborhood could support. Large amenities, of the type that a city can only support one, would go in a centrally-located downtown, and these were things like major department stores that were really entities in and of themselves. From there you'd look at things like grocery stores, bars, restaurants, gas stations, and the like and space them out in commercial clusters depending on the population, income, and projected demand of the area.
Even after World War II, as the automobile greatly improved mobility, these businesses could be spaced farther apart and serve larger areas, but the same principle remained. Most of our business is conducted within a short distance of our home or workplace. Prior to the 1990s, this was true of virtually all business. There might occasionally be a restaurant or store that you needed to travel to, but even these would be in arbitrary locations, excepting, of course, the large, regional amenities. What was new in the 1970s and took off in the 1990s was the idea that there were entire areas that people would travel to so that they could patronize businesses of the same general type for which they almost certainly had more convenient alternatives. On a recent Saturday I drove 20 miles to go to a brewery, at which I meant people who had driven even farther. In the 1950s, the idea that someone would drive that far to get a beer would seem ridiculous, unless they lived in a rural area and that was the distance to the nearest bar.
When we look at Pittsburgh, this dynamic first became expressed in the South Side. When J&L Steel built its sprawling mill there in the 19th century, employees had little choice but to live within walking distance, and the density was high enough to support a massive business district. Even as suburbanization went into full gear in the 1950s, the South Side's business district remained intact, because it was still close to a center of employment. It wasn't until the steel industry crash of the 1980s and the mill's closure in 1985 that vacancies started rising. The South Side's 1990s gentrification and subsequent rebranding was largely based in the reality that the kind of business that did best in close proximity of a steel mill was a tavern, and the high concentration of liquor licenses meant that the place could be rebranded as a nightlife district.
To the extent that Pittsburgh would have had a dedicated nightlife district in the 1950s it would have easily been Downtown, but that made sense because it was the center of activity for the region. A few years earlier you could have thrown the Hill District in the mix, but that would have also made sense since one would expect jazz clubs to be in an area with a large black population, especially in an era when they wouldn't have been tolerated Downtown. A few years later you may have said Oakland, but that would have made sense as well, because of the college population. But there was nothing about the bars in the 1980s South Side that held any particular appeal to an outsider, and by the time it became the center of Pittsburgh nightlife in the 1990s it made no sense because it didn't serve any particular population.
Likewise, Lawrenceville as a destination makes no sense. When the Planning Department did a survey of the city's shopping districts in 1965, it used the same logic as described above, making recommendations based on population and demographics. The Central Lawrenceville shopping district was thriving at the time, but the others weren't, and based on the data, there was little reason to do anything. Central didn't need help, and the others weren't worth saving. And this was in an era when the population of Lawrenceville was more than double what it is today. Of course, back then, the idea that anyone who didn't live in Lawrenceville would come there to shop didn't enter planners' minds, because it didn't make sense.
I know it seems like I veered way off track with that long digression, but the goal of this series is to see what we can learn about urban dynamics through a comprehensive examination of a city's neighborhoods. I was a history major in college, and coming up with viable theses drove me out of my mind, as the deeper I got into research the more evidence I'd uncover that didn't quite fit. Good historians understand that this evidence needs to be addressed and the thesis modified accordingly. Bad historians (and most pop historians) ignore this evidence or bend it to fit whatever just-so story their ideology warrants. Most discussions of urban dynamics I see online are based around case studies that are used to support just-so stories. In this installment, I'm trying to answer the question of why Lawrenceville turned around. But the broader question is "Why did Lawrenceville turn around, why didn't other neighborhoods turn around even though they seemed in better position to do so at the time, and what lessons can we learn from all of this?"
If you were in city government in the 1960s, you'd be witnessing suburbanization happening at a frightening pace and a reorganization of life around the automobile. The purpose of the 1965 report was to prioritize the use of city resources to stem this tide by ensuring that residents were provided with adequate shopping facilities, which, by 1960s standards, meant street improvements for better ingress and egress and expanded parking facilities. But the document contains a tacit admission that some areas simply aren't worth investing in, as investment is not supported by demographic trends. 30 years later the script had flipped and the goal became attracting the suburbanite who would normally just go to the mall. Redo the old squid port with high-end chain stores. Tear down a low-rent commercial district at Fifth and Forbes and replace it with a high-end one.
In the last installment, I roasted the armchair urbanists for their lack of perspective. Here, I reserve my ire for professionals and politicians. As a disclaimer, I have no formal training in public policy. But Lawrenceville's revival does not fit either of these planning narratives. Robert Hughes may have recognized the Soho effect in 1979, but he was an art critic, so what did he know? Real planners know that revitalization only happens if you bring in big developers and hold 175 public meetings where said developers show Power Points with shiny renderings and talk about affordable housing and ground floor retail with rents so high that the only businesses able to afford losing money operating there are national chains. Central Lawrenceville still had an intact functional business district. It also had a few vacant storefronts, and Lower Lawrenceville had a lot of vacant storefronts. There are a lot of reasons I believe Lawrenceville was able to turn around, but chief among them is the combination of the two.
Gentrified businesses do not often displace functional businesses. Instead, they either occupy vacant storefronts or displace other gentrified businesses. Functional businesses are boring but necessary. Destination businesses are fun but superfluous. What Lawrenceville had was a core of functional businesses that could provide necessities without requiring one to leave the neighborhood or even get in a car. If this is all it had, though, it would have just been another boring working class area that no one gave a second thought about; indeed that's what it was for most of its history. But it also had the vacant storefronts necessary to allow something more fun to move in. And the rent was cheap, which meant it could attract the kind of entrepreneur that couldn't afford other areas. I suspect the reason so many of these huge boondoggle developments fail is because they focus on the headline-grabbing destination businesses without taking into consideration that man cannot live on fun alone. So Lawrenceville is the kind of place where you can not only go out to eat, get coffee, and shop in a boutique, but also go to the dentist, optician, bank, drugstore, pick up a bottle at the Wine & Spirits. There are also things to do off Butler commercially. There are several scattered bars around, including places like Kelly's Corner, one of the few remaining old Lawrenceville establishments.
There's also the entirely separate Penn/Main business district, which it technically shares with Bloomfield but I'm including here in its entirety. This business district is of especial note because it includes Children's Hospital, built in 2009. I did not mention this in the introduction, because I personally do not believe that it's relevant, but media reports at the time suggested that the hospital's construction would spur Lawrenceville's revival, and media reports in the years since have fueled that assumption. This is complete hogwash. City planners are incapable of admitting that things happen absent their direction and instead created a just-so story to give them the credit. The theory goes that when the hospital opened it created demand that spurred doctors and other medical professionals to move to the area, increasing housing prices and revitalizing the business district. Aside from the ironic fact that city planners have traditionally treated hospitals as they do prisons, necessary evils that should be quarantined from polite society to the extent possible, and that there are plenty of places with similar amenities that have not seen any kind of turnaround (Uptown has a major hospital and a large-ish university), they seem to forgotten that there was a hospital on this exact site until 2002. The old St. Francis Hospital shut down, UPMC purchased it, and reconstructed/made additions to the buildings for use as a new Children's Hospital (which moved out of Oakland).
The surrounding business district had taken a hit when St. Francis closed, but the area was already on the rebound within a few years, and the damage was limited. Brillobox opened on Penn in 2005 and quickly became one the focal points of culture in Pittsburgh. By that I mean it was filled with hipsters. While it's technically on the Bloomfield side of the street it's realistically as much of a sign of and reason for the neighborhood's revival as anything else. This district is also notable for Wilson's Pharmacy. I haven't been in here and I imagine it's no different than any other pharmacy, but it's notable for the exterior, which apparently hasn't changed since the 40s.
As a final note before we leave Central Lawrenceville, Allegheny Cemetery is huge and, aside from being the final resting place of numerous prominent Pittsburghers, is also an unofficial park for the neighborhood. The whole thing is filled with sculptures and is impeccably landscaped, so it's common for residents to walk dogs here and even picnic among the tombstones. There are also a ton of deer here that are out of bounds for even the city's culling program (by virtue of it being private property), which means that I've seen bigger racks here on bucks than anywhere else.
Neighborhood Grade: Gentrified. 106 44th St. has 3 beds, 3 baths, and 1,785 square feet of living space. It sold for $8,000 in 2007. It sold for $424,900 in 2025. One thing I want to point out about the neighborhood grades: One of the criteria I had initially considered when determining if an area had "fully gentrified" or not was housing prices. The idea was that gentrifying areas had passed the tipping point where you couldn't find real deals anymore, but they were still cheaper than fully gentrified, stable upper middle class neighborhoods. The upper middle class designation would thus be for places where the neighborhood was past the point where anyone but those with means would be able to afford an existing house, and even rehabs were past the point where individuals could both afford them and afford the necessary renovations.
This may work in some contexts, for some neighborhoods, but Lawrenceville isn't one of them. Lawrenceville gentrified because hip, arty people made it trendy, and it's still trendy today because it's still the place to be if you consider yourself at least moderately hip. With that being said, it feels like it's on borrowed time more than it did, say, five or ten years ago. I suspect that the explosion of luxury condo and apartment developments in the Strip District took some of the pressure off, and there are enough working-class holdovers and bohemian types who moved in during the 2000s to prevent the neighborhood from being dominated by high-income tech and finance workers. But the business district is increasingly dominated by, and known for, high-end restaurants and bars, and there are stories of rent increases forcing out the small boutiques and art galleries that made Lawrenceville what it was. I don't want to put a timeline on when it will cross over into full-blown Yuppie territory, because that's dependent on complicated city dynamics and is tied to the fate of other neighborhoods, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens sooner rather than later.
10D. Upper Lawrenceville: The Tenth Ward
The part of Lawrenceville upstream of Stanton Ave. has always been the redheaded stepchild of the neighborhood. The vast expanse of Allegheny Cemetery and the sparse development on the opposite side of the street pose more of a barrier than the old arsenal, meaning that there was always a significant degree of separation between here and the main business district. At its furthest extent, beyond 57th St., development thins considerably as the valley narrows, and the neighborhood terminates at the 62nd St. Bridge. While the river is an obvious boundary, on the inland side Upper Lawrenceville is separated from adjoining neighborhoods by a steep hillside, which not only provides a well-defined boundary but also limits road connections to these places.
Historically, this was the last part of Lawrenceville to be built out. The earliest development dates to the 1870s, but that was limited to blocks close to Butler around 51st St. From there, development expanded both upstream and uphill, but it wasn't fully built out until the 1930s. As a result, the area looks different from the rest of Lawrenceville, as it isn't as dominated by brick rowhouses, and it creates an interesting effect as you go uphill. Starting at the streets close to Butler, it's about a 50/50 mix of brick and frame. As you go uphill, you run into an area that was built out during a time when Pittsburgh was expanding rapidly and brick was in short supply. As a result, the houses are mostly frame, though they are still built as rowhouses or near rowhouses, i.e. they are close enough together that they might as well touch. By the 1920s the brick shortage had ended, and as you get higher up brick houses reappear.
Unlike other parts of Lawrenceville, there is very little residential development below Butler, and most of what currently exists is recent development on old industrial sites. The business district also never developed to the extent of Central and Lower Lawrenceville and was suffering vacancy issues as early as the 1960s. That being said, what was built largely remains intact. I was surprised to discover that large gaps in the street wall, which I had presumed to be the result of blight or urban renewal plans gone awry, had actually always been there. The residential section seems to have gone into decline as early as the 1920s, with better-off residents first moving to the adjacent neighborhoods of Morningside and Stanton Heights, and later to the nearby suburb of Shaler. The city planners of the 1960s viewed the area's decline as an inevitability and recommended that the remaining businesses relocate to Central Lawrenceville, as the declining population was expected to obviate the need for a business district at all.
The result was that Upper Lawrenceville fell harder than the rest of the neighborhood, and the recovery was slower. As large housing projects began closing in the early 2000s, many of the former residents relocated there (by the middle of the decade, it was nearly 1/3 black). While this didn't lead to any appreciable increase in crime and vice problems, which had been plaguing the neighborhood for decades by that point, it did raise the specter of white flight. When my urban explorations began in earnest around 2007, Upper Lawrenceville was a much rougher place than the rest of Lawrenceville, as it hadn't experienced anything approaching gentrification. Dresden Way, an alley behind Butler, was a well-known site for heroin dealing and was littered with needles. I went to the grocery store once to see if it was any closer than the one I normally went to; it wasn't but even if it were, it was the kind of place where you had to tuck your pants into your socks before entering. The business district was mostly abandoned even into the 2010s, and what was there wasn't glamorous. It looked like the gentrification wave would stop at the cemetery, and Upper Lawrenceville would continue to decline.
These concerns turned out to be misplaced. Real estate agents are known to stretch the boundaries of desirable areas to make properties easier to sell, but here they didn't even have to do that. As Lawrenceville became a watchword, anywhere within the official neighborhood boundaries was fair game, and while Upper Lawrenceville was palpably grittier than the rest of Lawrenceville, once the rest of the neighborhood went from early gentrification to full-on mainstream gentrification, Upper Lawrenceville was primed to take up the slack. As I mentioned earlier, the abandonment without demolition was actually a boon to this process, as it allowed gentrified businesses to move in without having to displace established ones. I mentioned in a post a while back that a friend of mine owned an art gallery. She opened it in Upper Lawrenceville in 2014, by which time she wouldn't have been able to afford a storefront elsewhere on Butler, if she could even find one available.
At present, development has been creeping up Butler St., but it's a slow process. A large, 2 block long gap on the river side of Butler near McCandless Ave. has been filled in with a large retail/apartment complex with 300 units that's supposed to start leasing this year. Assuming this fills up, I'd expect it to play a big role in filling in a lot of the remaining vacancies. Previously, getting above McCandless involved walking past Bottle's Pub, which looked condemned, Conley's Bar, which probably should have been, and a used car lot, before an entire block of nothing surrounded by a chain link fence. There were several fine establishments past there, but the casual pedestrian would be forgiven for turning around at that point. The addition of hundreds of residents, all of whom are presumably moving there for walkability, plus the competed street wall, will hopefully make it economically viable for the remaining vacancies to be filled.
The explosion in new development over the past decade has not been without a downside. As it was the only part of Lawrenceville to have a substantial population of renters, many of the low-income residents have been gentrified out of Lawrenceville altogether. This includes much of the ephemeral black population, who had moved there following project closures and quickly found themselves displaced once again. Lawrenceville United, a neighborhood community organization, became concerned enough that they established a land trust to build homes for moderate income people, but this only resulted in one phase of construction that built seven houses.
Whatever else happens, I don't think development will ever extend past 56th St. In Upper Lawrenceville, Below Butler is dominated by active industries, and past that point they rise up to Butler St. itself and occasionally spill onto the other side, the biggest facility being a Sunoco terminal that would require a massive cleanup even if it were to close. There are some houses along Butler, but the slope above is too steep to support any real development, though there are a few isolated stands of houses that feel like West Virginia. These are officially in either Upper Lawrenceville, Stanton Heights, or Morningside, but they are cut off from the rest of their neighborhoods. These aren't unsafe, though there is some blight, and they can definitely give off a creepy vibe, especially if you go up here at night looking for a place to turn around.
Neighborhood Grade: Gentrified. This area has seen housing appreciation in the past 15 years comparable to the rest of Lawrenceville, but it was starting from a lower base. This combined with the lower-quality housing stock means that it remains more affordable. There was also historically more of a crime problem and a larger contingent of Section 8 renters, and while those problems are mostly in the past at this point, the area still has some of the Old Lawrenceville grittiness that's been completely snuffed out of the rest of the neighborhood. Ten years ago I'd have said that this was still in the early stages of gentrification, but it's passed that point and, if current trends hold, it won't be long before it's similar to the Central and Lower Lawrenceville.
10E. The Soho Effect
Hughes concluded:
In the 19th Century, artists used to live in bohemias which were interesting but not chic. Today, they make places chic by moving into them for a short time until the landlords raise the rent and boot them out again so they have to go somewhere else.
One of the questions I'd like to address in this installment is why Lawrenceville? How does it come to be that a declining, working-class industrial district with serious vice and crime problems manages to, within 15 years, become the city's most in-demand neighborhood? And how does this happen despite decades of neglect from the city? I ask these questions because, since at least the Urban Renewal era, there's been endless talk about this neighborhood and that neighborhood, how the city is pushing development, or developers are pushing development, or neither is happening but this place is in a prime location to take off, and sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't, but while public attention is focused elsewhere, Lawrenceville, a place no one gave any thought to whatsoever, swoops in and steals the limelight.
I think several factors play into this, some which are widely recognized and others which aren't. The most well-recognized factor is what has been dubbed the "SoHo Effect". When Hughes moved to New York in 1970, he didn't just happen to end up in SoHo. Artists had been renting disused industrial lofts for years as they provided inexpensive work space, as well as inexpensive, though illegal, living space. As Hughes moved to the city to take a job as art critic for Time magazine, he would have naturally wanted to live at the epicenter of the New York artistic world. By 1979, word had gotten out and his quiet little corner of Lower Manhattan had become chic.
Is this what happened in Lawrenceville? Partially. The gentrification was initiated by artists, who were then followed by hipsters, and finally by normies. In SoHo there was no intermediate step. What Hughes was complaining about at the end of the 1970s would speed into overdrive in the 1980s, but yuppie culture by its very nature wanted to be close to art culture. Art prices had increased over the past decade, and art became both an investment and a status symbol. While art may have provided the initial spark, describing Lawrenceville as an arts district akin to SoHo would be inaccurate. At last count there were about a dozen galleries, which is enough to host a gallery crawl, but with close to 90 galleries in the city as a whole its share isn't wildly disproportionate.
But more importantly, what happened in SoHo was synthetic. It was urban renewal. SoHo was an industrial district with a lot of abandoned factory space that needed to be repurposed, and it was the idea of city planners to offer professional artists cheap studio space. Lawrenceville didn't have the kind of factory lofts that SoHo did. What industry remained by the end of the century was smaller scale and still in operation. Looking to SoHo as a guide can give us some clues as to why it happened, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
The first factor that often goes uncommented on, which I discussed in detail above, is that its business district was unique in that it retained a functional core but had seen abandonment on the periphery. A neighborhood with only the former may be a nice place to live, but its businesses aren't easily dislodged, and destination businesses will never be able to develop sufficient density to gentrify an entire area. A neighborhood with only the latter is difficult for newcomers to live in, and the lack of existing foot traffic makes it difficult for new businesses to take root. In Lawrenceville, Butler St. provided residents with what they needed, but there was plenty of room for newcomers.
A factor discussed even less is the row house revival. This started in New York in the 1970s and quickly spread to other row house heavy cities—Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and, of course, Pittsburgh. But these early revivalists focused on intact examples that retained their historical details. Pittsburgh had plenty of these on the North Side, which had gone downhill quickly, but Lawrenceville remained working class much longer. By the 1950s, when suburban life became the ideal, small rowhouses were seen as outdated, and residents with cash to spare "modernized" them with new windows, awnings, siding, and other dubious improvements. These homeowners were proud of their modifications at the time, but they aged poorly. When the rowhouse craze started to take off in the 1990s, Pittsburgh still had plenty of intact examples that were large enough to have been chopped up into apartments in the past.
The remuddled, modest stock of Lawrenceville was of little interest to the urban pioneers. When these had all been redone, though, and the market wasn't slowing down, people began to look to other areas. The South Side benefited from this, but was starting to get pricy, and Lawrenceville was the next obvious place to look. I had a roommate who worked at the Warhol, and they had just hired a girl from NYC who wanted to own a row house in the worst way. Except in New York, you were looking at a million bucks for one at that point. In Pittsburgh, however, $100k would get you a nice one. The living room might have wood paneling and a drop ceiling, but your foot was in the door.
And then there's the racial aspect, which is uncomfortable to talk about but can't be ignored. Lawrenceville was white. Lawrenceville had vice problems, drug dealing, and the occasional shooting, but it didn't have gang violence in the same way that more traditional hoods did. More importantly, the white hipsters who moved in didn't feel like outsiders. I touched on this earlier, but there wasn't any friction at the time between old Lawrenceville and the newcomers. I don't want to give away too many spoilers from future installments, but at the same time this was going on, other areas of the city were seeing developers intentionally displacing long-time low-income residents in an attempt to revitalize the neighborhood. For most Pittsburghers at the time, this is what gentrification meant, not working-class white people being replaced by starving artists, students, and recent grads who didn't make a lot of money. That was just low-income white people being replaced by lower income white people, in a neighborhood where parts were already going Section 8.
Finally, we have to look at the context of what else was going on in Pittsburgh at the time. The South Side, which was the city's first trendy, arty area was starting to become yuppified, and its reputation rested primarily upon nightlife. The artistic-minded establishments may not have been driven out by rising rents, but the noise, traffic, and drunkenness made it anathema for anyone over 30 to visit on a Friday or Saturday night. In Oakland, rents were being raised in a deliberate attempt to drive out the counterculture and replace it with chain stores. The population loss the city had been experiencing for decades was beginning to stabilize, and the young people, who were leaving in droves the decade prior, were now sticking around, and wanted to live in the city. By this point, decades of disinvestment meant there were few "nice" areas remaining, and those that did exist were under increasing pressure. There were plenty of neighborhoods like Lawrenceville was at the beginning of the millennium, but there could be no diffuse settlement. Artists may not care where their studio space is so long as the rent is cheap, but if you're young and hip you want to go where the IT people are. Add in the other factors, and there were a few contenders, don't get me wrong, but Lawrenceville was the place everyone agreed on, and there's really nothing more to say.
As a housekeeping matter, I’ve decided to move this out of the CW thread and into its own post. I’ve done this for two reasons: The first is that, while these touch on culture war topics, they have yet to generate the kind of heat that suggests a quarantine is necessary and have taken on somewhat of a life of their own. The second, related, but more selfish reason is that these take entirely too long for me to write for them to be buried when Trump invades Iran or somebody posts about trans people for the 754th time.
Once again, I apologize for the long delay between posts, but this one was a monster. Rather than taking my usual break, I started writing this almost immediately after the last installment dropped, and I hoped to have this out by Christmas, but despite my slowly plugging away at it over the weeks it seemed to grow exponentially, and here we are. Which I guess brings me to a third reason for moving it: The ridiculous length. We’re talking about Oakland, which is a large, important, and diverse part of the city, and while I could have had these out earlier had I divided them up the way I did the Hill District, there wasn’t any way to do so that made sense. So your reward for waiting is what comes out to 30+ pages as written in work, not including links. For both people here who look forward to these, I guess this is your reward for waiting, and for the rest of you, I’ve made these easier to avoid entirely.
Series Index:
- Intro
- Downtown
- Strip District
- North Shore
- South Side
- Hill District: Lower Hill
- Hill District: Middle Hill
- Hill District: The Projects
- The Hill’s Environs: Uptown, Sugar Top, and Polish Hill
9. Oakland: Pittsburgh's Second City
Oakland is the academic, scientific, medical, and cultural hub not just of Pittsburgh but of all of Western Pennsylvania. It is also the third largest business district in the state, behind Center City Philadelphia and Downtown Pittsburgh. Oakland as a whole is bounded on the west mostly by parts of the Hill District, though its main entrance from that direction, so to speak, is from Uptown via Forbes Ave. It follows the hillside from south to north and creeps up the slope to varying degrees until the border with Polish Hill at the Bloomfield Bridge. On the south, the Monongahela River forms a pretty clear boundary, as does Junction Hollow on the southeast. North from there, though, the boundary is somewhat indistinct, as the exact spot where it bleeds into Shadyside is a matter of opinion. The city’s opinion, while official, excludes a number of landmarks traditionally thought of as part of Oakland and not thought of as part of their official neighborhoods, most notably the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, which literally nobody, the university included, considers to be in Squirrel Hill.
The city officially divides Oakland into North Oakland, South Oakland, Central Oakland, and West Oakland. These are only vague guidelines, however, since North Oakland and West Oakland only really include parts of the official neighborhoods, South Oakland colloquially refers to an area that is officially part of Central Oakland. Central Oakland doesn’t exist colloquially; it’s just Oakland, but anywhere else in Oakland can also naturally be described as such, including the parts I mentioned earlier that aren’t officially even a part of Oakland. To make the situation even more confusing, there are also some semi-official sub-neighborhoods. I’ve done the best I can at dividing them in a way that makes sense and ensures that every part of Oakland that deserves separate treatment gets it, while preserving well-recognized definitions as closely as possible.
I should also add that I have more of a personal connection to this place than I do to other parts of Pittsburgh. Although I never lived here, I went to Pitt Law School, and if there’s anything that comes to mind when people think of Oakland it’s that it’s the home of Pitt. Perhaps more importantly, though less relevant to my own nostalgia, I took my first breath here at 300 Halket St., as did about half of Pittsburghers born after 1970 and quite a few before. At 10,000 births a year Magee Women’s Hospital outpaces everywhere else by a wide margin (second place only has 3,000) and accounts for 40% of all births in Allegheny County. I should add that despite the name, in recent years UPMC has been aggressively advertising its services to men, though it will always be known as a maternity hospital.
9A. Steel City Beautiful
On of the themes that has developed over the course of this series is that the armchair urbanists who are so prevalent online often base their arguments upon two assumptions that do not stand up to historical scrutiny. These assumptions are woven into a narrative that goes as follows: Older American cities were allowed to develop organically, which resulted in the wonderful urban cores we see in the major cities of the Northeast and Upper Midwest. While this wonderful chaos was stymied somewhat by the introduction of zoning in the early 20th century, the focus on the automobile in the decades after World War II effectively killed it. The result was that newer cities would become oversized suburbs, while older ones would be subjected to urban renewal projects designed to make them more like the newer ones. A key component of this was the introduction or revision of zoning codes that made cities of the older style effectively illegal, requiring most new residential construction to be single family homes with generous setbacks. Also, this was totally a conspiracy among automakers to make the public more car-dependent.
What escapes these people is that they're applying 21st century values to an early 20th century reality. It's easy wax rhapsodic about density when everybody, no matter how poor, has access to treated water on-demand, sewage systems that don't require us to give our waste a second thought, electric appliances that obviate the need for open flames, and buildings with fire suppression systems. And it's especially easy to wax rhapsodic when urban living is a matter of choice and not one of necessity. To put it bluntly, urban conditions in 1900 were not the same as they are in 2026, and then, as now, there were reformers with their own ideas on how to address the situation.
And thus, City Beautiful. I'm tempted to call it a movement, but it wasn't so much a movement as a set of related ideas about urban design that coalesced in the 1890s. The first of these was that cities should address aesthetic concerns through public art, particularly sculpture and architecture. The second was the idea of civic improvement. This is a hard concept for us to grasp now, as it has become a subconscious assumption, but in the 1800s it was a new idea that citizen groups should take an active interest in improving their communities. Finally, there was the idea that urban design should complement and improve the natural landscape, rather than view it as a nuisance to be overcome, as exemplified in Frederick Law Olmstead's design for Central Park. These ideas converged at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, where the White City offered an urban vision distinctly different from the existing reality—the gleaming neoclassical buildings set in an impeccably landscaped park along Lake Michigan, lit with brilliant electric light, stood in stark contrast to the tenements and factories adjacent to it. What would it be like if a whole city looked like this?
No one contemplated that question more than the industrialists of Pittsburgh (Andrew Carnegie wrote an essay on the value of the fair to America). With its easy river transportation and access to rich coal seams, the siting for an industrial city was almost too good to be true, and it exploded as such. The geography of Pittsburgh was the stuff that made millionaires, but when they looked upon what they had built, they couldn't help but be embarrassed. Even by the standards of the time, Pittsburgh was especially awful. At this time, development was concentrated in river valleys and the Lower Hill, save for a few outposts where the railroad had penetrated. Most developed areas had population densities in excess of 25,000 people per square mile, and the Lower Hill had a population density in excess of 100,000 people per square mile. To put that in perspective, 2020s Manhattan has a population density of around 75,000 people per square mile, and Brooklyn has a population density of around 40,000 people per square mile. These densities in Pittsburgh, however, were achieved not with high-rise apartments or tenement buildings, but with people cramming into single-family houses and small apartment buildings. In an era where most people had to live withing walking distance of work, and when pollution controls were nonexistent, Pittsburgh had little to offer that wasn't purely economic.
Luckily for the industrialists and civic improvers, a series of mergers in the mid-19th century meant that Pittsburgh had plenty of undeveloped land available for expansion. In particular, there was plateau to the east of the Hill that formed the bed of an ancient river channel. Wealthy Pittsburghers had been living in the Bellefield area since the 1830s, as they fled the cholera epidemics that plagued Downtown as well as the fire of 1840, and working class residents were starting to inhabit the cliffs above the river. But at the time Mary Schenley donated 400 acres for parkland in 1889, the area was still largely pastoral.
The industrialists had found the perfect spot to build a new Pittsburgh that was free of the stigma of the old. While Carnegie and Mellon would be the two men the most often associated with Oakland's early years, no man had a bigger influence than Franklin Nicola. Nicola was not an industrialist or financier but a real estate developer, and his purchase and development of farmland would play a key role in ensuring that Oakland developed as a paragon of City Beautiful thought. He purchased the remainder of the Schenley land and divided it into educational, residential, social, and monumental quarters. In the ensuing years he and others would, in collaboration with architects such as Henry Hornbostel and Benno Janssen, construct some of the more prominent buildings in what can be described as Monumental Oakland.
Nicola's vision, emblematic of the movement as a whole, went beyond mere aesthetics. Notice that there is no quarter dedicated to commerce, none dedicated to industry. Proximity to work and the amenities required for everyday living were a minor concern compared to proximity to higher education, social clubs, civic monuments, museums, churches, and libraries. City Beautiful planning was not meant to solve practical problems but to transform urban society into a more virtuous society. It was thought that city planning could eliminate, or at least mitigate, the crime and squalor that was associated with urban living. Whether or not this would be successful was an open question, as urban planning was in its infancy. By present standards, City Beautiful does not have a good reputation, as most of the proposals were abandoned early and came nowhere near completion, and many of the ideas—lots of green space, superblocks, and the idea that urban environment could affect public virtue—would later be incorporated into the disastrous urban renewal policies that were implemented mid-century. If one wants a modern example of what was intended, look at the Capitol District in Washington, DC, which is the result of John McMillan’s plan to approximate Pierre L’Enfant’s original vision for the city by removing the Victorian-era modifications that had been made over the previous century.
As far as Oakland is concerned, though, City Beautiful was a smashing success, not so much because the vision was seen through but more because there never was an overarching vision. City Beautiful as applied to Oakland was less a comprehensive plan than a series of smaller plans that played into a basic idea. As trends moved on, so did Oakland, but it still remained the nerve center for the city’s more high-minded elements, and while tastes changed over the years, it has more interesting architecture than anywhere else in the city with the possible exception of Downtown. If the McMillan Plan for Washington, DC is the canonical example of what City Beautiful planning is supposed to look like when fully implemented, then Oakland represents what City Beautiful can achieve when the concept is put in place but is allowed to develop on its own.
9B. West Oakland: Not Out of the Woods Yet
We've been talking about the Hill District for a while now, and while we're ostensibly moving on, there's one niggling issue when it comes to West Oakland. This is both an official city neighborhood and a legitimate area in its own right, but for a large part of its history it was sort of considered part of the Hill District. Geographically, the area we're talking about includes the residential area between Terrace Village and the Pitt campus, plus the campus of Carlow. The official boundaries include part of Soho and part of the Pitt/UPMC complex as well, but I'm discounting these because the former is obviously part of another neighborhood and the latter has more in common with the rest of the Pitt campus than the residential areas to the west.
I'm including Carlow College here because, while it's in Oakland, it's in its own world and isn't really connected to the Pitt campus or the business district. I know people who spent 4 years at Pitt and couldn't tell you where it was other than the sign on Fifth Ave. Educationally, it's a small college run by the Sisters of Mercy that was an all-girls school until 20 years ago and is now technically coed but is still 85% women. It's the kind of place Catholic mothers will push their daughters towards because there won't be as many boys as Duquesne. Also included in this part of Oakland is Chesterfield Rd., which is residential but is really its own thing because it's a student area located outside of the main student areas. It's interesting architecturally, if only because it's a master class in mid-century remuddling. The houses were originally built in the 1920s and were identical duplexes with mock Tudor trim on the second floors. Now you see everything from vinyl siding to stucco having replaced it, as well as a few that are still original.
The heart of West Oakland, though, is the residential area surrounding Robinson St. This is a lower-middle class black area and traditionally hasn't seen the same amount of student encroachment as the rest of Oakland, despite its proximity to campus. Unlike the rest of the Hill District, levels of blight are low, but it was still a rough area. During my college years, it was pretty much accepted that one didn't go west of the Fitzgerald Field House. I knew a couple of people who were jumped near there, and I've heard stories of unscrupulous landlords who would rent to out of town students whose apartments would then get broken into when they were home on break. I find it odd that while I don't have any problem visiting the Hill District itself these days, I still get sketched out by West Oakland. The minimal blight made it one of the few parts of the city that was actually worse than it looked.
So, for decades, Pitt students and everyone else treated this as part of the Hill. But I'm not going to. First, it's officially part of Oakland, which I know I'm discounting but it still counts for something. Second, the history of the area is more one of Oakland than one of the Hill. It was built out in the first decades of the 20th century—much later than the Hill—and by the 1920s was largely an Irish neighborhood. It's difficult to tell when the demographic shift occurred because the census tracts don't line up, but the available data suggests that it happened some time between 1960 and 1980. The biggest reason I've included this as part of Oakland, though, is because I simply wouldn't know how to categorize it as part of the Hill because it doesn't have a distinctive name apart from West Oakland. It borders Terrace Village but it's not part of the neighborhood as it was never a project, and it's certainly not part of Uptown or Sugar Top.
Neighborhood Grade: Sketchy but Safe. I suspect that the area's poor reputation stems from its proximity to Allequipa Terrace and the associated spillover. From what I can tell, the demographics of West Oakland changed as the projects started to get bad, and when the projects closed, former residents sought housing there. Once this generation of troublemakers aged out or moved on, and crime in the city dropped generally, West Oakland staged a modest recovery. The downside to this is that it's become increasingly attractive as a student area. While most of the current residents are service employees of the universities and hospitals, the lure of inflated rents will likely cause a slow deterioration rather than a full recovery.
9C. Central Oakland: The Oakland of Chancellor Bowman
Alright, I promise you we're done with the Hill District now. Central Oakland is a semi-bogus name that city planners use, since most people would just call this Oakland, but it's really Oakland qua Oakland. It includes most of the Pitt Campus, most of the hospitals, and the main business district. Officially, these areas comprise all of Central Oakland, and parts of North Oakland and West Oakland.
Getting back to the City Beautiful vision, in 1908 the Western University of Pennsylvania moved its campus from the North Side to Oakland, and as part of the move changed its name to the University of Pittsburgh. A contest was held for the design of the new campus and the winning submission went to Henry Hornbostel. At the time Hornbostel was Pittsburgh's court architect of sorts, having designed a disproportionate share of public buildings, and his design for the new campus was bold. Hornbostel's "Acropolis Plan" would have put 30 Greek Revival buildings on the hillside above O'Hara St, topped with a full-scale reproduction of the Forum of Trajan in Rome, huge escalators being built to move students and faculty up and down the hill. Only four buildings were completed as part of the original plan, though a few more were part of the plan in spirit. Throughout the first decade in Oakland, the university relied largely on temporary buildings, and funding was hard to come by, especially after the outbreak of the First World War. Compounding the problem was that the project's genesis was toward the end of the City Beautiful era. Neoclassical architecture soon began going out of style, and when John Gabbert Bowman became chancellor in 1921, the project was shelved.
While the Acropolis plan looks good in renderings, anyone familiar with the geography of the area understands that it wouldn't have been as impressive in practice; there is simply no vantage point from which it would have been visible. The VA Hospital, which sits at the top of the hill, is taller than anything Hornbostel planned on building, and it's invisible from most of Oakland. The renderings, while impressive, are taken from a vantage point which simply does not exist. Even at the time, when the area was undeveloped, the only place where the desired effect may have been achieved was from the campus of Carnegie Tech. When John Gabbert Bowman became chancellor in 1921, he scrapped the plan in favor of something even more ambitious: An Art Deco/Gothic skyscraper that would serve not as a mere schoolhouse but as a monument for education. Tour guides may point out that the Cathedral of Learning is the tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere, but they should also add that it is, bar none, the finest educational building in the world. Rising like a sentinel, there is hardly a spot in Oakland without a view of it, and on a clear day it can be seen from the top of Chestnut Ridge, over 50 miles away. It's the heart of the Pitt campus, and the most enduring symbol of the University.
One aspect of Pitt's history that I find especially interesting is that the campus is a pastiche of academic architectural trends. This is true of all campuses, to some degree, but seems especially true with Pitt, as the original plan's infeasibility caused it to spill from its original bounds early in its history. Most campuses, even urban campuses, have a core area set aside for them where the campus first developed, and over time things gradually expanded from there or were filled in. Pitt's original Oakland campus, the site where the Acropolis was to go, currently has 14 buildings. These include several residence halls and a fraternity complex, and include neither the main administration offices or the school's most iconic building. By contrast, there are more than 50 campus buildings scattered throughout the rest of Oakland, the Cathedral included.
So, from the original, stillborn campus plan we have a only a handful of buildings in the Neoclassical Beaux-Arts style, followed by the Collegiate Gothic of the Cathedral and its two associated buildings, Heinz Memorial Chapel and the Stephen Foster Memorial. The Cathedral was an institution-defining project but had the misfortune of being completed during the Depression. By the time WWII ended and the university was in a position to begin expanding again, Collegiate Gothic had fallen out of favor, and Pitt did not seem to favor any particular style in its new buildings and preferred to purchase existing buildings and repurpose them. It would not be until the 1960s that the next wave of construction would begin, and by this time Modernism was the style of the day. In particular, the site of the former Forbes Field and the adjacent frontage on Forbes Ave. would see a complex of new buildings in the much-maligned Brutalist idiom.
My relationship with these buildings is complicated. I am no fan of Brutalism, and these buildings are not exactly beloved by students, but they work. For three years of my life, I practically lived in this cluster of buildings that includes the Law School, David L. Lawrene Hall, Posvar Hall, and the Hillman Library. The first three of these are more or less representative of Brutalism's worst excesses—bulky exteriors, huge overhangs, internal pedestrian plazas that don't engage with the street, cavernous interior lobbies, and lots and lots of concrete. The Hillman Library is a kinder, gentler Brutalism, and is an example of the style done right, even if doing it right means sacrificing stylistic purity. But these buildings do function, and for proof of this one only needs to look across Forbes Ave.; for as beautiful and iconic as the Cathedral is, it doesn't work particularly well as an academic building. Accommodating students seems to be a particular problem, as it is too narrow to hold large classrooms. Much of it is used for administrative offices, and the academic rooms are rather awkwardly arranged. Emblematic of this is the famed nationality rooms. There are at least 30 of these classrooms that were meticulously designed to represent the various countries whose immigrants helped shape Pittsburgh. Such attention to detail was paid of making them period-accurate that every professor who has a class scheduled in one of them immediately tries to get it moved into a normal classroom.
Or so it was during my time at Pitt. The university administration, rather than recognizing the architectural incongruity as something that made Pitt unique, decided that the situation was unacceptable and is currently in the midst of an expensive renovation program where they intend to make everything look as homogenous as possible. While they aren't stupid enough to try to mess with the Cathedral, the Brutalist buildings make easy targets, and they've since been renovated in the bland, corporate style that's de rigeur in Class A office interiors. The Hillman Library, one of the best Brutalist buildings ever constructed (nay, one of the few good ones ever constructed), has been completely ruined by a glass atrium in front of the lobby reminiscent of the pyramid at the Louvre, only less charming. The interior was nothing special but at least looked how a typical campus library was supposed to look and functioned like one was supposed to function. Now they've given it the ambiance of an airport terminal and decided that, in order to foster a "collaborative atmosphere" good, sturdy desks and chairs would be replaced with low sofas and coffee tables. The library had a bit of a reputation as "Club Hillman" for the amount of socializing that went on there, but leaning into like this in a way that makes it difficult to use textbooks, writing pads, or a computer is taking the idea too far.
Apart from the Pitt campus, the Oakland business district, while large, isn't particularly impressive. Prior to 2005 or so, Oakland was the center of, for lack of a better word, alternative culture in Pittsburgh, and had a wide array of cool bars, coffee shops, bookstores, and other amenities typical of a college town. It was Pittsburgh's Greenwich Village, so to speak. Beginning in the 2000s, however, two forces came together that would strip it of this status. The first was the University itself, which began buying the commercial properties and evicting tenants in favor of chains that could afford high rent. The Beehive Theater became a New Balance store, Club Laga became a Radio Shack, and the Chipotles, Dunkin' Donuts, and Gamestops of the world began taking over Forbes Ave. The second factor, which may have been spurred by the first, was the gentrification of other neighborhoods that had heretofore been working class and unglamorous. Even the bars are the kinds of places that cater to college students, and they aren't even great in that respect since Pitt isn't much of a party school. The one thing the business district does have going for it is the variety of ethnic restaurants. While other neighborhoods are also strong in this respect, recent surveys show that this is the preferred location for new proprietors, as the captive audience of an open-minded college crowd allows them to do brisk business.
Neighborhood Grade: Non-residential. I guess you could count students in the Pitt dorms and people in the hospital long-term, but this is a commercial and institutional area. Seeing as everything around here revolves around Pitt and, to a lesser extent, UPMC, I expect any future development to be entirely in Pitt's image. That being said, there has been some significant construction on the western end of Forbes in the past decade or so, UPMC recently completed an extension of Presbyterian Hospital on the old Children's Hospital site, and there's another building going up where a parking garage used to be, so things keep moving. But this is already one of the most densely built-out parts of the city, and it feels like it's getting near capacity.
9D. South Oakland: The Ghetto
This is officially part of Central Oakland, but everyone calls it South Oakland. Adding to the confusion is there is an entirely different part of Oakland that is officially South Oakland, about which more in a later section. This area is bounded by the Forbes Ave. business district on the north, the Boulevard of the Allies on the South, Panther Hollow on the East, and Magee Women's Hospital on the west. When the second founding of Pittsburgh was merely a glimmer in an industrialist's eye, employees of the iron works at Soho and Linden Grove began settling the cliffs above the river. Oakland Square was developed in 1889, and over the succeeding decades, various immigrant groups, mostly Italians, began filling out the rest of the area.
The University of Pittsburgh's enrollment, however, began to explode in the decades following WWII. Prior to the war, there were few enough students that my grandmother (Class of 1935) had a yearbook with everyone's picture. The GI Bill caused enrollment to surge to 12,000 by 1950, 18,000 in 1965, and with the Baby Boomers reaching college age, it hit 27,000 in the early 1970s. One consequence of this is that housing became scarce. Pitt had few dormitories until the 1950s when it purchased Schenley Quad, former luxury apartment buildings on Forbes Ave, and the adjacent Schenley Hotel (now the student union). The poorly regarded Litchfield Towers were built in the 1960s, but this wasn't enough, as in 1971 there was still only room for 3,750 to live on campus.
Pitt, never a stranger to ambitious construction plans, sought in 1969 to build dormitories for 1,000 students at the top of the hill near the current location of the VA hospital, setting the stage for a showdown that would define the conflicting interests and contradictory positions of developers vs. residents. A group called People's Oakland was formed, whose goal was to resist university expansion to the extent they could. Remember, this is around the same time that Pete Flaherty was elected mayor among the growing distaste for large urban renewal projects, and Pitt's various plans for expansion were viewed as part of the same scourge. Long-term Oakland residents, often allied with students, sought to stem the tide. People's Oakland's stance was that the neighborhood was already too crowded, and more residential construction would only exacerbate traffic and other problems stemming from too many people. They particularly resented what they viewed as the university trying to ram projects through without community involvement. After all, we live in a democracy, and if the People don't want a new dormitory, then they should be able to say no.
In the short term, People's Oakland was successful; they were able to block the project. In the long run, though, they should have foreseen that they were cutting off their nose to spite their face. Even in 1971, it was clear that the housing situation was forcing students into residential areas, but the long-term residents thought that stopping construction meant stopping expansion. In reality, freezing dorm construction for 20 years only put increased pressure on the residential areas, and by the time Sutherland Hall was constructed in the early 1990s (on a site near the defeated project's location), there were few long-term residents left. In subsequent years, Pitt has successfully built several new dormitories and school-owned apartments, but this hasn't put much of a dent in the market. People's Oakland set out to save the old neighborhood, but they ended up destroying it.
So South Oakland is a prototypical student ghetto. The rents are insane, as they consider every bedroom in a house being occupied by someone paying a pro rate share of the entire rent. $2100 for a three bedroom is already on the high side in Pittsburgh, but that gets you nice digs in a fashionable part of town. In Oakland, that get you a place with indoor/outdoor carpeting, a kitchen that hasn't been updated since the 60s, a bathroom that hasn't been updated since the 30s, mold problems, heating systems so inefficient that $700 gas bills aren't uncommon, and, in at least one instance, a chimney collapsing onto someone's bed (luckily when he wasn't home).
If Oakland were a typical mill neighborhood this situation would be tolerable, a necessary evil. The shame of it all is that it is architecturally one of the finest places in the city. It was built out during a time when Pittsburgh's housing was in a period of transition and accordingly has a wide variety of typologies, from typical Pittsburgh vernaculars like detached homes and brick rowhouses to smaller multi-family styles like six-flat apartments that are more reminiscent of Chicago. In a different timeline, this could have been one of the city's architectural gems, but the houses were mostly ruined by various absentee landlords who deferred necessary maintenance and remuddled historic facades.
One would think that after 50 years of gradual neighborhood deterioration long-term residents would give up the ghost when it comes to opposing housing projects, but no such luck. In 2014, a developer bought a row of houses on Bates St. dating from 1914 with the intention of demolishing them and building an apartment complex on the land. Community opposition blocked this project, leaving the rowhouses vacant but still extant. The developer simply walked away, and by 2021, the site was actively hazardous, and the property was transferred to a conservator who intended to renovate them. But by that point they hadn't been occupied for seven years and were beyond the point of repair. Developer Walnut Capital bought the property in 2021, demolished the structures, and conveyed the land to the university.
Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. Walnut Capital had previously tried to renovate an abandoned car dealership into an apartment complex, but community opposition blocked that project as well. While they were eventually able to settle on office space, the South Oakland housing shortage still loomed large, and they set their sights on a former Quality Inn, which they wanted to convert into apartments with a grocery store on the ground floor. By 2024 this project was "on indefinite hold", due to, you guessed it, community opposition. The relevant community groups evidently had no particular problem with the project itself but instead latched onto concerns that the developer wasn't meeting with the right people in the right order, and something about how Oakland was developing a new 10-year plan and they should wait until that was out before starting the whole process over again.
The ironic thing about this is that all these projects were supposed to be for the benefit of long-term residents, not students. The few long-term residents have made it clear multiple times, including in the since-released 10-year plan, that one of their goals is to increase the number of long-term residents as a backstop against the university. To be fair, the university is such a behemoth that developers like Walnut Capital are forced to partner with them if they want to build anything in Oakland, as they could probably block it themselves if they don't like it. They then want certain concessions that the developer may or may not be interested in giving. Pitt's involvement then poisons the whole project because the residents see it as further university encroachment into their territory. Pitt wanted to build lab space or something similar in one of those projects, and the residents took the position that campus extending that far south was unacceptable. So we're left with a toxic situation where South Oakland is in a permanently deteriorated state and any hope of relief is stymied by a complicated network of animosities that sinks any effort to relieve the problem. Neighborhood Grade: Student area. There's absolutely no reason for anyone to live here who doesn't attend Pitt. For that matter, there's little reason to live here even if you do attend Pitt. Even graduate students wouldn't be caught dead here. It's safe, though you still have to deal with loud parties, the occasional flaming couch, and drunk people smashing car mirrors for no reason. When Mexican immigrants first started coming to Pittsburgh Oakland was one of the neighborhoods where they concentrated, but the above issues led them to vamoose once they realized there were better options. Making things even more sad is that even with the huge Central Oakland business district, this area is still able to support a smaller business district on Semple and scattered businesses throughout the neighborhood. It could be a gem of urbanism. The silver lining in all of this is that the high demand makes it unlikely that the area will ever see wholesale blight and abandonment, but unless serious changes are made to student housing policy, most of these properties will forever be faded glories.
9E. The Real South Oakland: The Bad Part of Oakland
This area has no particular name and is officially part of South Oakland, but it has a totally different vibe than what is commonly referred to as such. It occupies a peninsula (if you can call it that) of the plateau that Oakland sits on, loosely bounded by the parkway on the south, Panther Hollow on the east, Bates St. on the west, and firmly bounded by the Boulevard on the north. This is one of the few parts of Oakland that is dominated by long-term residents, mostly elderly Italians in the north and blacks in the far southeast. This latter area's demographics are the basis of the subtitle, which is partially tongue in cheek. The true bad part of Oakland was always West Oakland, but this is still sketchier than the other South Oakland, trading some student ghetto elements for real ghetto ones. That said, it's not seriously unsafe and still has a neighborhood feel.
The area began to be settled in the 1870s but development continued through the 1920s, and even today there have been relatively recent infill projects on the sites of an old mill and a school. Some students have been living here, particularly in the northern part near the Boulevard, and there's a decided tension with the long-term residents, who don't want to see this go the way of the other South Oakland and otherwise decrease quality of life by making parking space scarce and increasing through-traffic. Student potential here is ultimately limited though due to zoning, which prohibits chopping up single family homes into apartments and puts limits on the number of unrelated persons who can live together, as well as efforts beginning with the Peduto administration to aggressively enforce code violations. But it's really too far away from campus to be of much interest to undergraduates.
I didn’t write a good spot for pictures so here are some rowhouses, and here is a more streetcar suburban area.
Neighborhood Grade: Stable. While there's a certain appeal for students who can't afford a house a 10-minute walk from campus renting a cheaper house a 20-minute walk from campus, this isn't going to turn into a student ghetto any time soon. Conscious efforts to retain a corner of old Oakland aside, the Boulevard of the Allies is a four-lane road that can be dangerous to cross on foot and presents a real barrier to walkability. Exacerbating this further is the lack of a business district apart from the other South Oakland. The Boulevard is somewhat mixed-use, but these are things like medical offices and auto-related businesses. There may be some attraction for non-student professionals who work in Oakland, but it's always going to be a more marginal area in terms of desirability.
9F. The Bates Basin
This one doesn't get a subtitle because it's a small area and there's not much to say about it, but it's distinctive enough to merit its own section. It occupies the bowl surrounding the southern end of Bates St., where the grade eases enough to allow access to the plateau above. This bowl is mostly wooded and is thinly settled, giving it a West Virginia feeling. The big issue here is that this part of Bates St. is effectively one big highway onramp, being the main link between the Parkway and Oakland. There have been various proposals throughout the years to widen it to four lanes for better access, but these keep getting tabled for unknown reasons. The new 10-year plan I referred to earlier includes a call to not only expand Bates to four lanes but also add special transit lanes and bicycle infrastructure to give Oakland a much-needed bicycle connection to the Eliza Furnace Trail below (the current connection is sketchy and inconvenient). Included in the plan is the desire to demolish all the houses in the basin to create some kind of green buffer, though I suspect that people in Oakland just don't like the run-down, backwoodsy feel of the place.
Neighborhood Grade: Sketchy but safe. The houses here are either right on top of a traffic jam or in what looks like a West Virginia holler town. I once met a guy who lived here and said he liked it, and I've biked through here trying to find a safer way up the hill and it was fairly interesting, though the streets all dead end and I half expected a guy to come out with a shotgun and tell me to get off his property.
9G. Oakcliffe: NIMBYism Done Right?
This small area is bounded by the Boulevard on the north and west, the Parkway on the south, and the Bates ravine on the east. This is officially part of South Oakland but is also an official micro-neighborhood and has a very active civic organization. Typologically, this is a more brick, urban, rowhouse dominated area. Like everywhere south of the Boulevard, it's about 50/50 student/resident and is defined by conflicts between long-term residents and slumlords who snap up available properties in all cash transactions, but the neighborhood organization has made things especially testy around here, as its closer proximity to campus than the rest of Oakland south of the Boulevard makes it particularly vulnerable.
About ten years ago a landlord was fined $300,000 for having too many unrelated people living together. I don't want to belabor the point about student ghettos too much, but the whole phenomenon presents a conundrum to YIMBYism and armchair urbanism more generally. Most contemporary commentary centers around the idea that zoning regulations and other mechanisms prevent cities from achieving their full potential by artificially boosting land values and artificially creating housing shortages. If we were only to eliminate these mechanisms, or at least severely restrict them, we could simultaneously create more dynamic cities and lower housing costs. Also, the people who implemented these things were racist and probably paid off by the auto industry.
Now, I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but I'm fairly confident that most of these YIMBYs wouldn't view ever-expanding student ghettos as a positive development. Yet, they are created by market forces, and it's zoning that's keeping Oakcliffe intact. The area is zoned single-family, and only three unrelated persons can live together. The community organization is full of good people, but they're mostly a snitch patrol who aggressively report violations. While I don't think they have a problem with students per se, they prefer the kind of people who plan on staying for a while and who will engage with the community.
When they're not busy protesting every plan for additional development, they're ostensibly supporting the city's strategy of limiting the student ghetto to the area between Forbes and Bates. It's a reasonable plan but actually achieving it would mean obliterating the current neighborhood to build new high rises. The reality is that there is a population that doesn't have a lot of money but does have an above-average willingness to tolerate poor living conditions and a requirement of living in an area where they don't need a car, and student ghettos are a result.
Except there's something else going on here that nobody takes into a consideration. The above scenario is suspiciously similar to conditions during Pittsburgh's time as an industrial boom town. Cars hadn't been invented, so living within walking distance of the mills was necessary, and the population consisted almost entirely of poor immigrants who were willing to tolerate crowded, substandard conditions. The social reformers of the day took a look at these situations and found them unacceptable. In the 1920s, they would establish zoning codes and later, building codes, to ensure that nobody had to live like this. In the 1950s, they began ambitious slum clearance programs to end the problem, but it's clear from the writings of the reformers that they had desired to do this as early as the 1890s.
In the Oakcliffe Community Organization's meeting minutes, I found a note about proposing the demolition of 2610 Forbes Ave. This house is currently sited on what is effectively a highway onramp, where the Parkway, Forbes Ave., and the Boulevard of the Allies all come together at Oakland's Main Entrance from Downtown. It looks like this house was occupied as recently as 2016 but has since been abandoned and is currently owned by the city. It stands alone, perched precariously on the hillside, but it was once part of a group of houses in a part of Soho called Rock Alley. There is a report from 1914 describing the area as muddy, unsanitary, and dilapidated, with sewers running through the streets and some homes open to the snow and ice. Following this report, the residents were relocated and the houses were demolished, though this house hung on through the construction of the Parkway in the 1950s, the Birmingham Bridge in the 1970s, and the realignment of Forbes and the Boulevard in 2008. One could argue that it should be allowed to remain, the last outpost of a neighborhood lost in the name of progress and reform, that had it managed to hang on certainly wouldn't have survived the ravages of urban renewal and its demands for improved auto accessibility.
But let's be honest, the house needs to go. It's on a terrible piece of property in a city with a lot of terrible pieces of property, it was substandard when it was built over 100 years ago, and it has no appeal, save for possibly someone with absolutely nowhere else to go. The point I'm trying to make here is that these things are complicated. Should the residents of Oakcliffe simply abandon their little slice of Oakland to fate and leave when conditions become intolerable? Should we give up on South Oakland altogether and replace the existing urban fabric with student apartment complexes the size of the Tower of Babel? Are Pitt's expansion strategies a reasonable response to demand? Are Walnut Capital's? Are Oakcliffe residents wrong to oppose the new developments? How much say should residents have in what their neighborhoods look like? After all, it was the heavy hand of 1950s reform that led to the NIMBYism we have today, and online urbanists seem to forget that. I know these themes will come up time and again throughout the rest of this series, but the whole student situation in Oakland highlights how incredibly complicated this all is, and how there are no easy answers. Neighborhood Grade: Stable, but a precarious stability. On the one hand, if Pitt's housing problems were solved it's easy to see this becoming gentrified. On the other, if it weren't for a community organization holding it together it would quickly descend into student ghetto.
9H. The Technology Park: Brownfield Development
This is an area that nobody would describe as Oakland but is included here because nobody would describe it as anywhere else, either. This is a strip of land between the Monongahela River and Second Ave. that was formerly the site of various steel mills before being wholly consumed by the massive J&L Pittsburgh Works that stretched across both sides of the river between the South Side and Hazelwood. In the early 90s this was converted into office space in one of the earlier projects to remediate an abandoned industrial area. It's currently home to a bunch of CMU labs, whoever the successor to Union Switch and Signal is, and a few other tech companies.
Neighborhood Grade: Non-residential. Walnut Capital had planned to build an apartment complex here, but it was shelved due to lack of interest. I doubt any residential gets built here in the foreseeable future since it's far from traditional neighborhood centers and it's a decidedly 20th century project with no attempt at creating a business district or indeed being anything other than a suburban office park.
9I. Panther Hollow: The Real Old Oakland
Part of Oakland's eastern boundary is formed by a ravine carrying Nine Mile Run to the Monongahela River. Residential portions of Oakland's plateau line one side of the rim, and Schenley Park and CMU line the other. The bottom contains a small neighborhood that is the last spot in Oakland completely resistant to student infiltration. This area was settled by immigrants from the Abbruzi region of Italy, many of whose descendants still live here today. I would point out that the actual name of the ravine is Junction Hollow, Panther Hollow being another ravine that extends through Schenley Park and terminates in Junction Hollow. The neighborhood itself is called Panther Hollow, though, and most Pitt students erroneously refer to the ravine as such.
In the 1960s, Pitt wanted to build a massive research complex in Junction Hollow that would have stretched up to the rim and contained a tunnel to accommodate the rail line. This plan was wisely scrapped following community opposition. More recently, this has been the go-to location for amateurs who think that Pitt's football problems will be solved with an on-campus stadium. The Panthers played in Pitt Stadium, on the current site of the basketball arena, until 2000. Pitt Stadium was old and in need of expensive upgrades, the university needed a new basketball arena, and the city was building a new stadium for the Steelers that they were willing to allow Pitt to use rent-free. The school jumped at the sweetheart deal and the Panthers have been playing on the North Side ever since.
For some fans, this is an immense source of damaged pride. On the one hand, some are nostalgic for the electric atmosphere that used to exist on game days and consider a ride on a shuttle bus a poor substitute for walking up Cardiac Hill as the band warms up in the alley. On the other hand, there's simply no room in Oakland to build a stadium, and there's no justification for spending hundreds of millions of dollars for a facility that will be used fewer than ten times a year. "What about Panther Hollow?" is the mantra of the ignorant. It's smaller than they think it is. People also forget that Oakland is one of the most difficult places to park in the city, and that combined with the lack of tailgate space will limit the appeal to normal fans. Normal fans, opposed to students, that is, who on-campus stadium boosters are convinced would show up in greater numbers. Never mind that the student section is usually pretty full; we need to convince more non-students to show up. Anyway, it's not happening so there's no point in advocating for it.
Neighborhood Grade: Stable. You don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of ever living here, but if you can find a house, go for it.
**9J. Schenley Farms: The Oakland of Franklin Nicola
As I mentioned earlier, Nicola's plan for Oakland called for a residential section that was to function as a sort of model suburb, at least as far as one was envisioned in the early 20th century. To this end, he dedicated an area in the north of Oakland, adjacent to and somewhat below the hillside that was to be the site of Pitt's acropolis campus (and is now the Pitt Upper Campus). Two of the remaining sides are hemmed in by Bigelow Blvd., and the northern side consists of a terrace that was later added onto the back side of the Upper Hill.
Model homes were constructed in 1906 and the neighborhood was filled out by 1920. In the introduction to this series I identified five basic typologies that could be used to describe Pittsburgh's neighborhoods—row house, frame row, mill house, streetcar suburb, and postwar auto suburb. While these aren't strict categories and a lot of blurred lines exist, Schenley Farms represents a sixth category that should be added to the list, the early auto suburb. I overlooked this initially because it isn't common, but it's still common enough. Automobile ownership wasn't common until the 1920s, and right when one would have thought that residential neighborhoods built around the automobile would have taken off, the depression hit, followed by the war, and by the time that true auto suburbs came along, architectural trends had changed.
The homes of Schenley Farms, however, predate even this early auto era, making it probably the earliest of the auto-based neighborhoods in the city. I'm not sure whether the original residents would have owned cars, but the houses all have driveways and detached garages, suggesting that they would have at least owned horses, and it seems likely that these were converted for auto use relatively early. In any event, other features of the neighborhood include architect-designed houses and underground electrical service. This latter feature was supposedly so power lines wouldn't mar the view of the houses from the street, though these days the views are obscured by the copious shade trees. Due to its desirability, this area immediately became an enclave of the upper middle class to wealthy, and it remains so to this day. But there is an alternate history.
At the time of its construction, Schenley Farms was not the only wealthy neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Going back far in the city's history, rich people built large houses and abandoned them as other areas became fashionable. The population pressures of a growing city meant that these grand old houses were chopped up into apartments for lower or working class residents, and this process was already underway in some areas at the time Schenley Farms was being laid out. In the 1960s and 1970s, with Pitt expanding and the wealthy moving to the suburbs in droves, it would have been unsurprising if these residences were remuddled and chopped up into student apartments. The reason this didn't happen, though, is our old friend zoning, likely coupled with some restrictive covenants, which notoriously required all residents to be approved by existing residents (It is said that this was racially discriminatory, and while no blacks lived here until the 1970s, I can't find any evidence that any black was ever precluded from buying here). Schenley Farms has been recognized as a historic district since the 1970s, was added to the NRHP in the 1980s, and the Historical Review Board is required to approve all exterior modifications.
I bring this up because YIMBYs and armchair urbanists scoff at these kinds of restrictions as limiting affordability, but there's little perspective. These houses are considered architectural gems, but it isn't inconceivable that they could just be another student slum, the trees removed so the landlords can offer parking spots for $150/month. When walking around old neighborhoods, I often have to use my imagination, fantasizing about an ideal world where modifications are undone, paint is added, details are restored, and the whole place looks as good as its potential suggests. This is usually a pipe dream, though, because the goal is to maximize short-term gain. Even in areas like the South Side that began gentrifying 30 years ago, there isn't much motivation to remove PermaStone or aluminum awnings or restore windows to their original sizes. There is motivation, however, to replace aluminum siding with vinyl and replace old, period-incorrect windows with new, period-incorrect windows. Even high-end renovations tend to go for a modernizing look. I was browsing YouTube recently and came across a channel of a Pittsburgh-area contractor whose calling card seemed to be painting brick houses white with black trim. These weren't cheap flips, either. In my opinion, this man should be arrested. If anyone wants to restore this house to original, it will take a lot of expensive, labor-intensive work to remove the paint. And even if you keep the paint, it has to keep being repainted. All to save a few bucks repointing (probably) and to give it a "modern" look. I find it quite nice that there are at least some places where I don't have to do this imagining, and Schenley Farms is one of those places. It's small, with only about 90 homes (and another 38 on a terrace addition), but every one of them is pristine. There was never any comeback or revival, just an early peak and a long plateau. I'm not suggesting that every neighborhood should be a historic district and require expensive, period-correct details, but there's a time and place for everything.
Neighborhood Grade: Upper middle class. Actually, upper class, these days, as you aren't getting any of these houses for under a million dollars unless you can find one that needs work. I knew some professors who lived here when I was in law school, but a mid-career professor at Pitt or CMU couldn't afford to buy here now. The limited inventory means that these don't go on the market very often, and their history combined with their location near the universities and hospitals yet isolated from the riffraff of the city makes them about as prime as real estate can get. The weird thing is that when people talk about the nicest Pittsburgh neighborhoods it almost flies under the radar. Other wealthy neighborhoods in the East End have sections that are just as nice, but the neighborhoods as a whole are larger, more varied, and ultimately more accessible. The old money suburbs get more press because they have actual mansions with grounds. If you're currently looking, and don't mind living on the less desirable terrace (with its sinking road), there's a 4-bedroom, 3 bath, 3,242 square foot house there for sale with an $860,000 asking price. It was built in 1912 and featured in the March 1913 edition of Concrete-Cement Age magazine, a copy of which appears to come with the house. Then again, considering that in Los Angeles you'd pay the same price for a 1,000 square foot ranch, it seems like quite the steal.
9K. North Oakland: Old Bellefield
This largely describes areas to the north and east of the Pitt campus. It's an official city neighborhood, though my definition limits it to the blocks surrounding Craig Street, which begins on Forbes at the Carnegie Institute and runs north to Bigelow at the Bloomfield Bridge. Beyond that, there are several subsections that should be dealt with separately, though these aren't notable enough to be neighborhoods unto themselves.
Most of North Oakland is on land that was originally settled by Neville Craig, editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1821 to 1841. He named his farm Bellefield, which farm was purchased by glass magnate Edward Dithridge in 1851; Dithridge proceeded to sell lots as part of a housing development with the same name. This was one of the earliest settled parts of Oakland, as it attracted refugees from the Great Fire of 1845, and became a home for some of Pittsburgh's wealthier residents.
The first of the subsections is centered around the South Craig St. business district, which runs for a few blocks between Fifth and Forbes. This whole southern portion was the first area settled, and the few houses that remain from that first wave of settlement are modest frame houses. The business district itself may have been the first in the city to gentrify in the sense that we think of the term today when in the late 1970s and early 1980s it became home to advertising agencies, design studios, specialty shops, and practitioners of the more exotic medical arts. As the rest of Oakland has become more corporate and homogenized in the past 25 years, South Craig still retains a hip college vibe.
The residential parts of this section, though, only survive in fragments. CMU has made it clear that it considers this entire area part of their Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere and they have, over the past several decades, torn down the old houses for campus buildings and parking, and the rest will probably be gone in a few more. While the campus has encroached somewhat on Craig St. itself, most of the businesses are protected by zoning, and the university's most recent ten-year plan aims to keep it as a business district. While the CMU document emphasizes the same dumb trends like "innovation districts", "pop-up events", and "marketplace atmosphere", I'd rather that then see them try to strongarm the city into converting everything over to campus use, which looked to be their intention for a while.
Further north, between Fifth and Center, is an area of old Bellefield that was built out a bit later (late 19th/early 20th century) than the southern portion, and whose residents were wealthier. Most of the original houses here were grand houses and small apartment buildings, though few of these remain. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing up to the 1970s, a large number of apartment buildings were constructed in this area, making it one of Pittsburgh's few historic high-density areas. The residents of these are a mix of students, professors, and retirees, though it appears from the designs of the entrances and use of name architects that these were originally luxury buildings, and a good deal of them have since been converted into condominiums.
Urbanists take note, though—high density, even prewar high density, does not guarantee walkability. At the time they were built no thought was given to street engagement, ground floor retail, or even limiting surface parking. The business district on South Craig may be my favorite in Oakland, but it isn't functional, and to be honest, the main business district on Forbes, a good 20 minute walk from here, isn't particularly functional either. The neighborhood as a whole hasn't had a full-service grocery store in over a decade, and retailers say there won't be one any time soon, as the student population disappears over the summer and winter breaks. The recent (and massive) Empire Apartments at Craig and Center have attempted to buck this trend by incorporating ground-floor retail as part of the building's design, but all of it remains unleased save a Dunkin' Donuts on the corner. (I suspect, though, that there are some real estate shenanigans at play where the rents are too high for anyone except national chains, and financing agreements won't let them lower the price.) The result of all of this is that the single densest part of the city isn't even top five in terms of walkability, maybe not even top ten.
Around the intersection of Craig and Center; most Pitt students are surprised to discover that the foot traffic in this part of Oakland is disproportionately African American, and that there are several businesses that seem to cater to this demographic. It is my understanding that following the slow destruction of the Hill District as a commercial center in the decades following the 1968 riots, this area took up part of the slack, similar to the now defunct Fifth-Forbes corridor I discussed way back in the installment on Downtown. There are also a lot of immigrant-owned businesses in this area, often occupying mid-century storefronts that were tacked in front of houses that can be seen further back on the properties. There is also another small business district a bit to the south of here at Craig and Bayard.
Finally, north of Baum, after another block or so of single-family houses, we get to a weird, semi-abandoned industrial area that was the former location of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which has a few mill houses at its northernmost tip before the narrow road slinks under the Bloomfield Bridge and into Polish Hill the back way. This district was originally the site of Luna Park, a small amusement park that only operated for a few years in the first decade of the 20th century. Following the park's closure in 1909, the area became the center of the auto business in Pittsburgh. In 1923 it held Samson Motor Co., Kaufman-Baer Garage, Fisk Tire Co., Oakland (the brand) Motor Car Co., Franklin Pittsburgh Auto Co., B.F. Goodrich Rubber, Kelley-Springfield Tire, Van Kleeck Motor Co., Oldsmobile, Nash, Chevrolet, and the main garage for the Pittsburgh Taxi Company. There's an "auto row" on Craig St. that consists of weird buildings that look abandoned but aren't and extend a couple stories below to the streets in the back. This district of auto dealerships and related businesses historically continued along Baum, but that's a story for another neighborhood.
Neighborhood Grade: Student area. Though its population is more diverse than that of South Oakland, this is still largely occupied by college students who prefer to live off campus in a dwelling where they won't get MRSA. It's definitely also more CMU and grad student heavy than the undergrad heavy South Oakland. On the whole it's not a bad place to live if you like apartment towers, but you can probably find cheaper, nicer digs elsewhere.
9J. East Oakland: The Oakland of Andrew Carnegie This is a semi-bogus grouping created to describe parts of Oakland that are largely outside the official neighborhood boundaries but are colloquially described as part of it and which are even part of it for planning purposes than the areas they officially belong to. Beyond that, though, this section is possibly the apotheosis of City Beautiful city planning in Pittsburgh. Most of Oakland is intensely developed, with rare oasis such as the lawn of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial providing any kind of glimpse into what the neighborhood was originally supposed to look like. Here, though, there's enough open space to get a better idea of what the ultimate vision was.
This section, quite simply, includes the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, the grounds of the Carnegie Institute, and the nearby part of Schenley Park that includes Phipps Conservatory, which has a more "monumental" character than the rest of the park. While I never intended this series to contain tourist recommendations, there's a walk (or drive) that I think gives the essence of what the movement was trying to achieve. Starting from the Cathedral lawn, cross Forbes and head down Schenley Drive Extension. Schenley Plaza is to the right, and the Pitt lower campus beyond that, all occupying the space where Forbes Field used to be. Luckily, the now ruined Hillman library is screened from view by street trees and kiosks in the plaza. But you should be looking to the left at the massive Carnegie Institute.
This building contains a natural history museum, an art museum, a lecture hall, and a music hall, but the side facing Schenley Plaza contains the main branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which is quite simply one of the best libraries in the world. In the 2000s, when vinyl was at its low point as a medium, they were still lending out records, because the material hadn't been issued on CD and someone might want to listen to it. It has a surprisingly large amount of floor space dedicated to sheet music. It has stacks that are shoved into weird mezzanine levels in the back with low ceilings and narrow staircases. One of my biggest pet peeves about a lot of old, beautiful buildings is that concerns about security, or the necessity of selling tickets, or handicapped accessibility, or some other reason to restrict access means that you have to enter through an annex built in the 1970s, or the basement, or some other goofy ingress point. Since the library doesn't need to be particularly secure and is free to the public, you can still walk right up the steps and enter through the big doors that have always served as the main entrance. It seems that libraries may be among the last such buildings where this is possible. What makes this library special, though, is that it strikes a balance that I feel all large metro main branch libraries should strike: It has the size and scope befitting a flagship library in a major city, but it's fundamentally still in service to the public. It's not as though I've been to a ton of big city main branches but they seem to fall into one of two camps. To illustrate, I visited the New York Public Library—it of the famous lions—in 2010. I saw plenty of displays showing interesting items, the visitors center, and of course the big research room on the third floor that's the size of a football field. Now, in the Carnegie Library there's a lectern in the lobby that says "Ask Me" on the front, and there's someone standing behind it. While I'm sure that the bespectacled middle-aged black woman who was standing behind it the last time I visited fields dozens of questions per day, I doubt anyone has ever asked her where the books are, as that's abundantly clear to anyone who enters the front door and isn't blind (in which case she would direct them to the guy who handles materials for the visually impaired). Nevertheless, while I had seen plenty of rare books behind display cases and reference books and the like, I hadn't quite figured out where the actual library was, as in the part where there were shelves of books to browse. So I found myself asking that exact question, to which the answer was that they were stored in an area closed off to the public, and that if I wanted one I had to go on the computer and find it and someone would bring it up, not for me to check out, but to look at in the reading room.
They also had quite a few special collections, but to access those I'd have to fill out a bunch of forms explaining why I needed to see it and if the library gods thought I was worthy they would grant me conditional access. I actually already knew this from several years earlier when I was selecting the topic for my senior thesis in history and I had called them asking about some collection or another (in other words, I actually had a good reason to look at it) and I was told that access would not be granted for a mere baccalaureate theses and that doctoral research at minimum would be required for them to even consider it. This was not a library designed for people like me.
What people like me are expected to do is go to a branch library where they carry John Grisham and Danielle Steele novels and allow anyone to browse the stacks, which brings me to the other end of the spectrum. Cincinnati has the largest public library system in the US. But their main branch is… just another branch. It's big, and it has administration offices, and it's well-appointed, but there isn't much to draw anyone from elsewhere in Hamilton County Downtown. Carnegie is the kind of place where anyone can walk in and browse and has programs encouraging people to read but also has the negatives of every official photograph taken of David L. Lawrence when he was Governor of Pennsylvania.
I apologize for this long diversion about libraries, but this series has been well-received and wouldn't be what it is now if the main branch of the Carnegie were anything other than what it is. When I first started and was looking for information on the Fifth and Forbes proposal and not finding it online, I went to Oakland and sheepishly asked a research librarian in the local history room how to go about finding old newspaper articles about it. I hadn't even planned on including any of it here yet, I just remembered it and was curious about what all the fuss was about. I made it clear to him that he wasn't to invest too much time on this because it was purely for my own edification and I'm sure he had a lot of work to do, etc. but he insisted that he loved this kind of thing and that's what he was here for and he expended a not-inconsiderable effort tracking down an envelope with newspaper clippings in it that I assumed would have been thrown away sometime since the millennium. I have since leaned on him quite heavily and he's never let me down so far, and I highly doubt that for all their money and prestige anyone at the main branch of the New York Public Library would have gone to such lengths for such a frivolous endeavor. Gil, if you're reading this, thanks again.
Anyway, as you continue along the colonnade of sycamores that line the road along the front of the library, turn left onto Schenley Drive, which runs along the back of the building with the Frick Fine Arts Building on your right before heading over the Schenley Bridge and into Schenley Park. To the left, there is a view of the Carnegie Mellon Campus. The campus is laid out with two main focal points, The Mall and The Cut, and you can't really see either of them from here. What you can see from here is a jumbled mass of "functional" Beaux-Arts buildings from the old campus completely dominated by more modern ones, the space between them compressed by distance. I once saw a top ten list that included CMU as one of the ugliest campuses in America, but that kind of misses the point. It was originally designed by Henry Hornbostel, he of Pitt's Acropolis plan, he who has been immortalized in the numerous public buildings he designed in his career even if few today have heard of him. While his buildings tend to typify the excesses of the Gilded Age in their ornateness, at heart, he understood that Carnegie Tech was primarily a school where one would learn the industrial sciences, and fashioned them after factories and steel mills.
Even with all the modernist excesses, the original plan has been respected to a remarkable degree. Structures like the brutalist Wean Hall still adhere to the same proportions and setbacks as the rest of campus, as well as the tendency for everything to be in essence a stylized industrial building. Could something a bit more "contextual" gone in its place? Yeah, probably, but what does that say, really? Industry is about efficiency, not beauty, and it looks to the future, not the past. The front view of Hamerschlag Hall, the centerpiece of campus, sees the Cathedral of Learning looming behind it. The Cathedral looks good, but it was bult decades later and didn't factor into Hornbostel's plan. What's also visible is the smokestack to the boiler house, and that did factor into the plan. The view from the bridge gives a full-frontal of not just the smokestack but the entire boiler house, with Hamerschlag and the rest of campus looming on the hillside above the ravine. CMU is beautiful, but this view of it is my favorite.
On the other side of the bridge, Phipps Conservatory is to the right. Henry Phipps was Andrew Carnegie's business partner and he modeled his conservatory on the horticultural hall at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and some of the plants from that fair are supposedly still growing there. It's a beautiful place if you like giant greenhouses, but by now we've entered Schenley Park. I'm going to treat parks separately in another installment, as large parks don't really feel like parts of neighborhoods, so I'm not going to say too much about Schenley now, but there are exceptions, and this part of Schenley definitely feels like Oakland. If you continue across the Panther Hollow Bridge you get a beautiful view of the wooded namesake hollow below. But once on the other side, turn around, because I saved the best for last. Heading back towards Oakland proper, Flagstaff Hill is on the right, across from Phipps. From the top, the skyline of Oakland is laid out before you, from the towering hospitals, to the hillside where the old Acropolis was supposed to go, to the plateau of the South Oakland student ghetto, to the roof of the Carnegie Institute, to the CMU boiler house, to the slopes of the Schenley Farms Terrace. And framing it all in on the left are the tops of the Downtown skyscrapers, and on the right, of course, the Cathedral. As a building designed to be a sentinel, it looks its most at-home when viewed from unexpected angles, jumping into view as a happy surprise when you don't expect to see it. But it looks its best from here.
Neighborhood Grade: Nonresidential, unless you count CMU student housing, in which case it's a student area. The fact that the land is permanently dedicated to public and institutional uses means it won't be developed further in any of our lifetimes, and I think everyone would agree that that's for the better.
9K. Monumental Oakland: The Oakland of Franklin Nicola (Again)
When I first contemplated writing about Oakland over a year ago, my first thought went to the various architectural treasures contained therein. I did not, however, want this series to become The Motte Review of Buildings, so I focused it on neighborhoods and sub-neighborhoods and how they fit into the city. Downtown has more notable buildings than anywhere else in the city, and I barely mentioned any there. Oakland feels different, though; while any Downtown will have its share of landmarks, Oakland was, in a sense, founded on the idea of beautiful buildings, and the stretch of Fifth Ave. between Morewood and Bouquet has a disproportionate share of them. This area has already been covered in the sections on North Oakland, Central Oakland, and the semi-bogus East Oakland, so this isn't as much a neighborhood essay as it is a list of buildings worth mentioning.
Fifth Ave. runs one-way east to west, so we'll start at Rodef Shalom Temple (Henry Hornbostel, 1906). This is sort of cheating, as residents of the adjacent areas will tell you that they live in Shadyside, but most people consider the synagogue itself to be in Oakland, so I'll treat it as a sort of exclave. Continuing towards town, on the left we have the WQED studios (Paul Schweikher, 1970), another one of the few good brutalist buildings, though it was better before they demolished the grand staircase in front out of practicality concerns. If you grew up watching Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, this is where it was taped. If you grew up watching National Geographic, this is where it was edited. Holy Spirit Catholic Church, Byzantine Rite (1961) is next, a weird building that sits at an angle to the road and can't decide if it wants to be traditional or modern. Hiding behind that on Clyde St. in another exclave is First Church of Christ, Scientist (S.S. Beman, 1904, now home to the Pitt Early Childhood Development Center). This is unusual for a church in that, like all Christian Science churches, it looks less like a traditional church and more like a Greek temple. Back on Fifth is Central Catholic High School (Link, Weber & Bowers, 1927), which isn't a boarding school but looks like one, with its Gothic elements.
As we pass through the North Oakland apartment district, of note is Fairfax Apartments (Philip M. Julien, 1926), which comes across as a last hurrah of highly ornamented residential high-rises in a landscape that modernism would soon dominate, as is indicated by the plain high-rises that surround it. The most notable of these is Webster Hall (Eric Fisher Wood, 1925), which, while a year older, already shows the more stripped-down style that would soon become commonplace. The RAND Building (Burt Hill, 2006) isn't of much interest architecturally on its own, but it works well as a younger brother to the adjacent Software Engineering Institute (Burt Hill, 1987). Across the street, St. Paul's Cathedral (Egan & Prindeville, 1906) and its associated buildings are the spiritual heart of Pittsburgh, Catholicism being the religion of the immigrants who defined the city. To this end, it beats the diversity drum pretty hard; while it's consistently Gothic Revival, it's a mishmash of French, German, and English Gothic styles.
As we hit the heart of Monumental Oakland, The Mellon Institute (Benno Janssen, 1937) is a testament to what can be done with serious financial backing—these are the largest monolithic columns in the world. Most large columns are made from stone discs stacked atop one another, but these are cut whole. If you read enough about famous architects you read plenty of stories about how most of these guys were arrogant, self-absorbed assholes, I'm looking at you Frank Lloyd Wright. While researching this, I came across an article from a guide to prominent Western Pennsylvanians published in 1923. It is clear that the subjects submitted their own biographies, as most run several paragraphs, but Janssen's is just a full-page photograph with the caption
Benno Janssen, well known Pittsburgh architect, was born and reared at St. Louis, Missouri. Mr. Janssen has been the architect for many of the finest structures in Pittsburgh and vicinity, including buildings of both residential and business type and of several club houses now occupied by the leading clubs of Pittsburgh.
Yup, this is the kind of guy who can just call and order the largest monolithic columns that have ever existed. Continuing on, we have the Cathedral, about which enough has been said. Across from that is the Music Building (Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, 1884) formerly the manse for the Bellefield Presbyterian Church, of which only the bell tower remains. The great Henry Hobson Richardson designed the Allegheny County Courthouse and developed the first (and to date one of the few) distinctly American architectural styles, Richardsonian Romanesque. There are quite a few Richardsonian Romanesque buildings throughout Pittsburgh, though this is one of the few in Oakland. Clapp Hall (Troutwein & Howard, 1956) is the lone building designed in the Gothic/Art Deco style of the Cathedral after expansion resumed following the war.
As for the clubhouses of this area, we have the Masonic Temple (Janssen, 1914, now Alumni Hall), modeled as a Greek temple, the Pittsburgh Athletic Association (Janssen, 1911), modeled as a Venetian palace, and the University Club (Hornbostel, 1920), modeled after nothing in particular. This was evidently the template for the adjacent Nordenberg Hall (Mackey Mitchell, 2013) and nearby Oaklander Hotel (Raintree Architecture, 2017), which are textbook examples of what I call the neoneoclassical style. I am no great fan of this style, but it doesn't exactly bother me, either. On the one hand, it's free from the kind of classical ornamentation that modern architectural tastes find tacky. On the other hand, it isn't self-consciously modern. It's neoclassical architecture that's designed to blend in with its surroundings and not draw attention to itself. Neoneoclassical buildings are good citizens of the neighborhoods they inhabit, and their inability to invoke strong feelings in anyone means that while they avoid the revulsion that comes with a lot of modern architecture, they also forgo any chance of ever being loved by anybody. The best part of the University Club is the rooftop terrace, and the best thing about that is the great views it gives of the Cathedral and the rest of Oakland.
These buildings surround Hornbostel's Allegheny County Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall (1910) which is the complete opposite aesthetic. It's entirely over the top even by the standards of the Beaux Arts, one of the few tributes to the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus that approaches the scale of the real thing. Upon close inspection, it's almost gaudy. Taken as a whole, it's sublime. Rounding out Monumental Oakland are the Schenley Apartments, now dormitories, that Hornbostel designed in the more stripped style of 1923, and the building that started it all, the William Pitt Union, nee Schenley Hotel (Rutan & Russell, 1898).
9L. The City Beautiful: A Postscript
As I was writing this, Hemingway’s, a bar on Forbes Ave., announced that it will be closing in May. Bars have come and gone over the years. Hell, landmarks have come and gone—The O, The Garage Door, Dave and Andy’s Ice Cream, and Fuel & Fuddle all closed in recent years, but for some reason this hits harder. I haven’t been there in years, and I didn’t even go there particularly often when I went to school right across the street, but I was always comfortable in the knowledge that I could go there, and enjoy myself. Because when I say it was unremarkable, what I mean is that it was a bar right in the middle of a college campus that had no pretentions of being a “college bar”, excepting that food and drink were always reasonably priced. It had the same ambiance as any strip mall sports bar, and while everything changed around it for 40 years, it seemed timeless. Even The O, or the Original Hot Dog Shop, as it’s formally known, didn’t inspire such a reaction. It was certainly more iconic, the kind of place that sold T-shirts, but it was always a grease pit whose reputation shone above its actual value (though it was almost certainly better than the gringo $6 taco shop that replaced it). So in a few weeks, I will be taking one last walk around the park.
More important to Oakland’s future, Pitt released the executive summary of its 2025 ten year plan, which includes significant investment in more on-campus housing. One aspect of the plan that caught my eye was the demolition of the Bouquet Gardens low-rise student apartments to construct denser housing. These were somewhat revolutionary when they were built because they were the nice student housing where there was a living room, kitchen, and everyone got their own bedroom, but it apparently isn’t compatible with housing guarantees and pressure for the ghetto to stop expanding. Pitt currently has a three-year housing guarantee for undergraduates, but this has necessitated drastic measures like converting student lounges into dorm rooms and putting students up in hotels. About 40% of undergrads live on campus, and they hope to get this up to 60% by 2035, which I suppose is a good thing, though I doubt it will be enough to spark normal people to start moving to South Oakland and rehabbing the houses.
The one thing I haven’t talked about yet is sports, mainly because the only team of any note that plays there is Pitt basketball. But this wasn’t always the case. The Pirates played at Forbes Field between 1909 and 1970, the Steelers played at Forbes Field and Pitt Stadium between their founding and 1970, and Pitt played Forbes Field and Pitt Stadium between 1909 and 1999. And that’s just within living memory; the long-forgotten Pittsburgh Pirates NHL team played at Duquesne Gardens on Craig Street between 1925 and 1930, and the minor league Pittsburgh Hornets played there from 1936 to 1956. But Oakland’s Achilles heel, parking, led the Steelers and Pirates to decamp for the Three Rivers Stadium in 1970, and the construction of Heinz Field led Pitt football to follow suit 30 years later. When Pittsburgh was awarded an NHL franchise again in 1967, they would not play in Oakland but in what was left of the Lower Hill.
Every boy dreams of hitting a walk-off home run in Game 7 of the World Series; it’s such a common trope that it’s cliched at this point. But in 150 years of professional baseball, it’s only happened once. On October 13, 1960, the Pirates were playing the Yankees in the ultimate game of a hard-fought series that the Yankees were favored to win, having outscored the Pirates 46–17 in the series heading into the game. Pittsburgh led 4–0 in early innings before giving up the lead to the Yankees, who led 6–4 going into the bottom of the eighth. In one of the wildest finishes in baseball history, the Pirates scored 5 in the bottom of the inning to retake the lead, but concede it to the Yankees in the top of the ninth. As the Pirates came to bat, the score was tied at 9. Leading off was Bill Mazeroski, a second basemen known primarily for defense. At 3:36 pm, in one of the most iconic moments in sports history, Mazeroski sent the second pitch of the inning over the head of outfielder Yogi Berra and the left field wall. The Pirates win the championship. Forbes Field is long gone, but the left field wall remains, marked at the spot the ball went over. Every October, fans still gather there to listen to the radio broadcast of the game.
Bill Mazeroski passed away yesterday at the age of 89. Godspeed Maz, and Beat ‘Em Bucs.