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.