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Notes -
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
Series Index:
Parts 6–8: The Hill's Environs
It's been nearly 8 months since the last installment and I apologize for the slow pace of these. As usual, I hope to get these out faster in the future, but I have limited Motte time and these take a while to research and write. The major roadblock though is that the reason I'm here is mainly to comment on regular posts which have a shelf life of about a day, and I'd rather dedicate what little time I have to that than a vanity project. ANYWAY, we'll finally start to inch out of the Hill District by looking at three neighborhoods that are historically associated with it to varying degrees but really aren't part of it. Sugar Top has the biggest claim to being part of the Hill, but its residents are better off and insist that it isn't. Uptown was always sort of the Hill but not really and still sort of is but not really, and Polish Hill was in the same boat as Sugar Top at one time but has now forged its own wholly separate identity.
6. Uptown: Forcing the Issue
Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood is loosely bordered by I-579 on the west, the Birmingham Bridge on the East, and the Monongahela River on the south, though there is very little development on the river itself due to an abrupt elevation change. On the north the boundary is more controversial; the official dividing line is right down the middle of 5th Ave., but a more realistic boundary would include the entirety of 5th plus a few streets that run parallel. The name is also controversial. The aforementioned elevation change means that the neighborhood sits high above the Mon, giving the neighborhood its official name, Bluff. But most Pittsburghers only consider the Bluff to be the highest land in this area. The Bluff itself is entirely occupied by the Duquesne University campus, which is practically a world unto itself, except where it spills down the hill onto Forbes Ave. The area east of Jumonville St. is also known as Soho, though this designation is mostly only used among old timers (it does appear on some maps). To most Pittsburgher’s, though, the entire area is just Uptown, and the local community organization has installed “Welcome to Uptown” signs that only add to the confusion.
The western part of the neighborhood is dominated by institutional uses. In addition to Duquesne University, it includes the Allegheny County Jail (though this is isolated from the rest of the neighborhood and is only included because it doesn’t fit anywhere else), Mercy Hospital, and PPG Paints Arena. While the area around PPG includes a few businesses that largely cater to the pregame hockey crowd, most of the commercial corridor on 5th and Forbes sits underutilized, and the rest of the neighborhood is residential. It was historically a rowhouse neighborhood, but decades of disinvestment have left much of it blighted. Hundreds of historic rowhouses have been demolished at a time when rowhouse neighborhoods in other parts of the city were being revitalized. This presents a conundrum — a neighborhood that’s located on a well-traveled corridor between Pennsylvania’s second and third largest business districts (Downtown and Oakland), and contains a mid-size university, a major hospital, and a hockey arena, should by all accounts be one of the most desirable parts of the city. Yet it’s in pretty rough shape.
Like most of the rest of the city, Uptown was initially an immigrant community, mostly Jews and Eastern Europeans, who came to work in J&L Steel's Soho Works. Fifth Ave. was a thriving commercial district supporting this community. Again, as with countless neighborhoods in cities across America, it started to go in decline after WWII, as everyone who could afford it moved to the suburbs. The population gradually got smaller and poorer. While Uptown was spared the rioting that devastated most of the Hill in the Spring of 1968, it wasn't spared the disinvestment that occurred thereafter. As the heroin trade took over the devastated corners of Center Ave. in the Hill, street prostitution, which had long been established in that area, moved strongly into the Fifth/Forbes corridor. When Pittsburgh hosted the 1979 meeting of the US Conference of Mayors, the Mayor of Milwaukee described Fifth Ave. as the most frightening slum he had ever seen. Most of the redevelopment was at this point focused on the North Side; the destruction of the Lower Hill and subsequent community opposition meant developers wouldn't touch the area with a 99 ½ foot pole. It wsan't until the late 2000s and the construction of the new Penguins arena and anticipated Lower Hill redevelopment that anyone gave Uptown a second thought.
Part of the answer can also be found in the person of Sal Williams. Mr. Williams was an Uptown native who had since decamped to the suburbs (and had mafia connections; his brother was “Godfather of Pittsburgh” Junior Williams) and spent decades buying up properties and demolishing the buildings to build parking lots. At one point his company owned something like 150 parcels in the neighborhood, and he seemingly had no interest in selling to developers. Williams’s apparent strategy was to continually acquire land and make money off of surface parking for Penguins games and downtown commuters until he had obtained a critical mass, then sell it at an inflated price for some large-scale development. Former councilman Sala Udin, whose district included Uptown, has said that he regrets not having pushed harder for a proposed 2000 moratorium on building demolitions and new surface parking.
There’s more to the story, of course. For his part, Williams always claimed that he wasn’t in the parking lot business. He loved Uptown and wanted to be part of the revitalization; there was simply no developer interest, and parking lots allowed him to pay the bills while he waited. Undin’s successor, Tonya Payne, also praised Williams. She noted that the city and Urban Redevelopment Authority owned more land in Uptown than he did, but didn’t have the resources to maintain the properties or demolish the structures. Public ownership of distressed properties is effectively a black hole that the city has spent decades trying to unsuccessfully resolve; Payne said that when she was president of the local community group they would often turn to Williams to purchase crack houses and other undesirable properties before they ended up in the city’s hands. She also noted that he indeed had renovated properties and sold to developers, and that the alternative to his parking lots would be overgrown lots full of trash. People later said that he was willing to sell his properties for tax assessed value to anyone willing to develop them, even if it meant selling at a loss, but there were few takers. One could cynically point to the thousands that Williams gave to Payne’s campaign to unseat Udin, but the woman did have a point.
The bigger problem Uptown has had to deal with, though, is the perception that it’s part of the Hill District. While Uptown was historically a white area, it was nonetheless considered an extension of the Hill, and it declined around the same time and in much the same fashion as the rest of the Hill. While there’s little violence, the neighborhood has plenty of lower-level stuff like prostitution, drug dealing, and car break-ins that make it less-than-ideal. There’s been increasing pressure on the police to simply crack down on the kind of behavior that wouldn’t be tolerated in more affluent areas, but even 100% success does little to change perceptions.
For its part, the city has started to address these issues by effectively eliminating zoning restrictions. Setback requirements have been all but eliminated, mixed-use is encouraged, and height restrictions are so generous that no realistic development is going to exceed them, and even then there are exceptions if they include a certain amount of affordable housing. The result has been several new developments in the past ten years, including renovation of the old 5th Avenue School, which had been a vacant eyesore, into apartments. Several more residential projects are underway, and some of the apartments are supposedly renting for $2900/month.
But aside from a few luxury apartment developments, there has been surprisingly little additional development, and the ground-level retail that has been built has been slow to fill in. $2900/month may not seem like a lot if you're from New York or California, and I doubt the average apartment is priced this high, but it's shockingly expensive considering the lack of surrounding amenities. I get the impression that these exist primarily for foreign doctors working at Mercy Hospital who rent based on proximity, at least until they've lived in the area long enough to realize there are better options.
Given the precarious state of development and history of land speculation in an area that is unquestionably well-located, it would seem that Uptown's history is a good argument for Georgist land policy. If you look closer, however, it seems more like an argument against such policy. As Ms. Payne noted, speculators like Mr. Williams don't end up with large vacant holdings in a competitive market. Sal Williams bought derelict properties for next to nothing because he was the only one willing to take them; it was either that or abandonment, which after a long, laborious process would end up in the black hole of city or URA ownership. Once that happens, getting anything built means getting it past the mayor, council, the URA, and every single demand of every single community group.
If the powers that be decided that a land value tax were the best way to ensure that speculators developed this high-value land (and current tax assessments do value it highly), it would lead to less speculation, but that doesn't necessarily mean more development. It could mean that more properties would end up in the hands of the city or the URA, and all of the nonsense that that entails. The obvious retort to this is that it doesn't work unless we also strip away all of the nonsense, and I agree, but this could also mean that it's the nonsense that's preventing development and the taxation system has nothing to do with it.
But even if you do strip away the nonsense, well, you can lead a horse to water… If Uptown is a run down area that's "theoretically" primed for gentrification based on the opinions of people who don't live there, then the land is only theoretically valuable. There's no guarantee that any developer is going to make money on a project no matter how much red tape you strip away. Red tape is largely just a red herring used to distract the public from the fact that these developers either have no money or aren't willing to spend it. I had a conversation with a URA project manager back in March who told me that the reason these projects seem to end up in development hell is largely because the developers are relying on other people to pay for them. If you take your project to the URA and have the money in the bank or financing already committed it would take an Act of God for them to stop you. Sure, you might have to kick a couple of bucks toward a pet project that some community organization wants, but that's only in rare cases and it's more for PR than a strict necessity. The upshot with respect to Uptown is that it's obvious that for all the hype, developers still see the area as too risky to sink a ton of money into when there are safer bets elsewhere. Two residential projects that have already been approved are on indefinite hold due to projected cost overruns. Meanwhile, the speculators who own the parking lots are making steady income and, with everyone telling them how much their property is worth, they aren't going to let it go for cheap. And $2900/month apartments notwithstanding, anyone with legs or a car can see that, even outside the hockey arena, the area isn't exactly bumping.
Neighborhood Grade: Early Gentrification. Lots of concept articles and long term plans, and just enough new development to convince people that things are moving along, but there's still not enough that anyone wants to go there. It may all be a mirage, but 20 years ago, we didn't even have that. This evaluation may make me seem pessimistic, but I do think that the neighborhood's location and the commitment from residents and the city mean that Uptown will eventually turn the corner, if it hasn't happened already. The question is how much of the old neighborhood will be left standing when it happens.
7. Sugar Top: No Bursting This Bubble
This area goes by a variety of names, none of which is dispositive. The area is officially Upper Hill, but few people call it that, and the official boundaries cover areas that don't quite mesh as a single cohesive neighborhood. Historically it was known as Herron Hill, and still includes the Herron Reservoir, but that's a vestige of the past that also included nearby Polish Hill. The real issue boils down to whether one wants to think of the area as part of the Hill District; residents who want to dissociate themselves from it insist that it's actually a separate area called Schenley Heights. I've chosen Sugar Top because it's the name locals seem to use regardless of their opinion on the matter.
As the name would suggest, Sugar Top is the highest part of the hill. Its western boundary is at Herron Ave., which separates it from the rest of the Hill District, and its eastern boundary is where the land drops off sharply towards Oakland. To the north the Upper Hill officially ends at Bigelow Blvd., but I'm cutting off everything above the Webster Ave. corridor because it's disconnected from the street grid and culturally part of Polish Hill. I'm also putting the southern boundary at the VA Hospital, to include a couple streets that are officially part of the Terrace Village project neighborhood but aren't part of the project and culturally fit in more with Sugar Top.
Sugar Top is a working class black area. In the 1800s it was the site of a village called Minersville that predictably centered around coal mining. Little of this neighborhood survives, except for the old cemetery and an old farmhouse that currently sits vacant but that some group is trying to save. As development crept up the hill in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rural buildings were demolished in favor of more typically urban typologies. The area is small, but the housing stock is diverse, ranging from streetcar suburban to modest rowhouses. Some of the last blocks to be built out were along the aforementioned reservoir, and the area has a suburban feel and incredible views.
As I mentioned in previous installments, the Hill District historically existed on a continuum, with its poorest residents living in the Lower Hill adjacent to Downtown and the neighborhood getting progressively wealthier as you went east. Well, this was about as east as you could get and still be in the Hill District. It had a leafy, pastoral feel that the rest of the Hill lacked. In 1940 this was a predominantly white area, but over a third of its residents were black. Countless black professionals—barbers, teachers, lawyers, ministers, doctors—began to settle there. This part of Herron Hill became Sugar Top, the place a black family moved when they made it. While the white population gradually left, Sugar Top was able to maintain its cachet well into the 1970s.
While this cachet no longer exists among the black community, Sugar Top has nonetheless managed to largely avoid the blight and crime that plagued the rest of the Hill. The biggest issue is that residents continue to age and haven't been replaced by a new cohort of black professionals. Like Uptown, its reputation as part of the Hill holds it back from investment. Unlike Uptown, it's isolated and lacks any kind of business district. There was once a small one on Herron Ave., but it was mostly destroyed in the 1968 riots, and only scattered remnants exist today. Back in 2009 one of the community groups produced a plan for its revitalization, but nothing has happened, and the link I found to the plan is dead.
Neighborhood Grade: Stable. This has been a quiet, working class black area for decades, and there's little sign of that changing. There were some heavy breathing moments in the 90s and 2000s when it looked like gang violence from the Hill was creeping in, but those were just that, moments, and crime remains low. It seems unlikely to decline further absent any major changes. Most of the housing is owner-occupied. The closure and redevelopment of Terrace Village and the overall reduction of crime in the Hill means there's less potential for spillover, and what crime remains is centered around Bedford Dwellings, which is on the chopping block. Yet this is a double-edged sword; as crime in the rest of the Hill has gone down and areas closer to Downtown have been redeveloped, those areas become more desirable to local residents, and Sugar Top's cachet is lowered even further. Compounding the problem is the bottom-up approach the city has taken when it comes to redeveloping the Hill. With new development starting downtown and slowly creeping into increasingly less desirable areas, it will be a long time before new investment reaches the area. Combine this with the deficiencies I've already outlined, and it's understandable why the long-term outlook isn't great. This isn't to say that the area is going downhill fast or anything, but aspiring black professionals will either move into the newer developments or leave the area entirely, leaving Sugar Top for the black tow truck drivers and LPNs who have kids to raise and got a good deal on grandma's house when she went to the home.
8. Polish Hill: "Not Fully Gentrified"
Polish Hill is the final neighborhood we will be discussing before we (finally!) leave the Greater Hill District. It's a relatively small neighborhood and has the distinction of being the only area on the Hill that is majority white and the only area that has seen significant investment in recent years. The borders I'm using are slightly different that the official ones but mostly comport with them. To the north the practical border is the East Busway. To the west it's where Brereton and Stockholm streets dead end, and to the east it's at the Bloomfield Bridge. The only truly big change I made was to the south, where I include the predominantly white areas south of Bigelow. Polish Hill was rural until the 1870s, when a small community called Millwood formed at the bottom of Herron Ave. neat the railroad tracks. This crept up the hillside beginning around 1885, as a large influx of immigrants from—you guessed it—Poland arrived, though plenty of Irish, German and black families settled in the area as well. As was typical of Pittsburgh hillside neighborhoods, wood was the building material of choice for residential structures, though atypical for Pittsburgh, many of these were purpose-built as multi-family tenements. For the first half of the 20th century, the area was known as Herron Hill, along with what is now officially the Upper Hill, as that area was still majority white.
While the neighborhood did not experience any appreciable white flight, by the late 1960s it was nonetheless in dire economic straits. Pittsburgh was selected to participate in the Model Cities program, a Great Society-era anti-poverty experiment that lasted from 1966 to 1974. By this point, the enthusiasm for postwar urban renewal projects was losing steam, largely driven by local residents' concerns that it was being driven by distant bureaucrats with little respect for local concerns. Model Cities would allow a greater degree of citizen participation and grassroots involvement. The issue for Polish Hill was that, while it was poor and in need of development, it had no identity apart from the Hill District. There's sporadic use of the name "Polish Hill" to refer to the area prior to this, but it wasn't until around 1968 that it fully developed a separate identity, and the Polish Hill Civic Association was founded in 1969.
The neighborhood's association with Model Cities was contentious, to say the least. The new neighborhood withdrew from the project in 1968 after the Feds rejected all of their proposed program administrators in favor of an outsider (supposedly due to conflicts of interest). That wasn't the end of it, though; when the city officially drew the southern boundary at Bigelow, the white portions south of there came under the aegis of the Hill District's Model Cities program, and HUD sought to build housing what they considered part of their neighborhood. It doesn't appear that these were actually built, and Model Cities was largely considered a failure (the attempts at giving more local control only served to make the bureaucracy more complicated), but the events solidified Polish Hill's identity as a separate area.
I brought this up because the name is more recent that most Pittsburghers think. Most of our geographic names have either been used since time immemorial (the Hill District isn't in need of an origin story) or are obvious fabrications (the North Shore). This is a fabrication that nobody wants to admit was a fabrication because the origins are slightly racist. In fact, the name itself wasn't without controversy. After it started catching on in the early 1970s, police cruisers started bearing the names of their assigned neighborhoods to keep wayward cops from wandering too far afield. Polish-Americans who saw the name "Polish Hill" complained that it was an ethnic slur. Pointing out that the name had been in use for a while and was selected by its residents didn't seem to mollify them.
The neighborhood stayed pretty much the same into the 2000s; white, dumpy, the kind of sketchy place where crime is low statistically but former residents "can tell you stories". It wasn't an obvious spot for gentrification to take hold. There's no real business district, the houses are small and lower quality, and it was so insular that homes rarely came on the market. There were some rentals available, but these only appealed to the kind of punks whose desire for "authenticity" is so strong that they want to wallow in shittiness. But as other parts of the East End started to improve, there was some pressure on the market, and the small town feel and extreme closeness to Downtown (via low-traffic, high-volume Bigelow Blvd, no less), made it desirable. It still remained hard to break into. If you wanted to buy there you had to do so via off-market transaction (know a guy who knows a guy), as the sellers thought no one outside the family would be interested, but this gave the dingy, working-class neighborhood an air of exclusivity. The dam finally broke around 2011, when the old-timers caught on that their humble abodes were in high demand and started selling in droves. The nature of the off-market transactions kept the selling prices almost comically low; well into the 2000s the average price was under $50,000 and was often closer to $30,000. These would dectuple in a decade with the right renovations and appreciate considerably without them provided they weren't gut jobs.
As for the neighborhood itself, as I said, it lacks a true business district, but it's still semi-walkable, with scattered businesses, several of which are trendy. There's a coffee shop, a records store, a comic book store, and several bars. One of these is Gooski's a dank "hipster dive" as I call it (a place with the aesthetics of a dive but craft beer and a trendy clientele). The other is The Rock Room; the best way I can describe it is it's a bar from a 90s movie where the characters have the kind of aesthetic where the 50s are supposed to be cool. Everyone in there is a worse-looking version of Christian Slater's character in True Romance. Brereton St. is the closest thing it has to a main drag, if only because it is home to the aforementioned Gooski's and Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, which is the visual heart of the neighborhood and dominates its modest skyline. The housing stock is mostly these weird "semi-rows" that Pittsburgh seems to have a lot of. They're basically row houses with a small gap in between for the express purpose of making a wall that's impossible to repair or update.
8A. What I Meant by the Subtitle
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette features a local for-sale home in the Real Estate section of each week's Sunday paper, and earlier this year they featured a house that was on the market for $710,000. I've linked to an archived version of the article, but the gist of it is that the owners are doctors from New York City who bought a newly-built contemporary townhouse in 2023 because they thought they would be moving here. Those plans changed, and now, after $50,000 in additional upgrades, they're selling it for what would be the highest price ever paid in Polish Hill for a single residence. The whole thing came across as a bit over the top for most Pittsburghers, but what really set people off was their statement that the area wasn't completely gentrified.
Well, sort-of statement. It's unclear what they actually said because that quote was from the writer, but the wife did say that " I like that — it’s a little edgy, a little rough around the edges, but it’s cool, I like the vibe." The idea that someone would have the gall to list a house for a record-setting price in a working class neighborhood (with the implication that they expected people would pay it) while saying that the area wasn't fully gentrified struck people as ridiculous. Especially when they've seen prices skyrocket in a relatively brief period.
The thing is, though, they're kind of right. First, while the price may not have been justified—it ultimately sold for $690,000, short of the record—the house wasn't typical of the neighborhood. It was built in 2023, is about double the size of most houses in the area, and doesn't have the grey "cheap flip coture" so common in these cases but real, high-end fixtures. It also has a series of decks with incredible views. More importantly, the neighborhood could still improve further. It will never get a true business district, even though it is zoned for it, but I don't consider gentrification to be complete if the renovations are done with cost in mind. Putting vinyl over Inselbric is much different than taking it down to the wood, or replacing the siding with Hardee Board. Vinyl flooring isn't the same as hardwood (especially when the house already has hardwood you don't want to refinish). You get the idea. I imagine that if it were to gentrify completely, it would look similar to Mt. Adams in Cincinnati.
Neighborhood Grade: Heavy gentrification. The future of Polish Hill seems bright, and I can only expect it to get brighter as more homes are renovated. I think prices are going to top off at a lower level than in other parts of the city. Due to small population and geographic isolation it will never be able to develop a true business district, even though it's allowed by zoning. The population was over 3,000 in 1970, and though it's been gaining residents (1,200 in 2010 vs. 1,800 in 2020), declining household size and conversion of apartments back to single family homes will limit this growth, and there isn't much space for new construction. That being said, I'm surprised that this place gentrified at all given its limitations. As one final note, the areas south of Bigelow that aren't officially part of Polish Hill will be completely excluded from this process. The development is sparse and somewhat blighted, almost West Virginia in some places and this may give the best sense of the kind of people who used to live in the rest of the neighborhood.
Thank you for these. I almost moved to the Pittsburgh area a few months back (suburbs, though, not Pittsburgh proper,) and this series was on my mind.
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