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.
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Notes -
I am loving this series. I have read every article religiously - you are a masterful historian and you know how to provide the perfect amount of detail to perfectly capture these neighborhoods.
One thing that I commonly hear about Lawrenceville that I want to pick your brain about is the influence of the robotics industry in the area. In addition to the CMU lab, there are a number of labs that opened up around 44th Street in recent memory. There are a cluster of about five of them, in addition to the Aurora lab down toward the strip. A month doesn't go by where one of my friends mentions their friend-of-a-friend is moving in to the big five-over-one apartment complex across from the GetGo, and they are most often robotics employees. I would imagine that these companies flocked to the neighborhood for the cheap land along the river, but I'm not precisely sure why or how that has shaped the neighborhood proper. Thoughts?
The one thing that stands out to me about Lawrenceville compared to other neighborhoods of similar size and importance is the sheer number of cars that pass through. I suppose that shouldn't be a big surprise considering that Butler and Penn run right through, but something about Lawrenceville has always felt so congested. Perhaps it's because it has a reputation for being "touristy," and people from the suburbs come and visit.
They're there because RIDC built an industrial park there and is specifically courting them. It's as simply as that. As for how it's shaped the neighborhood, I'd guess that it's contributed to the push for more of these luxury apartments that keep popping up, but that's about it. The CMU lab has been there since 1994 but the push for more tech along the river didn't start until well after Lawrenceville became trendy. Incidentally, I was in Lawrenceville for dinner last night and it didn't seem like tech culture was having much of an influence on the overall vibe compared with a few years ago, though that may change with time and be the impetus that pushed it from the "gentrifying" category into the "upper middle class" category. Traffic was bad in Lawrenceville long before it became touristy. The issue is that it's an unbroken commercial stretch that's two miles long with 16 traffic lights, narrow roads, street parking, no turning lanes, and a lot of pedestrians. The only place I can think of that's comparable is the South Side, and that isn't known for great traffic flow, either.
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