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Notes -
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
Part II: The Strip District
Early development in Pittsburgh didn’t radiate evenly from the Point but was focused along the rivers. The most obvious location for initial expansion, then, was in the area known, aptly, as the Strip District. Its boundaries are well-defined and uncontroversial. The southern boundary is at 11th St. at the Convention Center, and the northern boundary is at 34th St. near Doughboy Square. Between these points, it occupies the narrow strip of land between the Allegheny River and a hillside so steep there are no road connections from there to the neighborhood on top (though there used to be an incline). The Strip began as a typical industrial/residential/commercial working-class area like any other river district in the days before zoning. No other neighborhood was more important to Pittsburgh’s early industrial history: This was the neighborhood where the bullets for the War of 1812 were cast in the nation’s first iron foundries, the neighborhood where George Westinghouse started producing airbrakes, the neighborhood Charles Martin Hall of what was then known as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company started producing aluminum. James Parton was looking down on the Strip from that aforementioned hill in 1868 when he famously described Pittsburgh as “Hell with the lid off”.
In 1906, the city removed freight tracks that continued Downtown along Liberty Ave. With the railroad now terminating in a yard at Smallman St., the area became a prime location for wholesalers to set up warehouse operations. The Strip had industrialized in the days before people like Andrew Carnegie could build mega-mills on virgin land, so the parcels were of a much smaller size. As the original industries left due to lack of scale, more and more of the area became occupied by warehouses. As the 20th Century wore on, the warehouses expanded and residential areas were demolished; the neighborhood’s population, over 17,000 in the early decades, was below 5,000 in 1940. As the wholesale trade diminished in the 1950s, merchants began opening retail outlets to supplement their existing wholesale business, focused on the Penn Ave. corridor, and by the 1970s the Strip had a reputation as a place where you could find fresher meat and produce than you can get in a grocery store, as well as hard to find oddities. But the rest of the district was an assortment of warehouses, light industrial concerns, parking lots, and storage yards. By 2000, the residential population had dwindled to a mere 266.
The Strip had an abortive resurgence in the 90s as part of an attempt to make it a nightlife district, but the story of the modern strip begins in 2006, when the former Armstrong Cork & Seal factory was converted into loft apartments. Since then, construction has been more or less constant. The semi-abandoned industrial areas have been replaced by high-end condominiums and office blocks, but there’s still enough industry left to give the area a raffish feel. The current population stands at about 3,200 and is expected to double in the immediate future just based on what’s under construction or ready to build. But the real draw is the shopping. Those wholesalers I mentioned earlier? They never left. When the rest of the neighborhood was run down and industrial, Penn Avenue had an almost carnival-like atmosphere, especially on weekends. Younger people don’t seem to appreciate this, but in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was no “foodie culture” or whatever other horrible phrase you want to use. Supermarkets carried stuff that everyone bought, and even things we take for granted now like prosciutto and avocados were hard to come by. Some specialty stores sold this stuff, but most supermarkets didn’t, and unless you knew about these places you were out of luck. But everyone knew about the Strip. If you wanted some oddity, it was common practice to assume you could get it there; even if you didn’t know where you were going you could just walk into a random store and ask and if they didn’t sell it they’d direct you toward who did. The atmosphere has gotten even better in recent years, as the commercial district has expanded from Penn and spilled onto neighboring streets. The big regional chain now sells specialty stuff, and even Aldi’s carries things you couldn’t find 30 years ago, but if you want to buy pheasant, or raw oysters, or even just olive oil in bulk at a reasonable price, the Strip is the place to get it. Hell, I can get fresher fish at Wholey’s than I can at any beach town in North Carolina I’ve ever been to.
With all the change, there are some contrarians out there who think that all this construction is a bad thing. They bemoan how they’re turning a historic working-class neighborhood into a place for yuppies and tech bros. The thing is, there was really nothing there to miss. I don’t think these people are truly nostalgic for tow yards, mid-century warehouses, and lots where they store pipe and electrical transformers. Most of these places were just sitting idle anyway. Consider: Everything in this shot is new construction. It may not win any architectural awards, but it doesn’t exactly look like a suburban office park. Now consider what the area looked like in 2008. Feeling nostalgic? If people are going to complain about losing the old neighborhood, the time to complain was well before they were born. The “old neighborhood” was mostly gone before the War, when the construction of the big mills drew jobs out of the neighborhood and the smaller industries that remained couldn’t support the old population on their own. Sure, it would be nice if the old housing stock remained, and some of it still does, but I’d rather build for the future than bemoan the past.
But these people are wrong in a more fundamental way; the heart of the Strip is, and will always be, Penn Avenue. As much as people may want to complain about gentrification (more accurately yuppification, since there were no existing residents to displace), the entire commercial district is local. There are few national chains horning in on the neighborhood. The more well-known businesses here are institutions; something like 20% have existed for more than a century. And the newer businesses have the feel of places that intend on becoming institutions; there’s very little corporate feel. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Pirmanti’s. Yes, it’s more of a local gimmick like the Philly Cheese Steak than fine dining. Yes, it’s overrated in the media. Yes, it’s still delicious. No, the original doesn’t taste any better than the innumerable franchise locations that are popping up everywhere. That being said, there is something to be said for innumerable franchise locations ruining the mystique of a special place. It used to be that you’d eat at Pirmanti’s when you went to the Strip because you heard about it but never got the chance to try it because the Strip was out of the way for most people. It used to be open 24 hours and was a popular place to get a late night snack during the Strip’s old club days. Now every suburb and exurb has one and I think they opened one in Florida, and they expanded the menu to include pizza and wings and a bunch of other stuff that wasn’t the classic sandwich, and these days, to most Pittsburghers, it’s just another restaurant.
That being said, there is a bit of anxiety among current residents that the big chains will see the massive population increase push out the local merchants who made the neighborhood attractive to them in the first place. While this is a possibility, I’d say it’s a slim one. The old commercial corridor on Penn Ave really only runs between 17th and 23rd streets. The area closer to Downtown is more sparsely developed and has a lot of parking lots. After 23rd street development becomes spotty and increasingly industrial until you’re in a sort of no-man’s-land until you get to Lawrenceville. The streets off of Penn toward the river are seeing the most development but aren’t as historically prized and don’t contain many of the classic strip businesses. Most telling, though, is that developers keep opening new retail space, and so far, little of it has gone to chains. The old produce terminal on Smallman St. was sitting abandoned for years after wholesale distribution moved to a larger modern building on the river. The recent redevelopment of the retail portion has been mostly local. Even if a significant chain store presence does materialize, I doubt that it will affect the existing, “classic” retail element too much. This stuff existed long before the Strip had any significant office space or residential development, and the chains that have moved in seemed geared toward meeting the demands of residents and office workers more than those of the weekend tourist crowd. Maybe some clueless suburban shoppers will grab lunch at Chipotle rather than Pamela’s or the cafeteria at Wholey’s, but a neighborhood needs unglamorous, functional places to work as a neighborhood. There’s been recent discussion of a Trader Joe’s moving into the part of the Strip closer to Downtown, and this hasn’t attracted much criticism. Downtown residents don’t really have anywhere to buy groceries, and while the wholesale outlets are fine for some things, they aren’t really places where you can do all of your shopping. There’s something odd about a neighborhood where you can get 759 different varieties of olives but not toothpaste. So I suspect this fear is largely unfounded.
Neighborhood Grade: Upper Middle Class. As I said earlier, it’s not really gentrified because there was no existing residential population of any substance, and the housing is all new construction. Parts of it were seedy, but it was never dangerous and has always been a draw for outsiders. There were never any rehabs for sale, no one ever felt like an urban pioneer moving here, it was just that one day someone built luxury apartment and the next thing you knew there were a lot of luxury apartments. It was never a hip neighborhood for artists or bohemian types. Urbanists need to take note because it doesn’t follow the standard playbook, and I’m honestly surprised that it even exists.
Posts like these are why I still come back here, thanks for writing this.
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I don’t think younger people understand how hard it was to get product back in the day. The strip was a real gem for Pittsburgh then. And for the region the chain grocery stores do suck.
It’s been a few years since I got primantis outside of the strip but the quality did seem different. Maybe other areas have improved. It makes sense that you could replicate the quality in the region but it did seem to be different before.
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At least two. One a regular pizza place, one (the older one) an absolute dive pizza place selling slices on the beach, which seems to have a high minimum tattoo coverage and piercing minimum to work there.
At first I thought you were confused when you described these as pizza places (i.e. they just happen to be owned by someone named Pirmanti) but I checked the website and they are "official" locations, even if they bear no actual resemblance to a normal location. For the record, Pirmanti's isn't known as a pizza place, and I don't think the smaller urban locations even serve pizza. It looks like the Florida locations were existing pizza places that got a franchise to use the name and sell the sandwiches, with no effort made to resemble the ones in Pittsburgh. Apparently the actual company doesn't care that much about consistent stores. That being said, I normally wouldn't go to a Pirmanti's while on vacation because I can get that here whenever I want to. But since it's evidently a bastardized bizarro version, I'm intrigued.
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