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Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
Part 5: The Hill District*
Immediately to the east of Downtown, the land begins sloping upward, gradually at first, then more decisively. This hill includes virtually everything east of Downtown until Oakland, with the exception of the Strip District, from which it is separated by a steep dropoff. On the Monongahela side, the riverfront is devoid of any kind of strip-like neighborhood, as the cliffs begin only 100 yards or so from the shoreline. Officially, this area includes part of the Downtown, Bluff, Crawford-Roberts, Middle Hill, Bedford Dwellings, Terrace Village, Upper Hill, and Polish Hill neighborhoods. As a housekeeping measure, I would note that the Downtown, Polish Hill, and Bluff sections aren't normally considered part of the Hill, the Upper Hill section is debatable, and small parts of Oakland may or may not be considered part of the Hill District based on how old you are. As a said when I began this series, the official neighborhood lines are based on census tracts, which may or may not line up with the way people actually talk. That being said, there are good reasons to treat each of these areas individually, so that's what I will be doing.
The Hill District, in general, is Pittsburgh's Harlem, even if in reputation more than in reality. This was the part of the city where the first black migrants settled in the early 1800s, when the area was nothing more than log cabins on the hillside overlooking the point. As the century wore on, it became the dumping ground for various ethnic groups that couldn't get housing anywhere else, not just blacks but also Jews, Syrians, Italians, and Poles. They each divided into their own little enclaves, so for a while you had Jew's Hill, Italian Hill, etc. Eventually these distinctions eroded, and we were just left with the Hill.
The Hill was never a desirable area. Industry needs rivers and flat land, and the Hill had neither. In an era when foot travel was the only option for the working class, proximity to jobs was of utmost importance, and for all the pollution and squalor of the South Side and the Strip, they at least had that. The Hill District had all of the problems but none of the benefits. The only thing in its factor was that it was at least immune from the catastrophic floods that were common before the rivers were under control, but that's about it. All that being said, the residents made the most of the situation, and from the 1920s until the 1950s the Hill had somewhat of a golden age as the centerpiece of the city's black community. For reasons that will be discussed below, the Hill went into decline beginning in the 1950s, and hasn't recovered.
I've attached a map that includes all the neighborhoods in the Hill I'll be discussing, but I've never done that before so we'll see how it goes. Worst case I'll upload a copy to Imagur and include a link like before.
5A. The Lower Hill: Ground Zero
A few years ago I did a similar writeup back on Reddit so I apologize if this covers the same ground, but I think it's worth a fresh look. As I mentioned in the installment about Downtown, city leadership had a vision of Renaissance beginning in the 1940s that culminated with the wildly successful Point developments. When it came to the city's other attempts at urban renewal, though, things didn't go as swimmingly, and the first of these was the destruction of the Lower Hill. The Lower Hill District was roughly the area between where I-579 sits today on the west, 5th Ave. on the South, Bigelow Blvd. on the north, and Crawford Ave. on the east. Wylie Ave. was the main commercial thoroughfare, and the neighborhood, while notably black, had a healthy concentration of Jews and Italians as well. But it was also poor and run down. The housing was old and dilapidated, with many residences lacking running water. Beds were crammed as tightly as possible into rooming houses, where tenants slept in shifts. It was rife with seedy bars and pool halls, and prostitutes and policy makers roamed the streets. In other words, it was a slum, and in a city desperately trying to clean up its image as well as its air, the presence of such an area directly adjacent to Downtown was unacceptable. So a plan was hatched in the name of slum clearance. An expressway would be built connecting the Liberty Bridge to a planned bridge and highway heading north. A new arena with a retractable roof would be built to accommodate the Civic Light Opera, who were sick of being rained out at Pitt Stadium. A new cultural center would be built for the Pittsburgh Symphony and various other groups, modeled after Lincoln Center in New York. And there would be lots of tower-in-the park luxury housing. Beginning in 1956, the entire neighborhood was razed. 1,000 buildings were destroyed, displacing 8,000 people with no immediate housing prospects. The street grid was eliminated entirely. To add insult to injury, most of the planned development never happened. The Civic Arena was the obvious centerpiece in all of this, but it too had a rocky history before the Penguins were established; the acoustics inside were so bad that the Civic Light Opera moved out after a few years. The cultural center never materialized, on the grounds of cost, and the residential construction was limited to a single building, though it was designed by I.M. Pei. For decades, the neighborhood mostly consisted of the Civic Arena, surrounded by a sea of parking lots, with I-579 forming a formidable barrier with Downtown.
In 2006, the possibility of a revival loomed large. The Penguins had spent years trying to get a new arena, and a savior appeared in the form of Isle of Capri, a casino company. Pennsylvania had recently legalized slots, but restricted the licenses, of which Pittsburgh would only get one. Three contenders appeared: Bally's who wanted to build a casino at Station Square, Barden, who wanted to build one by the stadiums, and Isle of Capri, who wanted to build theirs on the old arena site. To sweeten the deal, they offered to build an arena for the Penguins, and redevelop the old neighborhood, in exchange for the development rights. The bid ultimately failed. The gaming commission's decision to award the license to Barden seemed perplexing at the time (and moreso after Barden went bankrupt), the joke being that Isle of Capri didn't get to build the arena for free because Ed Rendell wanted to pay for one, but in retrospect the plan wouldn't have worked. Hill residents were largely opposed to a casino coming to what they felt was still part of their neighborhood, making the political implications too volatile, and there were other problems with the site, like parking, that simply weren't an issue on the North Side. Add in giving away development rights to an entire neighborhood and the cost was just too high.
One thing the Isle of Capri debacle did, though, was get more people talking about redevelopment once the Civic Arena was gone. The Penguins ended up securing financing to build a new arena on an old hospital site they had purchased with the cash proceeds of the Jaromir Jagr trade (which is more appropriately in Uptown but still adjacent) and were given some kind of redevelopment rights to the old arena site as a consolation prize. And then nothing happened. The arena deal was announced in early 2007, and construction was completed in time for the 2010–2011 season. The prudent move would have been to spend the ensuing three years putting a development plan in place, start tearing down the old arena as soon as the new one was ready, and begin the first phase of redevelopment about 6 months later, once demolition was complete. Instead, the demolition of the old arena was delayed a year while a group of morons tried to get it registered as a historic landmark. It was only once demolition was complete that anyone even started working on a plan for redevelopment. (It's 2012 by now if anyone is paying attention). We didn't see anything until late 2014, when US Steel proposed moving their HQ there once their lease in the Steel Building ran out; those plans were scrapped when US Steel decided to stay put. A couple years later some Danish firm proposed a wacky plan that looked more like something an architecture student designs for their portfolio than something intended to actually be built. Needless to say, that idea went nowhere.
Up to this point I haven't included many pictures, so here's a clip from Street View. You'll see City View apartments and the Cambria Hotel next door. Rotate around and you'll see the new FNB Tower as it nears construction, and Flag Plaza off in the distance. Include that and all the empty space and that's all she wrote. Every other building is in an adjacent neighborhood. This is all officially part of Downtown, but I've broken it off into its own neighborhood for historical reasons and because it deserves its own installment due to how fucked up the whole thing is. But I digress.
A big part of the reason development has been slow to take off is due to community opposition, in particular that of Marimba Milliones of the Hill Community Development Corporation. The HCDC has no actual power, but they have enough pull with the powers that be to make things difficult. The actual land is owned by the Urban Redevelopment Authority, but they also have to contend with the Sports and Exhibition Authority, the Planning Commission, the Penguins, and any number of other agencies. Given the controversial history of the area, the URA made it clear early on that they wouldn't approve any development that didn't include a Community Benefit Agreement that they found acceptable. The HCDC became the prime arbiter concerning what was acceptable to the community, and they've made it hell to get anything built. The biggest sticking point has been about affordable housing for the proposed residential development. The HCDC and the Penguins argue about what an acceptable percentage of affordable units is. Then they argue that the Penguins definition of affordable excludes those of "very low and extremely low income". Then they argue about how much money the developer is going to pony up for Milliones' pet projects in other parts of the Hill. The Penguins' original grant of development rights required them to have the entire parcel developed within 11 years from the demolition of the old arena, with a minimum of 2 acres of new development per year. In that 11 years the Penguins did virtually nothing but build a few more parking lots, but they've able to successfully use Milliones' antics to get extension after extension.
The current site developer, Buccini Pollin, took a novel approach — they hired Kimberly Ellis, a Hill resident and community activist who opposed the Isle of Capri proposal, to act as point person for negotiations with Milliones. The initial idea behind this move was that someone with an existing working relationship with HCDC would make things go more smoothly and convince Hill residents that they weren't being railroaded. The actual result was quite different; Ellis and Milliones went to war. Milliones suggested that the developer only hired Ellis so they could slip a fast one past the community. Ellis said that Milliones apparently didn't understand how capitalism worked and that the developer wasn't a cash machine. David Buccini eventually stepped in and told the URA that this was as good a deal as they were going to get and if they didn't want to approve their proposal then the land was likely to sit vacant for another 20 years.
Needless to say, the gambit worked, though by this point the URA didn't have to worry about being called racist by anyone except the HCDC, since the city as a whole was now willing to blame anyone and everyone for the huge gap west of Downtown; Ellis gave the URA cover from Milliones, but they had no cover if they turned the deal down. And so, in 2021, construction began on the first phase of redevelopment, a 26-story skyscraper that is to be the new corporate headquarters for First National Bank. It's par for the course at this point for the first phase of the development to be a new office tower being constructed during one of the worst commercial real estate markets in history, but in FNB's defense, this was a done deal before the pandemic, when Downtown office space was at a premium. Furthermore, they aren't building it because they particular need that much office space, they're building it because they need a huge visible erect penis to attract the likes of Chase and Wells Fargo for the kind of multi-billion dollar merger that doesn't happen to companies headquartered in suburban office parks.
The next phase is a bit more practical, a concert venue built for the promoter Live Nation. For a while, a common thing to bitch about was the city's lack of a mid-size concert venue that was supposedly preventing some touring acts from stopping in Pittsburgh. This was rectified years ago with the construction of Stage AE (5,500 outdoor, 2,400 indoor) on the North Shore, but for some reason a new 4,500 seat venue is supposed to solve the same alleged "problem". As for the rest, who the hell knows. There's supposed to be a bunch more residential with ground floor commercial but since the URA is approving this a block at a time Buccini Pollin is going to have to deal with Marimba Milliones at every step of the way. Not that they've been any better; they just got URA approval to bifurcate the Live Nation development, which was also supposed to include a parking garage and an EMS center. Given that the EMS center was one of the concessions Milliones won in negatiations, she's back at it screaming that the developer is acting in bad faith, also citing some other commitments that they supposedly haven't met. Not to mention that the delay in parking garage construction supposedly means that the new venue will cause parking problems in the Hill District, never mind that the whole area is currently nothing but lots and that the homes closest to the area all have off-street parking anyway.
Given my tone, you may suspect that I don't have much sympathy for Milliones and would side with the developer, but that's not entirely true. While I don't much care for her antics, I understand where she's coming from. The original clearance of the Lower Hill promised all sorts of benefits that never materialized, and it's her job to make sure that developers don't run roughshod over the area again, and at least make sure that they get as much out of it as possible. The development agreements aren't with her, but with the URA, and her influence on the project only extends as far as the URA allows. More importantly, what they want to put here is crap. For all we've supposedly learned about urban planning since the '50s, the current proposal looks suspiciously like what was originally proposed for the site. The renderings show a design with all the charm of a suburban office park, complete with huge setbacks and "green space" that nobody will use. The old Lower Hill may have been a slum, but it had character, and is remembered fondly. My own proposals would be to either: 1. Using old photographs and building plans, try and recreate the old neighborhood to the extent that is practicable for modern uses, or 2. Give the development rights, and possibly the property itself, to the HCDC. I suspect that if Milliones had actual skin in the game then she wouldn't be in any position to keep making demands. She could use the proceeds to fund whatever pet projects she wants. If nothing else, it would be a better way to get money flowing into the rest of the Hill than their current strategy of hoping for Federal grants. And if the property sits vacant for 20 years because of her intransigence then hey, it's her prerogative, though I think she'd eventually be forced out of her position if she let things go too long.
There's some suggestion among conservatives that the razing of the Lower Hill was actually a good thing, that the concerns of the city about substandard buildings and overall dereliction were well-placed. In a darker sense, they say that rather than contribute to the decline of the rest of the Hill it at least insulated Downtown from it. Trying to examine a historical counterfactual is an exercise in futility; there are so many downstream effects something has that have to be untangled that things quickly become impossible to predict. So I'm not going to pretend that things would be all sunshine and roses had the Lower Hill remained extant. I will, however, say this: Dense neighborhoods adjacent to Downtowns are usually the first to gentrify. Think Boston's North End, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Fell's Point in Baltimore, Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, etc. Judging by old photographs, it was mostly the kind of late-19th and early-20th brick structures that are in high demand today. People like being able to wake up in their row house and stroll to their job downtown. On the other hand, this kind of revitalization didn't start happening until the '80s, and I don't see it happening in Pittsburgh until the '90s — who knows how much of the neighborhood would have been left by that point? One thing I can say is that the idea that Downtown was somehow inoculated from the decline of the Hill District is bullshit. In my first installment, I talked about how in the '90s and '2000s Tom Murphy fought tooth and nail to kick out the low income merchants on Fifth and Forbes in the name of "revitalization". Well, those businesses would have stayed out of Downtown if the Lower Hill's business district wouldn't have been razed, turning Downtown into the most convenient place for Hill residents to shop. As far as a neighborhood grade, this obviously doesn't get one. It was gradable long before I was born, and will hopefully be gradable in the future, but right now there's nothing to grade.
If you've made it this far, you're probably wondering where these have been, and why they've been absent while I've continued to post other things. When I first started this series, it was intended to be a series of neighborhood snapshots where I'd give a description, maybe a little history, and a rating, and then come back in the end and seen what we'd learned. Well, it quickly became apparent that there was plenty of material for culture war discussion somewhat different from the usual and I wanted to use some examples, and for the first segment, on Downtown, I wanted to talk about the whole Fifth and Forbes fiasco. Well, I was going off of what I remembered from 25 years ago, a time in my life when I wasn't paying particularly close attention to these things, so I figured I'd need to get my facts straight. Except there is very little that's easily accessible and before I knew it I was perusing archived articles from 2001 just so I could get a timeline and figure out if my memories of the public perception were in line with what people were actually saying. Again and again this happened, with me saying that I was going to make it quick and only talk about stuff I remember but even then I'm constantly checking myself for accuracy. So the long and the short of it is that I do intend to see this through to completion. The pace may be slow because there are still quite a few "big ones", so to speak, that have a lot to talk about, but in the meantime, I'd like to thank everyone who's still with me and who has commented in the past.
Prior installments:
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These are great, thanks for writing them up.
Little side story that's kind of relevant, and may or may not interest you, but his post made me think of a very interesting story Sam Hyde told on a live stream years ago (yes, that Sam Hyde, way back before he kind of blew up into some kind of political figure, and was just some absurdist youtuber I followed).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=M2TYjRr-Gps
Kind of long (I'd still recommend watching it), but the basic gist is that he met a crazy guy who claimed his father, a Greek Immigrant, was some sort of genius architect and a big shot in the Pittsburgh mid-century redevelopment scene. Apparently the father bumped elbows with a lot of the city big wigs of the time, and was lead architect on a lot of major projects, but at some point refused to take part in a wife swapping "key" party and was subsequently professionally black-balled. Sam claims the guy had some of his dads old drawings still, including what sounds like original drawings of the Civic Arena. People online think they've traced the dad to being James Mitchell (originally Michalopoulos).
I'm glossing over lots of interesting little details though, like at one point apparently the guy claimed IM Pei being chosen to design what you mentioned, over his dad, was related to some side deal between US steel and China. Also I believe Sam briefly attended Carnegie Mellon, so that might explain why he'd even run into a guy like this.
Obscure forum post with apparently some more details
Could be legit, could be a lot of bullshit. You'd probably be a much better judge than me, but I thought it was interesting enough that I still remember it.
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Is there an index of previous posts? I read the first couple but seem to have lost the rest in the shuffle.
Also, and I literally almost forgot to say this because it's so glaring, but thank you and good work!
I've edited the post to include an index.
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