Representations of the Lower Hill District

Established in 1906, the Pittsburgh City Photographer (PCP) was an entity within the Pittsburgh Public Works Department responsible for documenting city infrastructure. Government bureaus (such as the Health Department, Housing Authority, or Transit Commission) could request the PCP to photograph public facilities like parks, streets, buildings, and their construction, and the locations of photographs were recorded by PCP photographers. Although the work of the PCP spans the years between 1890 and 2002, the photography division of the Public Works Department was eliminated in the early 1970s; After that, the City Photographer functioned like a police photographer, mainly photographing in junction with ongoing investigations. The resulting body of photographs now exist as the Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection in the University of Pittsburgh's Library Services.   

The large scope of this collection, in subject and location, has created a diverse visual history of Pittsburgh. This exhibition features photographs of the Lower Hill District (hereafter referred to as the Lower Hill for brevity) and surrounding Hill District from the period leading up to its demolition in 1957. During the years covered in this exhibition (with photographs from as early as the 1910s), the Hill District faced scrutiny for its “urban blight;” This term was coined by urban planners in the United States to refer to the process by which city spaces fall into disuse and disrepair. However, this disinvestment owed its existence to racism, segregation, and unequal access to economic mobility in the industrial workforce. Poor housing conditions in the neighborhood disproportionately impacted low-income and Black residents. Protests organized by Hill District residents for better housing conditions and community investment took place before and continued in response to the demolition of the Lower Hill, ultimately halting plans for further demolition in the neighborhood. 

This exhibition aims to recover a more comprehensive visual history of the Lower Hill than what was presented contemporaneously to the public amid the Pittsburgh Renaissance, the post-Great Depression redevelopment effort intended to bolster the city’s economy through public-private partnerships. To gain public support for demolition, the Lower Hill was photographed and mapped by redevelopers in ways that obscured its built environment from the community and quantified blight ( Click here to learn more about how redevelopers visualized the Lower Hill ). Photographs from the PCP recover what many residents remember of the neighborhood they defended: populated streets, sites of cultural significance, and other social intricacies of the Lower Hill. This comprehensive look into PCP representations of the Lower Hill also establishes possible connections between the PCP and the planning stages of redevelopment.

Photographs in this exhibition are displayed alongside digital maps to provide spatial and historical context. This combination of maps and photographs allows for a visualization of the space the Lower Hill once occupied, and can also be used to question the practices of mapping and grading space that contributed to its demolition. Geotags have been externally generated for all photographs in the collection using information recorded by the initial photographer; Each photograph in this exhibition has been titled, dated, located, and captioned exactly as the image is recorded in the archive. The maps below will be used throughout the exhibition--they include (in order of appearance): a present-day satellite image map of Pittsburgh and a 1939 aerial photo map of Pittsburgh (combined below and interactive to demonstrate the shift in the built environment), the 1937 Home Owner’s Loan Corporation Residential Security map of Pittsburgh (commonly referred to as a “redlining map”), and the 1950 Pittsburgh City Planning Commission redevelopment map of the Lower Hill. The button below the listed maps can be used to interact with these map layers on ArcGIS (for example, removing the 1939 aerial photo map to see redlining on a present-day map).

Pittsburgh’s emergence as a global industrial center in the first half of the 20th century gave way to many of the city’s infrastructural problems and inequities. By the time of the Great Depression, residents had come to know the city as “smoky, flooded, strike-prone Pittsburgh” (Vitale, 773). Indeed, the Hill District’s close proximity to the steel mills of the Strip District (seen from the heights of the neighborhood in Bedford Avenue, 1) drew European immigrants in the early decades of the 20th century, then Black migrants of the First and Second Great Migrations. The neighborhood’s diverse population prompted the creation of settlement houses like the Kingsley House and Irene Kaufman Settlement House (shown in Group at the Irene Kaufmann Settlement, 3). By 1940 the Hill District’s population was predominantly Black, although the Census of 1940 did record 25 nationalities in the neighborhood (Benz).

The Hill District’s built environment was the subject of visual scrutiny as early as the 1910s, as evidenced by photographs in the PCP Collection (see  Hill District Street Scene, 1914 ;  Hill District Houses, 1924 ;  Orbin Street, 937 ; and  Children Outside the Privy, 1940 . These photographs were requested by departments including the Housing Authority and Bureau of Public Health, and their framing uses the built environment to minimize the people photographed, which were often Black children). Photographs like Hoffers Way (4), for example, foreshadow the framing of clotheslines in allies between aging buildings leveraged by  redevelopers later decades . During the 1920s, local planners attempted to create a comprehensive plan for the city’s renewal, even introducing a crosstown expressway at the site of the Lower Hill, but were stalled by internal conflict (Grantmyre, 36). In this decade and progressing in the decades to follow, blight and slum clearance were hot topics in United States urban planning as poor living conditions were viewed as inferior, often with racial and ethnic implications (Lovett, 73). In addition to the racialization of the neighborhood implicated by urban planners of the time, poor housing conditions in the Lower Hill drew such public scrutiny; 40% of the structures in the Lower Hill’s third ward were built before 1900, many units lacked adequate water and heating facilities, and low vacancy rates exacerbated these conditions (Trotter, 65-66).

The neighborhood’s largely low-income population fell victim to (and  went on to protest ) these conditions for a myriad of reasons, especially for the neighborhood’s Black residents. Jim Crow Era housing segregation hindered Black residents’ ability to move to other neighborhoods, leaving much of Pittsburgh’s Black population redlined in neighborhoods also including Braddock, Duquesne, East Liberty, and Homewood. Additionally, Black residents working industrial jobs were often subject to the lowest paid labor with few opportunities for mobility, a common practice among industrial employers like the neighboring Midwest automobile industry. Although residents did experience poor housing conditions, the neighborhood was nonetheless cherished by its own and the rest of the city for its recreational attractions. In its earlier decades, the Lower Hill housed Washington Park (seen in Field Meet, 2), the reservoir-turned-park that many factory-employed children enjoyed (Uhl); and during the Jazz Age, the Hill District was known as “Pittsburgh’s Harlem” for its lively performing arts scene.

The built environment of the Lower Hill was on the minds of redevelopers amid the Pittsburgh Renaissance. New federal policies resulting from the contemporaneous New Deal secured funding and subsidies for state and local governments with urban redevelopment projects, setting the stage for banker Richard Mellon to form the Allegheny Conference for Community Development in 1943. Comprised of other elite Pittsburghers, Mellon brought the ACCD and its financial resources to Mayor David L. Lawrence with intentions set on long-term stabilization of Pittsburgh’s economy, and like many planners in the US at the time viewed slum dwellings as a direct threat to regrowth. ACCD President Arthur van Buskirk once stated, “How can our democracy be strong when we see central business districts […] bordered by slums and blighted areas?” (Vitale, 781). 

Through the newly founded Urban Redevelopment Authority, the ACCD worked with the Pittsburgh City Planning Commission (CPC) to plan the demolition of the Lower Hill. The CPC proceeded to “assess” the area, leveraging the Appraisal Method established by the American Public Health Association (APHA) to document and quantify blight. Designed to be more easily interpreted by the “busy public official or the layman” (Grantmyre, 18), APHA encouraged the creation of maps that categorized blocks in greyscale as “substandard” or “slum.” Appraisal Method guidelines instructed surveyors to assess the neighborhood in person for visual signifiers of blight. On the ground visuals were translated to maps via a point system that graded a block’s “dwelling” and “environment” quality, both of which were averaged in a “housing quality grade” (the grade shown in this exhibition; To view the other grades, use the  Interactive Map ). An  aerial photograph taken by the PCP  shows the exact vantage point and border of the maps created by the CPC, suggesting the PCP’s role in these mapmaking efforts. 

This appraisal method, like the preceding HOLC residential security maps, determined its own values often at the expense of lesser privileged communities. For example, the APHA Appraisal Method could demarcate a block as substandard solely on the basis of “mixed land use,” its own terminology for blocks that either mixed commercial industries (such as a bakery next to an auto shop) or mixed residential and commercial areas. Not only did this penalty directly neglect the Lower Hill’s local business district, which included Black-owned businesses, but also ignored residents’ value in its subsequent opportunities for employment, business ownership, and lively sidewalk activity that “ensured the block’s wellbeing and public safety” (Grantmyre, 23). Additionally, such grades were delivered on the basis of space. The Google Map below shows the street-facing distance between two graded blocks from the redevelopment map. The distance between points A and B is 456 feet, meaning surveyors assessed these blocks on an approximately two-minute walk.

The photographs in this section demonstrate the stark contrasts between the redevelopers’ visual understanding of the Lower Hill and the more candid street scenes captured by the PCP. One photograph in this section, Logan Street Scene (7), shows the same intersection photographed by the ACCD in  John Schrader’s Lower Hill District before Demolition . While Shrader (a photographer for the ACCD) was instructed to photograph the neighborhood desolate and blighted to coincide with redevelopers’ assessments and maps, the PCP was able to capture instead the regular activity of the same street.  

Although the job of the PCP was not to document the city’s cultural landscape, it nonetheless captured some significant cultural events and buildings. In her assessment of the photographs and maps produced by the ACCD during the Lower Hill’s redevelopment, Dr. Laura Grantmyre argues that bleak, desolate images of the area omit the “on-the-ground lived details of the neighborhood” (Grantmyre, 2016). The documentary nature of the PCP allows for these details to be recovered, and the photographs in this section allude to the neighborhood’s diverse social setting.  

The photograph A Library is a True Fairyland (1) documents an integrated gathering of children at the Washington Park library. Like the earlier photograph at the Irene Kaufman Settlement, integrated groups of children were a common sight in the Hill District as its population was largely Italian, Jewish, Syrian, and African American in the first half of the 20th century (Trotter, 65). Blitz’s Hebrew Bookstore (3) documents the impact these diverse communities had on their local economies. However, the Lower Hill’s demolition led to the closing of nearly 400 businesses, many of which were Black-owned and struggled to relocate in close proximity because of pending demolition plans (Trotter, 55).  

The Lower Hill, like the greater Hill District, also housed a lively, integrated nightlife. The Lower Hill’s  Crawford Grill  was among the Hill District’s many jazz clubs, neighbored by theatres like the  Roosevelt Theatre  and the New Grenada Theatre (2), the latter designed by architect Louis A. S. Bellinger who was the first Black architect hired by Pittsburgh’s City Architecture office in 1923. Photojournalist Charles “Teenie” Harris more thoroughly documented the cultural and daily sights in the Lower Hill and Hill District as he was a lifelong resident and worked for the Pittsburgh Courier, a Black-owned newspaper ( see more of Harris’ work in the exhibition of his work at the Carnegie Museum of Art ).

The 1957 demolition of the Lower Hill came to be known as “the most devastating thing that ever happened to the black community,” as it displaced nearly 8,000 residents and 400 businesses (Trotter, 71). The demolition was initially supported by local residents and the Courier for its promise of better living conditions, as demonstrated in the earlier constructions of the public housing facilities  Terrace Village  and  Bedford Dwellings . However, the absence of rehousing efforts left former residents in search of housing “in all directions,” and the Hill District, East Liberty, and Homewood saw their Black populations each increase to over 70% by 1960 (Trotter, 72). This population shift also exacerbated the issue of low vacancy rates in residential areas, schools, and public housing facilities that maintained “racial quotas” instead of racial integration (Trotter, 76).

Redevelopment plans for the Lower Hill included the construction of the Civic Arena. Completed in 1961, the site was a catalyst for protest not only for its displacement of residents but additionally its racially discriminatory hiring practices (Grantmyre, 2016). Residents soon collected to form the Citizens Committee for Hill District Renewal when the URA proposed extending demolition into the Middle Hill in the mid-1960s (Grantmyre, 2016). Protest efforts rooted in the Hill District and the contemporaneous Civil Rights Movement resulted in the preservation of the Middle Hill.

Talks of this planned continuation prove that redevelopers visualized the Hill District homogenously, viewing the entire Hill District as a financial risk. Yet, photographs by the PCP demonstrate the visual similarities that carry throughout the nuanced neighborhood. Both were sites of business, family, community, and culture; an ordinary yet vibrant sight in mid-20th century Pittsburgh. As symbolized through the reverted gaze of some of the people photographed (seen in this section’s Reading the Paper, 3, and Liberty Hall, 4--the same site twice photographed), this history proves that local agency can be complicated if not entirely lost when viewed from the vantage point of an external, institutional surveyor. The city still reckons with the redevelopment’s aftermath, as demonstrated by  artists grappling with this history like Dr. Felecia Davis  and  local organizations calling for reparations  (Harris, 2021).