Lower Hill Redevelopment (Pittsburgh, Washington: houses, neighborhoods, construction)

[I_Like_Spam]

People bemoan the construction of the Arena, Washington Plaza, Chatham Center nowadays as the destruction of a viable neighborhood.

The contemporaries who actually razed the neighborhood and redeveloped the area had quite a different view of the huge project.

From A Pittsburgh Album 1758-1958 by Roy Stryker and Mel Siedenberg, 1959, p.88.

The caption under a picture of the hill as it was:

The Lower Hill before redevelopment as seen in 1956; a hotbed of vice, dereliction, overcrowded slums in the shadow of the city's new modernity.

[BrianTH]

Here is a brief relevant history:

Crawford Square - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Although the Hill District was known for its rich culture and diversity of residents (Jews and other ethnic groups remained a fixture of the neighborhood), Pittsburgh authorities began to see its density, proximity to downtown, and high proportion of African Americans as reason to target the district for "Slum Clearance." [3] As early as 1914, the Hill District's African –American and immigrant groups were being condemned for their "moral vice." The verbal and written condemnation of such African-American-dominated neighborhoods was a common occurrence as a post-industrial response to changing demographics and deteriorating urban environments in North American cities. This type of rhetoric was used to strategically discriminate against neighborhoods like the Hill District. According to reports on the Hill District, African-American girls and women from the South populated the worst of the Pittsburgh brothels—the "alley houses of the Hill District." [2]. Later, increasing attention was given to housing conditions in the area. In 1946, the fledgling Pittsburgh Housing Authority published a report on "Negro housing needs," condemning the propensity of African American communities for overcrowding and calling for further assistance to this underserved population [4].

Of course as many of us here have pointed out, regardless of the truth at the time, neighborhoods like this that survived the "slum clearance" waves of the period have often since become prime neighborhoods.