Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual Culture

Conflicting Visions of the Lower Hill

In the years leading up to the Lower Hill’s demolition in 1956, the Conference represented the Lower Hill through its most egregious examples of blight but with no attention to its social vibrancy. This selectively bleak view of the Lower Hill made demolishing and redeveloping the neighborhood a foregone conclusion, regardless of its long-term social costs. In the summer of 1950 Pittsburgh’s City Planning Commission (CPC) analyzed the Lower Hill’s blight to certify it as a redevelopment area in line with Pennsylvania’s 1945 Redevelopment Law. The CPC photographed Lower Hill rear yards and alleyways to testify to the conditions that qualified the neighborhood as blighted. To document the neighborhood’s building density, the CPC photographed rear-yards shared by housing along Bedford Avenue, Fullerton Street, and Gilmore Way (fig. 3). Brick buildings dominated the image, dwarfing and encroaching on the rear yards, the scene’s only open space. Worse yet, no grass graced the scene and laundry lines, barrels and scraps of wood further cluttered the view. Showing rear yards also ignored the front of neighborhood buildings, the view residents consciously groomed for public scrutiny. Much of the scene’s clutter—the laundry lines, oil drums, and woodpiles—would not have appeared on main streets. A complete absence of people characterized the image, making the neighborhood appear lifeless and expendable.

In a 1956 brochure entitled “The Allegheny Conference on Community Development Presents…Pittsburgh!” the Conference paired this photograph with a caption labeling the scene a definitive example of blight, deftly arguing for the Lower Hill’s redevelopment. The photograph’s caption explained, “The new Hill will wipe away blight, decay, worn out structures and overcrowding.” Instead of saying these conditions existed in the photograph, the caption described a future without them, implying that the present Hill exemplified all of the above. However, the photograph showed the rear yards of a block that the CPC actually categorized as one of the Lower Hill’s “intermediate” rather than “slum” or “substandard” blocks. In other words, the rear-yard scene that the brochure’s caption defined as “blight, decay, worn out structures, and overcrowding” was officially classified as none of the above. The Conference distributed this brochure to the city’s politicians, leading civil servants, newspaper editors, and business leaders, effectively providing them with a mental picture of the Lower Hill that equated it to blight but negated its people and social life.

The city’s redevelopers had very little social contact with the Hill District; conversely the Courier’s photojournalist, Teenie Harris, grew up embedded in the neighborhood’s social and commercial life. Harris’s mother, Olga, ran the Masio boarding house, billiard parlor, barbershop, and miniature golf course on Wylie Avenue in the Lower Hill. Harris’s brother William “Woogie” Harris, meanwhile, helped run the city’s illicit numbers lottery. Teenie not only photographed the Hill’s social galas, crime scenes, protests, and political events for the Pittsburgh Courier, but also ran a portrait studio in the Middle Hill. According to photography historian, Cheryl Finley, Harris’s lifelong intimacy with the area gave him “unrivaled access” to the Hill and its residents. Indeed, between 1930 and 1980, Harris took nearly 80,000 photographs, almost all of which focused on the Hill District. As a lifelong resident of the Hill, Harris valued the neighborhood’s institutions and, as a result, centered his photographs on specific businesses, nightclubs, churches, sidewalks, and vacant lots; in doing so, he transformed the anonymous buildings and streets in redevelopers’ visual rhetoric into spaces where people shopped, played, and prayed. 

For example, Harris photographed the quotidian street scenes and socializing that animated the Lower Hill but remained invisible to redevelopers’ narrative. In the 1940s, Harris photographed children playing stickball in an empty Lower Hill lot (fig. 4). Harris positioned his camera at a distance behind the kids’ makeshift home plate. This distance and angle allowed Harris to fit the whole game, outfielders and spectators, into the frame. He took the photograph as the game’s batter hoisted his bat over his shoulder and awaited his next pitch. This image captured the day-to-day action that enlivened the Lower Hill’s streets and vacant lots. Harris’s photographs also showed adults using the neighborhood’s streets for leisure. In June 1949, Harris photographed fourteen men gathered around two sidewalk checkers games (fig. 5). Again, Harris stepped back from the action to take in the whole scene. Two of the players sat on crates and the checkers boards rested on the players’ laps rather than on tables. No one officially designated the sidewalk as a checkers arena or the vacant lot as a stickball pitch. After the games ended, these spaces likely returned to being an empty lot and a sidewalk for strolling pedestrians. Yet both would likely be transformed, again and again, into recreational spaces when residents descended on them with bats, crates, and checkers boards. According to Harris’s photographs residents saw the Lower Hill’s streets, sidewalks, and vacant lots as much more than examples of blight.

According to Harris’s photographic record, however, in 1946 Hill residents identified and protested the neighborhood’s blight, specifically its dangerous and unsanitary housing. That same year, the Conference claimed time and experience had inured city residents to bad conditions to the point that they failed to comprehend what plagued their city and how it should be improved. Harris’s photographs and the Courier’s coverage contradict this by showing residents bringing evidence of the Hill District’s outhouses, courtyard water pumps, and crumbling walls to the attention of the mayor, city council, and the Allegheny Conference. For example, Harris photographed Hill District residents protesting the neighborhood’s housing conditions in City Council Chambers (figs 6 and 7). Harris took these photographs from the room’s front-right corner. This angle captured the protest’s organization, size, and complaints: well-dressed protesters orderly filled the chambers and held signs that read “From G. I. Latrines to Hill District out houses" and "From G. I. foxholes to Hill District rat holes.” Ten years before demolition commenced, Hill District residents spotlighted housing problems, such as unsanitary toilets and vermin infestations. 

The Courier’s coverage leading up to this protest, which occurred in May 1946, used visuals of the neighborhood’s deteriorated housing that spotlighted residents’ agency and encouraged readers to support the protest. That March, The Courier sent photographer, Oceana Sockwell, out with the protest’s organizers, the Hill District People’s Forum Social Action Committee (SAC), to document residents’ housing complaints and rouse public support for the campaign. Three Sockwell photographs appeared in an article entitled “Shocking Housing Conditions Exposed in Drive.” The first showed the Youngblood family talking over desperately needed home repairs with SAC leader James Owens. In the next photograph, a veteran drew water from a hand pump to demonstrate “how sixteen families in Humber Way are supplied with water.” The third image pictured a mother, Mrs. Morgan, pointing to her kitchen’s dilapidated walls. These photographs showed residents discussing the specific conditions they wanted remedied with the SAC and the article noted that the Youngbloods and Morgans had signed a petition demanding better housing-code enforcement. Unlike the Conference’s vacant rear-yard photograph, the Courier’s visual coverage highlighted the Lower Hill’s bad living conditions, but spotlighted residents as the experts on neighborhood conditions and as the initial agents for change. 

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