Conflicting Visions of the Lower Hill’s Redeveloped Future
Futurism also characterized the models that redevelopment boosters used promote the project; yet models added another dimension to the viewer’s experience, compelling viewers to embrace the planner’s vision. Photographers documented the model from above, imitating an aerial photograph, and from the side, imitating an urban landscape (fig. 8). Both angles replicated common compositions in urban photography, making the model seem even more real to the viewer. The panoramic style of the landscape photograph brought the viewer close to ground level, emphasizing the plan’s open spaces and landscaped order. The Civic Arena sat on the left, its metallic dome shimmering amidst the model’s tiny trees and uniform white buildings. To advance its argument for redevelopment in “The Allegheny Conference on Community Development Presents…Pittsburgh!,” the Conference paired an aerial photograph of this model with its rear-yard image of “blight, decay and worn out structures.” The caption below the model lauded the Arena’s architecture as “[u]nique and spectacular in design” and boasted, “[T]his structure is destined to become a wonder of the modern world.” This phrasing reframed a miniaturized simulacrum of the Arena, with its tiny fake trees and foamy grass, as a spectacular wonder for the reader to behold.
The Courier and Harris, conversely, envisioned redevelopment as a path to better housing for Hill District residents; this vision came, in part, from the neighborhood’s positive experiences with the Pittsburgh Housing Authority’s Terrace Village and Bedford Dwellings housing projects. In spring, 1939 the Courier celebrated Terrace Village’s promise with sketches of the project’s uniform and well-designed three-story buildings and broad landscaped courtyards. An article in July added evidence to support this celebratory tone. Subtitled “Huts of Squalor to be Changed to Models of Modernity by PHA,” the article sought to raise community awareness about the needs of residents displaced for Terrace Village, but concluded that the project overwhelmingly benefited the community. Slices of the Hill’s “dilapidated frame buildings and age-weary brick structures” would be replaced by housing for 1,818 families in “complete little villages, each one a model of modernity.”
The Courier also gave glowing photographic coverage to these housing projects, including Harris photographs showing children enjoying the projects’ amenities. For example, this Harris action-shot of children playing volleyball on Bedford Dwellings’ playground accompanied a 1941 article saluting Bedford Dwellings’ facilities (fig. 9). Harris took the photo from the playground’s corner, looking down on the backs of four boys defending one side of the volleyball net. Across the net, a team of girls and boys in crisp clothes watched the ball. This perspective drew the viewer into the game. Immaculately clean and surrounded by newly constructed brick walls, the playground looked like a healthy and safe space for children to play.
Similarly, another 1941 Harris photograph from Bedford Dwellings looked across a room filled with children in Halloween costumes; the photo accompanied a Courier article praising Bedford Dwellings for hosting a community Halloween party and representing the project as a vital community institution. When rain threatened to ruin Halloween for the Hill’s children, Bedford Dwellings threw a Halloween party for the whole neighborhood. The party saved Halloween for “450 costumed kiddies from the Hill area." In Harris’s accompanying photograph, an interracial group of kids dressed as pirates, superheroes, and princesses filled the frame from left to right (fig. 10). Bedford Dwellings’ facilities made this dry and safe Halloween scene possible. Not only did Bedford Dwellings’ amenities exceed the Courier’s expectations, but the project also functioned as a community space for the Hill District at large. When the Courier and its readers envisioned redevelopment in the 1950s, they envisioned an expanded public housing supply and, in turn, more scenes like these of safe community recreation and socializing.
When the Lower Hill’s demolition began, the Courier depicted redevelopment’s end goal as better housing for residents. A November 10th, 1956 Courier article summarized how families being relocated from lower Bedford Avenue were faring. Among lower Bedford’s non-white families, ninety percent had been relocated to “low-rent projects in the Upper Hill” in accordance with their preference to stay in the Hill. The story featured a Harris photograph of a relocated family in their new public housing apartment. In the photo, Mr. and Mrs. Walker and their six young children sat on and around their sofa watching television. One of the television’s antennae sliced through the composition, indicating that Harris photographed the family from behind the television (fig. 11). This choice foregrounded the television, a symbol of the family’s improved quality of life. The photograph’s caption elaborated on this theme. Redevelopment had relocated the Walkers from a “six-room shack” on Gilmore Way in the Lower Hill, to public housing in the Upper Hill’s Bedford Dwellings, “where they are happy.” This image supported demolition and redevelopment, but articulated the Courier’s specific vision of what redevelopment should achieve: improved living conditions for the Hill District’s people.
