Grantmyre- Conflicting Visions of Urban Renewal in Pittsburgh’s Hill District:
How Visuals Illuminate Redevelopment’s Shortcomings and Set the Stage for Resident Protests
The above two photographs illustrate how visual images can conceptualize urban spaces in contradictory ways. Commissioned by the city’s leading redevelopers, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (the Conference), the first image foregrounded an intersection in Pittsburgh's Lower Hill District (fig. 1). To the right, an old truck and lumber littered a vacant lot overgrown with weeds. The photograph made the Lower Hill’s streets, instead of its people , its main subject and highlighted clutter that emphasized the neighborhood's blight. Conversely, a photograph taken by Charles "Teenie" Harris, a photojournalist for the city's African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, captures the Hill's lively and diverse nightlife (fig. 2). A conga line led by an exotic dancer promenaded in front of a jazz band. Gilda, an African American female impersonator, clutched onto the dancers' hips followed by a black woman in an elegant satin dress and a comedian in a housedress. In the audience’s front row, a white woman watched. This image documents the neighborhood's rollicking entertainment culture and the everyday cross-racial, cross-class, and gender-bending intermingling that it facilitated. In Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the 1950s redevelopers used images of blight to justify tearing down the Lower Hill while Harris and the Courier depicted the neighborhood as vibrant and historically significant.
Retrospectively, historians consider the Lower Hill's demolition and redevelopment, which uprooted 1,885 families—a majority of them African American—between 1956 and 1961, a mistake. The project’s Crosstown Expressway successfully eased downtown’s traffic flow and the jewel of the Lower Hill’s redevelopment, a Civic Arena with a retractable dome for open-air summer musicals, initially awed residents and visitors alike. However, the project’s other elements—three high-rise garden apartments, multiple commercial buildings, and a symphony hall—were never completed in the Lower Hill. Only one high-rise apartment building, Washington Plaza, rose in the Hill, and the rest of the space became parking lots. Many Lower Hill residents also found themselves struggling to find adequate housing even though federal law required cities to assist residents displaced by redevelopment projects. Many African Americans in Pittsburgh consider the Lower Hill’s demolition the “most devastating thing that ever happened to the black community.”
Much has been written about Pittsburgh’s urban redevelopment, particularly the strength and efficacy of its public-private partnership. After WWII, the city’s business leadership, following the lead of Mellon-bank mogul and leading Republican, Richard K. Mellon, formed the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (the Conference) to save Pittsburgh from its smoky skies, dilapidated infrastructure, and flagging economy. The Conference teamed with Democratic Mayor, David Lawrence, and this cross-partisan alliance of private and public leadership brought about the city’s famed “Renaissance.” Pittsburghers credit many programs from this Renaissance, such as smoke control and the redevelopment of downtown’s Point District, for modernizing the city and easing the region’s transition from an industrial powerhouse to a service-based economy.
The Lower Hill’s redevelopment, however, complicates the Renaissance’s legacy. In the years leading up to the Lower Hill’s demolition in 1956, the Hill’s black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and its leading politicians supported redevelopment. The Courier, like its prolific photographer, Teenie Harris, celebrated the Lower Hill’s diverse and vital culture, but also agreed with redevelopers that dilapidation marred the Lower Hill’s built environment. The Courier also concurred that redevelopment would fortify Pittsburgh’s economy. By the 1960s, however, the Courier and redevelopers divided over the Lower Hill’s legacy. Redevelopers celebrated the building that replaced the Lower Hill, the Civic Arena with its domed retractable roof, as an architectural marvel that put Pittsburgh on the map. The Courier, meanwhile, began citing the Lower Hill experience as evidence that “urban renewal” was nothing more than “negro removal.”
Interrogating redevelopment’s visuals explains why and how the Lower Hill’s redevelopment became so divisive. Urban renewal historian, Christopher Klemek, argues that an urban renewal order with a shared “guiding image” took shape in the United States and Western Europe in the early and mid twentieth century. This guiding image molded public policy at the federal, state, and local level and influenced urban redevelopment projects like the Lower Hill. Although many aspects of this guiding image can be gleaned from redevelopers’ written texts, historians of urban policy like Klemek, Dana Cuff, Margaret Farrar, and Samuel Zipp have suggested that redevelopers' visuals provide new insights into their guiding image. Cuff, Farrar, and Zipp show how selectively bleak photographs of older neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and New York City discursively defined urban blight and sold this definition and redevelopers' favored intervention--demolition and redevelopment--to the public. Klemek and Zipp argue that the architectural sketches and models that planners used to envision and promote redevelopment projects illuminate the urban renewal order's modernist urban vision, including its assumptions and blind spots.
My research expands on their work by foregrounding and systematically interrogating the visual record of one urban redevelopment case study—Pittsburgh’s Hill District—from start to finish. The Conference’s visuals of the Lower Hill, particularly their photographs of desolate and litter-strewn back alleys, reveal redevelopers’ singular concern with the Lower Hill’s built environment and their underestimation of what would be lost through demolition. Teenie Harris’s photographs and the Courier, conversely, acknowledged the Hill’s physical dilapidation, but celebrated its vibrant social life and spotlighted residents’ activism for better living conditions in the years before redevelopment. Redevelopers and the Courier also envisioned the neighborhood’s redeveloped future very differently. The Conference’s emphasis on the city’s built environment and its economic vigor led to an exclusive focus on the Civic Arena’s technological marvels—in particular its retractable domed roof—and its promise to make Pittsburgh economically competitive. The Courier, on the other hand, envisioned redevelopment as a route to better housing for Hill residents and represented their hopes with Harris photographs of families, particularly children, enjoying the amenities of new public housing.
The visuals created by redevelopers and the Courier after the Civic Arena opened in 1961 highlight residents’ and redevelopers’ divergent expectations for redevelopment and show how residents visually translated their disillusionment into protest. Redevelopers used the Civic Arena’s image as a symbol to celebrate their success. The Courier, conversely, expressed its dismay that better housing proved illusory by fusing symbols of racial injustice to images of the Civic Arena. By the mid-1960s, Pittsburgh’s redevelopers were considering extending redevelopment through the Middle Hill, but the Courier threw its visual support behind anti-redevelopment activists. Riding the momentum of nation-wide black protests and using the Lower Hill as a symbol of redevelopment’s injustice, the Hill’s activists and the Courier forced redevelopers’ retreat from the Middle Hill in 1968.
