Lower Hill Conclusion
This article has shed light on how these divergent perspectives came to be by examining the Lower Hill’s redevelopment through its visual record. More broadly, close readings of visuals have revealed how policymakers, propagandists, and the mainstream media perceived the people and spaces affected by specific public policies. Comparing these top-down visual representations to visuals created by the people most affected by specific policies highlights how the latter perceive themselves, their problems, their built environment, and their own solutions. The contradictions between top-down and bottom-up representations illuminate policymakers’ biases, assumptions, and blind spots—the flaws in their perceptions of the people and spaces touched by policy. Flawed perceptions encourage flawed policies. These policies go unchallenged if media coverage replicates policymakers’ and their propagandists’ biases, assumptions and blind spots. Skewed representations give the public a mental picture of the people and spaces affected by policy that presupposes the policy’s aptness.
In Pittsburgh, redevelopers visually represented the Lower Hill as they perceived it and their visuals shaped the public’s mental picture of the Lower Hill. Redevelopers’ photographs of desolate litter-strewn back alleys reveal that they saw the Lower Hill only in terms of its built environment. By showing the worst examples of the Lower Hill’s built environment but not its people, redevelopers’ images argued demolition would have structural benefits and no social costs. Combining these unflattering images with captions and written texts naming them definitive evidence of blight both reiterated the argument for demolition and lent redevelopers’ mental pictures of the neighborhood greater authority. The architectural sketches, models, and photographs redevelopers used to envision and the Lower Hill’s future and, later, to celebrate its achievement illustrate their ideal city—a landscape of ultra-modernist technological marvels. Paired with captions heralding the Arena as a “wonder of the modern world,” these images tickled the public’s imagination and strengthened support for redevelopment. When the city’s local daily newspapers and national periodicals used these same images, redevelopers’ mental picture of the Lower Hill garnered even greater authority.
In contrast to the redevelopers’ vision, Teenie Harris and the Pittsburgh Courier also represented the Lower Hill District as they perceived it, but as neighborhood insiders, their depictions paid homage to its social vibrancy and envisioned a people-centered redevelopment. Harris’s photographs of early housing protests and residents’ relocation showed redevelopment as residents perceived it. Photographs of the housing protests spurred by the Hill District People’s Forum demonstrate residents’ dismay with their living conditions as well as their activism to remedy their neighborhood’s deficiencies on their own terms. Once the Hill’s black political leaders and Courier embraced redevelopment Harris’s photographs envisioned it as a route to better housing. The dissonance between redevelopers’ and the Courier’s vision for the Lower Hill’s redevelopment helps explain the disillusionment and protests that ensued after the Civic Arena’s completion. Building on the Courier’s, Harris’s, and Civil Rights protesters’ visual repurposing of the Arena as a symbol of racial injustice, the CCHDR ultimately forced the URA to retreat from the Hill District in 1968.