Hill District (Pittsburgh)
Encyclopedia : H : HI : HIL : Hill District (Pittsburgh)
The Hill District is considered by many to be the cultural center of African-American life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay once called the district "the crossroads of the world," referring to the neighborhood's heyday in the 1930s-1950s. It is known to many Pittsburghers as simply "The Hill."
The Hill District is comprised of five neighborhoods: Crawford-Roberts, the Middle Hill, the Upper Hill, Bedford Dwellings, and Terrace Village. It is bordered by Downtown on the west, the Strip District and Polish Hill on the north, the Bluff (Uptown) on the south, and Oakland on the east.
Prior to 1930, the Hill District was inhabited by a diverse mix of residents, among them strong Irish and Jewish populations. During the Great Migration, which began in World War I and reached its peak during the Great Depression, Blacks came to the North to escape poverty and repression in the South. However, conditions in the area not being much better, they settled in the Hill District and started up many area businesses. The Hill became a cultural hotspot in the 1930s, and until the 1950s was one of the most prosperous and influential black neighborhoods in the United States. The area housed jazz legends such as Stanley Turrentine and Art Blakey and writers such as August Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who set many of his plays in the area. The Pittsburgh Courier, an influential black newspaper, was printed in the Hill. Its chief photographer, Charles "Teenie" Harris, documented life in the Hill for more than forty years, creating an unusually comprehensive photographic collection now housed at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball team also played here. The team, which played in the Negro National League, featured players such as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Jimmie Crutchfield and Cool Papa Bell.
The decline of the Hill came with an urban renewal project which tore down homes and businesses to make room for the Civic Arena and public housing projects in the mid-1950s. Over 8,000 residents were displaced by the project, which went down as one of the most destructive public projects in the history of the United States. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, race riots made the area even more volatile, and the crack epidemic of the 1980s further devastated what was left of the neighborhood. By 1990, the area population had declined to 15,000 from over 50,000 in 1950. Most of the residents lived in public housing in 1990. Recently, a great deal of government money has been funneled into the area in an effort to rebuild the community to its earlier heights, but crime in the area is still high. With the destruction of some of the public housing projects and construction of market-rate housing, though, the Hill is showing signs of improvement.
Trivia
The TV Show Hill Street Blues ties its name origin back to the Hill District. Steven Bochco, a series writer for the show attending college at the nearby Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and based the name of the show on the district.Reference
See also
List of Pittsburgh neighborhoodsExternal links
- [Carnegie Library's History of The Hill]
- [City of Pittsburgh's Hill District page]
- [Wylie Avenue Days Program log] - Documents the Hill District's best years through the 1930s-1950s
- [Blog post mentioning the fall of the Hill District] - cites NY Times article
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