Opinion: Locals should decide which pieces of history to keep — or demolish

On Sat., Jun. 29, BikePGH’s Open Streets route started in the Hill District and wound 3.5 miles downhill across the Roberto Clemente Bridge onto the North Side. Throughout the Hill District, temporary white sandwich board signs pointed to historic businesses and landmarks, a walking tour that is one initiative of the Hill Community Development Corporation. One in particular puzzled me — the sign for the Hurricane Lounge, a 120-seat jazz nightclub and restaurant, was sitting on the sidewalk beside a tidy brick residential building that seemed to have been built in the ’90s.

The Hurricane Lounge was part of a thriving Black commercial and residential neighborhood that was destroyed by the decades-long “redevelopment” of the Hill District, an inequitable process that resulted in the loss of a vibrant neighborhood.

Yet, in a recent edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, columnist Ruth Ann Dailey exhorts the city to preserve its heritage and asserts that the “last significant loss” was the Civic Arena. She warns “We can’t trust the state with our city’s future” but obliviously omits the planning decisions of the past which have caused harm primarily to Black Pittsburgh neighborhoods. She further advocates for the preservation of the State Correctional Institution (SCI) without noting the economic or zoning context of the property or the wishes of the adjacent neighborhood.

In doing so, her voice becomes emblematic of a certain type of White nostalgia that would rather just not talk about the messy business of Pittsburgh’s modern development — like the fact that the Civic Arena in the Lower Hill District was once the site of 8,000 homes and 400 businesses. Through new planning frameworks and inclusive development, the City is attempting to right the wrongs of the past and create a Pittsburgh where people in every neighborhood can thrive, but an allegiance to old and inaccurate stories about what we value will hold us back.

I — a newcomer, moving to Pittsburgh in 2016, with my urban planning glasses permanently affixed — have noticed that many people here do not appreciate being reminded of past planning decisions that have resulted in the remarkable inequality faced by Black Pittsburghers. Soon after I moved here, Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode on Pittsburgh aired, and I was surprised to see the backlash he received for discussing the loss of the Lower Hill District neighborhood with activist and leader Sala Udin. It felt like he had gone off script, that he had lifted the veil in front of the whole country.

Dailey also identifies as a newcomer and diagnoses Pittsburghers as having low self-esteem and not valuing our history, which she sees as a reason we are not fighting to keep SCI from being demolished. Because the decision regarding the property’s fate is in the hands of its owner, the Pennsylvania Department of General Services, she views this as an overstep by the state into local land use decisions.

Indeed, top-down planning can lead to cultural erasure. The fate of the Hurricane Lounge and the Lower Hill District is not unique to Pittsburgh; in the 1950s and 1960s, a series of federal policies known as Urban Renewal resulted in the destruction of primarily Black neighborhoods across the U.S. Planning decisions in the time of Urban Renewal were characterized by a top-down mentality, a sense that the experts at the federal and state level held the solutions to address social problems, for example, clearing and redeveloping “blighted neighborhoods” with shiny new projects such as sports arenas and disastrous public housing, the classic example being Cabrini-Green in Chicago. Decisions were made without the input of citizens, and often against their will, while promises to be compensated for losses never materialized.

Unsurprisingly, the areas identified as “slums” were often neighborhoods of color; author James Baldwin wryly noted that the real goal of urban renewal was “Negro removal.”

Another example of top-down planning that has left a mark on Pittsburgh is redlining, which refers to maps highlighting in red the areas within which it was considered “too risky” to make mortgage loans. These areas were generally neighborhoods of color, and the effects have had long term consequences. Neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s and 1940s have lower rates of homeownership and higher rates of health disparities today. The University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project overlays redlined areas onto present day maps of cities. On the Pittsburgh map, translucent red polygons overlay the Hill District, and, across the river, cover the Allegheny West neighborhood, snaking up along the Ohio and into Marshall Shadeland. The sinuous shape crosses Ohio River Boulevard and juts out at right angles to include the former site of the State Correctional Institution.

In response to Urban Renewal, community activists rallied their neighborhoods and demanded to be involved in deciding what type of development would happen in their neighborhood. Community engagement is now a core tenet of the planning process. In light of the harmful outcomes of top-down planning, Dailey is right to question whether “any voice from the people of Pittsburgh” was consulted when making a decision on the SCI property. In fact, many voices were!

The plan submitted by Michael Baker International last June details the outreach that was conducted as they prepared their analysis of the site. Names and dates of meetings are included; they met with economic development staff at the city, county, regional and state levels, they spoke Pittsburgh City Planning and the Urban Redevelopment Authority, and Riverlife, and the Pittsburgh Film Office.

Most importantly, the study cites the feedback from the community group representing the Marshall-Shadeland neighborhood that encompasses the site.

President Angel Gober was quoted in a 2023 article from WESA, explaining, “That feels like a traumatized, harmful space that has incarcerated Black people for a very, very long time … we don’t want to keep something that has had a major negative impact on Black people and in our neighborhood.” The study notes that the neighborhood group expressed a strong desire to see the existing property totally demolished to remove its negative incarceration legacy and be replaced with redevelopment that provides job training and employment opportunities for local residents.

Furthermore, the plan looks at the realities of the site and of the economic context within which redevelopment will take place. The property has been vacant since 2017, it contains lead paint, asbestos, and underground storage tanks, and it is located in both the 100-year and 500-year floodplain. The 59-acre ALCOSAN sewage treatment plant (and its attendant odor) is its next-door neighbor. It is zoned industrial and most of the surrounding uses are industrial.

On June 25, the Pittsburgh Business Times reported that the Pennsylvania Department of General Services is planning to move ahead with full demolition of the site, removing the buildings and remediating the land to create a marketable 411,000 square foot of new industrial use, and retaining approximately 5.2 acres of the property’s riverfront for a dedicated public park use.

Dailey ends her column telling us a resort developer is appealing to Governor Shapiro, and that another out-of-state hotel developer may be interested. Or that the film industry could continue to use the building — it is true that Mayor of Kingstown has been shooting at the location, though the study notes no commitments to continue doing so are in writing. These solutions are focused outward — looking toward tourists or the film industry to justify the preservation of a relic that no longer serves the city or the neighborhood. Ironically, the governor stepping in to scrap a stakeholder-driven plan would be the ultimate in top-down planning.

If Pittsburghers are to boost their self-esteem, as Dailey recommends, one way to do so is to take accountability for past actions. This means that treacly nostalgia for buildings that are emblematic of racist planning decisions should be challenged in public and private conversations, and that decision-making processes about public assets should include the relevant stakeholders and accurate data rather than out-of-town-resort developers. Pittsburghers can, and should, trust themselves with their city’s future.

Emily Brown is a planner and Certified Economic Developer (CEcD). In her spare time, she runs the Instagram account @MomsForUrbanism.