Our First Tour through Pittsburgh

November 19th, 2009

After we ate some lunch, Renee, Lea and Lena took us on a tour through Pittsburgh. We paid special attention to two neighborhoods, that are possible places for a project that deals with vacant land and population loss. Larimer and Garfield. While driving Lena told us through what we were seeing and photographing through the windows of the rental van.

Garfield is a neighborhood  in the east end of the City. Like many parts of Pittsburgh Garfield is a fairly steep neighborhood, with north-south residential streets running at about a 20% incline from Penn Avenue at the bottom to Mossfield Street at the top.

Garfield’s earliest settlers were predominantly blue-collar Irish laborers and their families, who worked in the mills and foundries down along the Allegheny River, shopped in local stores on Penn Avenue, and built and lived in modest brick foursquare homes on the streets running up from Penn Avenue. The community, then almost exclusively Catholic, built St. Lawrence O’Toole Parish on Penn Avenue in 1897. From 1880 until about 1960, the neighborhood remained as it began: a solid, working-class area, with all the closeness and xenophobia that such a place entailed. Neighborhood activist Aggie Brose described Garfield in 1960 as a place where “You sponsored each other’s kids, you went to all the weddings and funerals, you never wanted for a baby-sitter, you never had to call a repairman, you didn’t need for a social. When you put the kids to bed, the women went out on the stoops.”

Things changed in the 1960s, when some Garfield residents began to leave the City for nearby suburbs in Shaler and Penn Hills. In response, the City’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) used eminent domain and attempted to change nearby East Liberty from an urban shopping area, then the third-busiest retail center in Pennsylvania, to a suburban one. The URA knocked down many small shops, accessible on foot or by bus, and thereby opened land for larger ones, accessible by car. At the same time, the City’s housing authority built several massive public housing complexes on Garfield’s borders: Garfield Heights, a 600+ unit complex high up on Fern Street, and the East Mall, a 20+ story tower straddling Penn Avenue at the entrance to East Liberty.

These changes, designed to halt the slow trickle of Garfield residents to the suburbs, instead turned a trickle into a torrent. East Liberty lost most of its businesses, and the new housing projects, inhabited by poor African-Americans, unnerved Garfield residents. In 1969 the federal government gave the City funds to enforce housing codes in Garfield so that as old residents fled, their homes were not allowed to deteriorate. This move also backfired: long-time residents, told that homes built in 1900 (and often passed through families over the years) did not meet codes written in 1960, moved away rather than pay for upgrades.

Thus began a textbook case of white flight: in 1970, Garfield had a population of roughly 10,000 people, 80% of them white. In 2000, Garfield’s population had been cut almost in half to 5,450 people, 83% of them black.

Garfield, which had been a haven for working-class Irish-American homeowners, is now called home by African-American renters, and the steady industrial jobs that supported the older Irish-American residents are gone for good. Garfield’s current residents have established some of their own traditions, including the “Turkey Bowl,” a formal, full-contact football game on Thanksgiving Day played in full pads by teams called the Old Heads and the Young Bucks. But some of the neighborhood’s current traditions are negative ones: drug dealing, prostitution, and illegitimacy are not uncommon in today’s Garfield, and children attending the neighborhood’s Fort Pitt School often fall behind their peers on national tests.

To halt what they perceived as the neighborhood’s decline, in 1975 parishioners at St. Lawrence O’Toole founded the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, a Community Development Corporation that uses private and government funds and activism to encourage homeownership and business development. Over the years, the organization has built or renovated dozens of housing units, and renovated commercial properties for dozens of small businesses, from restaurants to art galleries to theater companies.

In the 1980s, a similar group called the Garfield Jubilee Association formed, with a goal of creating affordable housing. In recent years, the two groups have joined together in a joint project to build dozens of new single-family homes. In 2000, the BGC and Friendship Development Associates, Inc. formed the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative. The PAAI encourages artists to live and work along the Avenue by rehabbing properties, making small loans or grants for facade renovations, and organizing joint marketing events such as Unblurred, held the first Friday of each month, where the venues of Garfield and Friendship open for special events.

Efforts by groups like these, along with a recent recognition that massive, 1960s-style social welfare projects often had negative consequences, have helped to revitalize the neighborhood. Commercially, Penn Avenue is recovering from the flight of local businesses in the 1970s and 1980s. Some bastions of the old neighborhood remain, as groups like the BGC and GJA, and FDA have worked to keep some banks and stores along Penn Avenue. Since 1990, these have been joined by newcomers: African-American barbershops and salons, tiny family-owned Vietnamese restaurants, and a series of arts-related businesses (e.g., theatres, galleries, an architecture studio, a glass factory, a coffeeshop, and much more) attracted by the PAAI. There has also been some positive residential development: the East Mall and Garfield Heights Senior highrise was razed in 2005, and the townhouse units are scheduled to be demolished in 2007–2008, and replaced with mixed income units, as well as new replacement homes scattered through the neghborhood. Visitors to Garfield today will see a neighborhood on the rise, a formerly blighted community that is now becoming a vibrant community, with a focus on the arts, while not forgetting its roots.

We then drove through East Liberty into Larimer.

Larimer was originally settled by Germans in the later half of the 19th century. By the early 1900s Italians from Abruzzi, Calabria, Campania, Sicily and Northern Italians became the dominant ethnic group. These settlers were slightly better-off than their kinsmen who moved to Bloomfield around the same time: the residents of Bloomfield built modest frame row-houses, while those in Larimer built somewhat nicer detached brick homes with small yards. Before long, Larimer residents had built and were running concrete foundries and commercial bakeries along Lincoln Avenue towards Two-Mile Run (some of which still exist today), and a successful commercial district at the intersection of Larimer Avenue and Meadow Street, near the community’s spiritual home of Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church (1898). In 1928, the Italian Sons and Daughters of America was founded in the neighborhood. Larimer was Pittburgh’s Little Italy until the 1960s.

As with other neighborhoods in Pittsburgh’s East End, the 1960s were a turning point for Larimer. Some residents began to move to the suburbs in the early part of the decade, and this process was hastened by the urban renewal of East Liberty and the construction of a 320-unit housing project on Larimer Avenue near the entrance to Larimer from East Liberty. Today, aside from a few remaining businesses along Lincoln Avenue, no vestige of the neighborhood’s Italian community remains (Our Lady Help of Christians was closed in 1992). The once-proud brick houses are now either abandoned or neglected by absentee landlords, and the residents, largely African American are among the poorest in Pittsburgh.  Many can consider Larimer one of the saddest stories of white flight in Pittsburgh.

Larimer is surrounded on nearly all sides by small valleys, or “runs” in the vernacular: branches of Negley Run form a border between Larimer and Highland Park on the North-West, and between Larimer and Lincoln-Lemington on the North-East, while the last bit of Two-Mile Run, the present site of the East Busway, forms a border between Larimer and Homewood on the South-East. On the South-West, there is a natural passage from East Liberty to Larimer along Larimer Avenue.