Pittsburgh

The Lower Hill District was the cultural and commercial center of Black Pittsburgh from the Great Migration through the 1950s. Poet Claude McKay named the intersection of Wylie and Fullerton avenues the Crossroads of the World. Gus Greenlee opened the first Crawford Grill in 1930 and built Greenlee Field for his Pittsburgh Crawfords Negro League team. The New Granada Theater opened on Centre Avenue in 1937 and hosted Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie. The Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely circulated Black newspaper in America, ran its newsroom from Wylie Avenue. WHOD radio broadcast from Fullerton Street, where Mary Dee Dudley pioneered Black radio as a DJ. The Lower Hill by the 1940s held residents from at least 25 nationalities: a Black majority of roughly 67 percent plus Jewish, Italian, Syrian, and Eastern European households whose institutions lined the same blocks.

The Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority, created in 1943, designated 95 acres of the Lower Hill for clearance in 1955 after securing more than $17 million in federal loans and grants. Mayor David L. Lawrence wrote of “the social desirability of complete clearance.” Demolition began in May 1956. By the summer of 1958, workers had razed approximately 1,300 structures, including Bethel AME Church, Pittsburgh’s oldest Black congregation, at Wylie and Elm. Crosstown Boulevard, later renumbered as Interstate 579, cut the Hill District from downtown in 1959. The promised apartment complex, motel, and art museum were never built. Most of the cleared land became parking lots around the Civic Arena, which opened in September 1961.

The community organized through all three phases of what followed. In 1963, the United Negro Protest Committee posted a billboard at Centre Avenue and Crawford Street reading “NO Redevelopment Beyond This Point” and held that line physically. Nate Smith founded the Black Construction Coalition in 1969 and secured union cards for approximately 17,000 Black workers over four years. After the Pittsburgh Penguins signed a new arena lease in 2007, the One Hill Neighborhood Coalition, representing roughly 100 community groups and led by the Hill District Consensus Group and Hill CDC, negotiated the One Hill Community Benefits Agreement, signed August 19, 2008. The Penguins’ development rights over the 28-acre former arena site expired in October 2025, returning control to public agencies and reopening the fight over enforceable terms.

The essay under this city documents the clearance, the multi-ethnic community that clearance destroyed, and the three generations of organized resistance that followed.