Lower Hill District

What the Hill held

Map: Lower Hill street grid, ca. 1950

Wylie Avenue ran east from downtown Pittsburgh into the Hill District with the confidence of a main street that knew its own importance. Barber shops opened at six in the morning for the men on the early shift at U.S. Steel. The Pittsburgh Courier rolled its morning editions from a newsroom a block off the avenue. Crawford Street angled south past the numbered houses where families who had arrived from Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama in the Great Migration’s two decades of steady northward movement had put down roots, planted kitchen gardens, and enrolled their children at Watt and Milliones schools.¹

Poet Claude McKay, who walked the Hill in the early twentieth century, named the intersection of Wylie and Fullerton avenues “the Crossroads of the World.” He was not exaggerating. By the early 1940s, the Hill District held residents from at least 25 nationalities.² Black families formed the majority and had done so since the Great Migration reshaped the neighborhood’s demographics in the 1910s and 1920s. Jewish families, whose congregations stretched back to Beth Hamedrash Hagodol’s founding in 1869, occupied the western blocks closest to downtown; most had begun moving to Squirrel Hill and Oakland by the 1930s, and by 1953, when the Urban Redevelopment Authority conducted its formal survey, the pattern of Jewish out-migration was largely complete.³ Italian families clustered on Fernando Street and the blocks running south toward Fifth Avenue. Syrian families, many of them Antiochian Orthodox Christians whose congregations the record names without specifying precise locations, maintained a “Little Syria” enclave along the blocks east of Washington Place; the specific church names in the project footprint require additional archival research at the Syrian American Heritage Archive or the Heinz History Center to confirm.⁴

What held all these communities together was commerce, music, and the particular social architecture of a neighborhood that had learned to organize itself because no one outside it would.

The Crawford Grill anchored the commercial life of the avenue. Gus Greenlee opened the first Grill at 1401 Wylie in 1930, funding it partly from his numbers operation and partly from the profits of the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Negro League team he had built into a powerhouse with Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and Oscar Charleston on the roster.¹ Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Billy Eckstine all played the Grill. Greenlee’s second venue, Crawford Grill No. 2, opened at Wylie and Elmore in 1943, the year the first Grill burned. The two venues together made the Hill’s entertainment corridor a peer of Harlem and Kansas City in the circuit of Black American jazz.

The New Granada Theater on Centre Avenue hosted Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and the top bands of the swing era. Loendi Club on Fullerton served as the Hill’s premier Black social club. WHOD radio, broadcasting from Fullerton Street, gave Mary Dee Dudley an air to pioneer Black radio broadcasting in a city where no other outlet would hire her.⁵ The Pittsburgh Courier, whose circulation reached 200,000 copies per week in the 1930s, ran its national operation from a newsroom within walking distance of the avenue it covered.¹

Hayes Drug Store had operated for 75 years at 83-85 Washington Place when the wrecking crews arrived. Multiple Hill District businesses appeared in “The Negro Motorist Green Book”; the Heinz History Center has noted that more than 30 Lower Hill establishments were listed, and only one Green Book-listed Lower Hill building remained standing after clearance.⁵ Ma Pitts’s eatery, Nesbitt’s Pie Shop, Charlotte’s Beauty Salon, the Car Stop Sandwich Shop, and Charlie Hing’s Chop Suey served a neighborhood that generated its own economy because the broader Pittsburgh economy had never fully admitted it.³

Anchoring it all, at the corner of Wylie Avenue and Elm Street, stood Bethel AME Church. Founded in 1808, it was Pittsburgh’s oldest Black congregation, the first Black school in the city’s history, and a documented stop on the Underground Railroad. Its Romanesque sanctuary seated 1,900 people. Its congregation had outlasted slavery, industrialization, and two world wars. The URA would demolish it in 1957.⁴

How the clearance happened

Map: URA Lower Hill project area, 1956

The Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority came into existence in 1943, established by state legislation at the urging of City Council member George E. Evans, who framed redevelopment as employment for returning war veterans. The URA’s early years focused on the Golden Triangle and downtown, guided by the “Pittsburgh Renaissance” that Mayor David L. Lawrence and financier Richard King Mellon had designed to remake the smoky mill city into a modern corporate center. The Lower Hill, immediately adjacent to downtown and visible from its towers, was always the logical next target.²

The URA’s 1953 survey of the Lower Hill recorded 1,551 families in the project area: 1,239 Black families (67.1 percent) and 312 white families (32.9 percent).³ Those white families were disproportionately Italian and Syrian; the Jewish out-migration to Squirrel Hill was nearly complete by this date, though the buildings that Jewish congregations had occupied remained in the clearance zone. Beth Hamedrash Hagodol, founded in 1869 as the Hill’s oldest Orthodox Jewish congregation, had already suffered fire damage; the clearance consumed what remained.³

In September 1955, the federal government approved the Lower Hill redevelopment plan and committed more than $17 million in loans and grants. The URA designated 95 acres for clearance; some secondary sources give 100 acres, reflecting that road construction and right-of-way ultimately consumed an additional five acres beyond the plan boundary.⁶ Mayor Lawrence wrote to City Council of “the social desirability of complete clearance.”⁷ The phrase is exact and worth holding: not partial clearance, not selective demolition, but complete erasure of whatever stood.

The relocation program was, by the URA’s own records, inadequate. Families received three-month notices. No serious inventory of replacement housing existed. Of the 1,551 families the URA displaced, approximately 29 to 35 percent moved into public housing; 31 percent found private rentals; and 8 percent purchased homes.³ Many scattered to the Middle Hill, Upper Hill, Homewood, and Larimer, neighborhoods that were already overcrowded. The URA’s own relocation officer later acknowledged that the agency had no plan for rehousing low-income Black families in a city where private landlords routinely refused to rent to Black tenants outside a narrow geography.

Demolition began in May 1956. By the end of that summer, the URA had razed approximately 1,300 structures across roughly 80 city blocks.⁵ The street grid was erased systematically: Bedford, Bustrick, Centre (in part), Clark, Congress, Crawford (in part), Elm, Epiphany, Fullerton, Gilmore, Fernando, Logan, Reed, Washington, Webster (in part), Wylie (in part), Yuba, Clay Way, and Sachem Way all disappeared or were truncated.⁶ The Crossroads of the World became a cleared field.

Bethel AME held out longest. The congregation appealed repeatedly to the URA for a reprieve, pointing out that the nearby Church of the Epiphany, two blocks away and also Catholic, remained untouched. Observers at the time attributed the disparity to Mayor Lawrence’s Irish Catholic background. The URA circumvented the city charter’s prohibition on using eminent domain against religious institutions by acting as a non-city authority. The demolition came in 1957. The congregation received $240,000 in compensation and rebuilt at Webster and Morgan avenues, completing the new sanctuary in 1959.⁴

At least eight houses of worship fell in the clearance, including St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on Fernando Street, with its Gothic structure, grotto, school, playground, and rectory.⁴ Several Antiochian Orthodox and Syrian congregations that served the Little Syria enclave were also displaced; the specific names of those congregations in the project footprint have not been confirmed in the sources reviewed for this essay. The researcher who needs those names should consult the Syrian American Heritage Archive and the Heinz History Center’s Immigrant Communities collection.

The 413 businesses on the URA’s inventory simply closed or relocated without assistance.⁵ The Pittsburgh Courier was forced to move its newsroom. Mary Dee Dudley’s WHOD lost its Fullerton Street broadcast location. The Civic Arena opened on September 17, 1961, at a construction cost of $22 million, seating 12,500 under a retractable stainless-steel dome, the first of its kind in the world. The URA and the city never built the apartment complex, the motel, or the art museum the original plan had promised.⁵ Most of the cleared land outside the arena’s footprint became parking lots.

In 1959, Crosstown Boulevard, later numbered as Interstate 579, cut through the former Lower Hill and severed what remained of the Hill District from downtown Pittsburgh. The physical disconnection compounded the economic one. The Hill had lost its commercial core, its street grid, its institutions, and now its road connections to the city that had consumed it.⁸

By 1960, the URA’s own count documented the displacement of approximately 8,000 residents, the figure that appears consistently in the agency’s relocation records and in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s 2014 interactive reconstruction.³ Some scholarly sources cite 9,000, a higher total that likely includes residents who moved before the formal relocation count began, in anticipation of the clearance. Eight thousand is the documented floor.

Who fought, and what survived

Map: Freedom Corner

The Pittsburgh Courier editorial board endorsed the redevelopment plan in 1954, calling the Lower Hill “the shame of Pittsburgh,” a position the paper shared with the dominant national discourse on blight at the time.³ The Courier later reconsidered as clearance displaced the paper itself and the scale of damage to the Black community became undeniable. The paper’s editor, Carl Morris, wrote: “Aluminum and steel are poor substitutes for human dignity.”³ The Pittsburgh NAACP, led by Byrd Brown, did not wait for the Courier’s reversal. Brown stated, sometime between 1961 and 1963: “We have been very patient in Pittsburgh on this kind of treatment. We are determined to get our fair share.”³

The community’s determination found its geographic form at the corner of Centre Avenue and Crawford Street. In 1963, the United Negro Protest Committee rented a billboard there. It read, in plain letters: “NO Redevelopment Beyond This Point.” Byrd Brown, Nate Smith, and Jimmy Joe Robinson organized at the corner and physically stood before bulldozers when the city showed signs of extending demolition into the Middle Hill. The action worked. Clearance stopped. The corner became the Hill District’s permanent symbol of the line that the community had drawn and held.⁵ In 2001, the sculptor Carlos Peterson and architect Howard Graves installed the Freedom Corner memorial at the intersection, with concrete rings bearing the names of civil rights activists who had organized there through the 1960s.

August Wilson grew up at 1727 Bedford Avenue, one block from the clearance boundary, and left the Hill for good in 1958, a year after Bethel AME came down. His Pittsburgh Cycle of ten plays gave the Hill District its fullest literary witness. “Two Trains Running,” set in a Hill District restaurant facing urban renewal demolition in 1969, gave Sterling the line that defined the cycle’s moral logic: Memphis Lee’s diner was the neighborhood, and what happened to it was what had been done to everyone who had ever lived there.⁹ “Jitney,” set in a jitney station threatened with demolition in 1977, covered the same ground with a driver’s-eye view of a neighborhood that had survived the wrecking ball only to face it again.¹⁰ “Seven Guitars,” set on a Hill District backyard in 1948, captured the neighborhood in the last years before the clearance began.¹¹ Wilson’s 1996 keynote address to the Theatre Communications Group, published as “The Ground on Which I Stand,” laid out in direct terms what the destruction of the Hill had cost Black cultural life in America: the loss was not a neighborhood but a world, and no arena had replaced it.¹²

Nate Smith turned resistance into reconstruction. In 1969, the same year the Penguins played their second season at the Civic Arena, Smith founded the Black Construction Coalition to challenge the exclusion of Black workers from the U.S. Steel Tower and Three Rivers Stadium projects. He lay down in front of bulldozers to shut down job sites that refused to hire Black men.² He founded Operation Dig in 1969, bought equipment by mortgaging his own house, and over four years placed approximately 1,250 Black workers in construction jobs while securing union cards for around 17,000 more. The strategy was direct: if the arena that replaced the Hill was going to be built, the Hill’s displaced residents would build it.

Crawford Grill No. 2 survived at Wylie and Elmore in the Middle Hill and became the center of Pittsburgh jazz through the 1970s. A state historical marker was dedicated there in 2001. The building is endangered; as of 2020 it appeared on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of Most Endangered Historic Places.⁵ The New Granada Theater at 2007 Centre Avenue, the last surviving major performing-arts venue of the Hill’s golden era, fell into disrepair in the 1960s and sat vacant for decades before Hill CDC purchased it in the mid-1990s. A long restoration followed. The theater reopened as a music venue in 2023.⁵

August Wilson House received Pittsburgh historic designation in February 2008 and National Register listing in April 2013. It now operates as an arts center supporting Hill District artists and nurturing the neighborhood’s literary and theatrical traditions.² Bethel AME, rebuilt and active at Webster and Morgan avenues, kept its congregation and its institutional memory through six decades of displacement. In April 2023, after years of advocacy, the congregation recovered 1.5 acres of its original Lower Hill land from the Pittsburgh Penguins.⁴

The Hill District Consensus Group, formed in 1991, began the patient work of rebuilding the neighborhood’s planning capacity. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, HDCG developed community plans that guided several mixed-income residential projects, including the Crawford Square apartments. The organization also built the framework that produced, in 2008, Pennsylvania’s first community benefits agreement.

Present-day parallels: the 28 acres

Map: 28-acre Lower Hill redevelopment parcels

When the Pittsburgh Penguins signed a 30-year arena lease in 2007 and received development rights to the 28-acre Lower Hill site through a subsidiary, Pittsburgh Arena Real Estate Redevelopment, the Hill District recognized the pattern. Public subsidy and public-authority powers had transferred land in a majority-Black neighborhood to a private sports enterprise, without community input, repeating the 1955 sequence at a scale of 28 acres rather than 95.¹³

The One Hill Neighborhood Coalition formed to break that pattern. Representing approximately 100 Hill District community groups, with Carl Redwood of the Hill District Consensus Group and Marimba Milliones of Hill CDC as lead organizers, One Hill demanded a CBA before ground broke on the new arena. In February 2008, Hill CDC and the One Hill coalition filed suit challenging the arena development approvals, seeking leverage in negotiations. On August 19, 2008, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the City of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and the Sports and Exhibition Authority signed the One Hill Community Benefits Agreement.¹³ Pittsburgh City Council ratified it on September 25. It was Pennsylvania’s first CBA.

The agreement’s terms were real: $8.3 million in community investments; $2 million toward a neighborhood grocery store; a First Source hiring center giving Hill District residents priority access to arena-related jobs; a Hill District master plan process; and a community steering committee role in future development decisions. The negotiations extracted those commitments from parties who had not offered them voluntarily.

The limits were also real. The community had sought $10 million toward the grocery store; the Penguins contributed $1 million. Enforcement relied entirely on community pressure, with no CBA terms attached as legal conditions of project permits or land conveyances.⁷ A Shop ‘n Save grocery store opened in 2013, ending the neighborhood’s status as a grocery desert. The First Source hiring center established operations. Several other commitments moved slowly or stalled. The Lower Hill Development Team, reviewing its plans against the Greater Hill District Master Plan and the 2014 Community Collaboration and Implementation Plan, scored 56 percent against the Master Plan and 47 percent against the CCIP, failing both benchmarks, then abandoned the unified review process rather than address the findings.⁷

The F.N.B. Financial Center, a $250 million office tower that opened on Block G-1 in February 2025, became the first completed building on the 28-acre site. The Live Nation concert venue, Citizens Live at The Wylie, secured planning approval in January 2023 after a benefits deal that included a $2 surcharge per ticket and a total of $850,000 for the Ammon Recreation Center, but left inclusionary zoning commitments unresolved.³

The most consequential moment in the 28-acre story came on October 22, 2025, when the Penguins’ development rights expired. Control of 21 remaining developable acres reverted to the URA and the Sports and Exhibition Authority. Carol Hardeman, who serves as executive director of the Hill District Consensus Group, described the development process as a “rigged board game” and stated: “As Black people, we’ve never had the opportunity to roll the dice.” The expiration of the Penguins’ rights reset the game, or at least the board.

On March 12, 2026, the URA Board announced a 30-day public notice for a Request for Proposals for housing on a portion of the Lower Hill site and presented draft guidelines for a Lower Hill Development Fund. The RFP is open at the time of this writing.⁷

The structural difference between 2026 and 2008 is that the public agencies now control the land before the RFP goes out, rather than after the rights conveyance. That sequence is the key. The 2008 CBA was negotiated after the Penguins received their development rights, which meant the community negotiated from reduced leverage, after the key public decision had been made. An RFP is a public document with public conditions: the URA can attach enforceable CBA requirements, minimum affordable housing percentages, First Source hiring obligations, and Hill District CLT control of residential parcels as conditions of proposal selection, not as side agreements that rely on good faith to enforce.

Hill CDC has been building the Hill Community Land Trust since 2014, targeting households below 60 percent of area median income and covering both residential and commercial property.² A CLT removes land from the speculative market permanently, using a deed restriction that runs with the land. If the URA’s RFP awards residential parcels to a CLT-structured development, the affordability survives future owners and future market cycles in a way that voluntary CBA commitments do not. The Hill CLT model is available. The question the March 2026 RFP poses is whether the public agencies will require it.

Bethel AME’s 2023 land recovery provides the proof of concept for a related strategy. The congregation documented its institutional standing, demonstrated a historical claim to specific parcels, and negotiated a transfer of 1.5 acres from a private developer. The claim worked because the congregation had maintained continuous institutional presence in the Hill for 215 years, even after demolition forced a move. Other institutions whose Lower Hill predecessors the clearance destroyed, including the descendants of the Italian and Syrian congregations whose specific names the record has not fully recovered, may have analogous standing if their histories can be documented through the archival research the brief marks as incomplete.

What the 2008 coalition built, and what the present-day organizers carry forward, is not nostalgia. Crawford Grill No. 1 is not coming back. Wylie Avenue’s commercial corridor is not being restored. What the Hill District Consensus Group and Hill CDC are building is something the 1956 generation did not have: an enforceable framework for what comes next, a land trust to protect what is retained, and a documented historical record precise enough to support a reparations argument in a negotiation room.

The 95 acres that the URA cleared in the 1950s held 1,551 families and 413 businesses, 67 percent of those families Black, 33 percent white, the white residents disproportionately Italian and Syrian, their churches and social institutions swept away alongside those of the Black majority.³ The city that called them all blight owes the community an accounting. The March 2026 RFP is the next line of that account.

Footnotes

1. Mark Whitaker, Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Joe William Trotter Jr. and Jared N. Day, Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff, “Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District: Traces of a Lost Neighborhood,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2014, https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/lower_hill/. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

4. Alex Roarty, “Pittsburgh’s Oldest Black Church Was Demolished as ‘Blight’ in the 1950s Lower Hill. Today, Members Seek Justice,” PublicSource, 2021, publicsource.org/bethel-ame-black-church-history-racism-reparations-lower-hill-penguins/. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Hill District Digital History Project, “The Civic Arena: A Mid-Twentieth Century Transformation of the Hill District,” item 75, 2012, hillhistory.org/items/show/75. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

6. Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh, Lower Hill Redevelopment Area Property Inventories, 1955-1960, Pittsburgh City Archives Universal Access, Preservica record SO_2bf357bd-87f3-4d73-bcd0-363500e79429. ↩ ↩²

7. Georgetown University Law Center, “Power Play Goal: Analyzing Zoning Law and Reparations as Remedies to Historic Displacement in Pittsburgh’s Hill District,” Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy 29, no. 3 (2022), https://www.law.georgetown.edu/poverty-journal/in-print/volume-xxix-issue-iii-spring-2022-2/power-play-goal-analyzing-zoning-law-and-reparations-as-remedies-to-historic-displacement-in-pittsburghs-hill-district/. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004). ↩

9. August Wilson, Two Trains Running (New York: Plume, 1993). ↩

10. August Wilson, Jitney (New York: Overlook Press, 2003). ↩

11. August Wilson, Seven Guitars (New York: Dutton, 1996). ↩

12. August Wilson, The Ground on Which I Stand (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996). ↩

13. One Hill Neighborhood Coalition et al., One Hill Community Benefits Agreement, August 19, 2008 (copy held by Hill District Consensus Group, 409 Dinwiddie Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15219). ↩ ↩²