Allegheny City: A History of Pittsburgh’s North Side

Chapter 11. Decline and Rejuvenation: 1950 to the Present

206 decline and rejuvenation c h a p t e r 11 Decline and Rejuvenation 1950 to the P resent A t m i dc e n t u r y, Pittsburgh, like so many American cities, had an aging stock of buildings that had suffe ed disinvestment during the Great Depression and World War II. The city’s business leaders and its new Urban Redevelopment Authority recognized the need to address Downtown deterioration, launching the Renaissance project, which removed a railyard and old buildings at the Point and replaced them with Gateway Center. Pittsburgh planning agencies and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation also presented plans for North Side redevelopment and highway construction. By 1950,the century’s midpoint, Pittsburgh’s population was peaking, at about 677,000. The North Side’s housing, commercial buildings, and factories were at this point among Pittsburgh’s oldest, however, and the area was already losing population. The Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association thus decided to study the North Side in particular as early as 1951.The resulting report, published in 1954,spoke bluntly of “the burden of obsolescence and decay which afflict[s the lower North Side.” Specificall , the study noted that of the lower North Side’s 18,756housing units, 56.6 percent were “without private bath or dilapidated.” It described the lack of parking facilities adjacent to businesses and the fact that many of the area’s streets were inefficien for automobiles. It criticized the business district around Federal and Ohio streets as disreputable, terming some of its stores old-fashioned and plain. To address the many problems the planning association found, the study proposed sweeping changes to the lower North Side’s land use and transportation corridors. Industrial districts, it proposed, should be created west of Chateau Street, within a four-block swath, through which railroad tracks already ran through Manchester and along the Ohio and Allegheny rivers. New highways should run along Chateau Street in Manchester and along 206 207 1950 to the present Reedsdale and Lacock streets, parallel with the Allegheny River, East Street, and East Ohio Street. The flat and hillside residential area north of North Avenue between Brighton Road and East Street, containing the Mexican War Streets and several blocks eastward, should be redeveloped. Thisscheme would eliminate all of the area’s 50-to 120-y ear-old houses, stores, and churches, and almost all of its streets, in favor of high-rise apartments, parking lots, and a shopping plaza. A new limited-access highway just above the redeveloped community would connect California Avenue in Manchester with East Ohio Street, proceeding through northern Manchester, the Mexican War Streets, and Deutschtown, hugging the hillside below Perry Hilltop, Fineview, and Troy Hill. Thearea around the Diamond should be revitalized with women’s and children’s clothing stores, restaurants, clean and modernized commercial The doomed Allegheny Center area in the early 1960s,looking northwest; Stockton Avenue is at left. Courtesy of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation 208 decline and rejuvenation buildings, promotional effo ts, parking lots, and new and updated housing. Farther south, below Ohio Street, the association called for a group of new one-story retail buildings with rooftop parking, elevated walkways connecting the new stores. The historic Market House and many other nineteenthand early twentieth-century buildings would be razed to make way for parking and new commercial space. The sweeping 1954plan sat on the shelf until 1958,when the closing of the eighty-nine-year-old Boggs & Buhl department store added impetus to the call for redevelopment. The Buhl Foundation, a charitable organization, had sold the store ten years before, shortly after announcing the closing of the Federal Street business and its branch stores in Dormont and on Mount Washington. A group of investors had bought Boggs & Buhl from the foundation and reopened the Federal Street store after just a month of remodeling , to acclaim from shoppers and from city and state officials But this did not last: now, ten years later, the new owners blamed the store’s more recent closing on a steady loss of market share to suburban retail outlets. The city demolished the vacant building in 1960. Even as Boggs & Buhl came down, the doomed North Side commercial district retained a variety of businesses that today’s city enthusiasts would envy. The1960Pittsburgh directory shows that the thirty-six city blocks around the historic Allegheny Diamond included approximately fifteen churches, eight barbershops, seven pharmacies, two print...