Neighborhood of the week: Upper Hill (Pittsburgh, Minersville: lawyers, houses, neighborhoods)

[eschaton]

The Upper Hill, also known as Sugar Top, is the furthest east portion of the Hill District, consisting of those areas to the east of Herron Avenue. It also borders the city neighborhoods of Polish Hill and North Oakland.

The Upper Hill has gone through several transformations in Pittsburgh history. In the 1870s and 1880s, there was a neighborhood centered around Herron Avenue below Milwaukee Street (then Madison Avenue) called Minersville. Little of this neighborhood survives, except for the old cemetery - which some of my wife's ancestors are buried in. The neighborhood during that time period was pretty sparsely developed with detached wood-frame houses - likely rural in built form, because the "urban area" of the Hill still only extended to Kirkpatrick.

The built form of the Upper Hill as we came to understand it was largely a byproduct of the period from 1890 to 1930, when the older rural forms were systematically demolished, replaced with a mixture of streetcar suburban to early suburban typologies. The Upper Hill is a geographically small area, but has a wide variety in terms of its built form, from grand homes to modest rowhouses. Some of the last areas to be built out were the blocks along the reservoir, which have a very pastoral feel and some great views.

When the Upper Hill was first built out, it was a majority white neighborhood, as the black community during that time period was still largely restricted to the Lower Hill. However, unlike many other Pittsburgh neighborhoods, restrictions on black residents owning property ended early, meaning it became the neighborhood where countless black professionals - barbers, factory workers, teachers, lawyers, ministers, and doctors, settled. The Upper Hill transformed into Sugar Top - the place where black Pittsburgh moved when they "made it." In 1940 the neighborhood was still majority white, but over a third of residents were black - over 2,000 residents. Soon thereafter the white population of the Upper Hill largely left, but the Upper Hill maintained its cachet within the black community through to the early to mid 1970s. This was a neighborhood of some fame even nationally. Lena Horne briefly lived here, and Thurgood Marshall stayed with friends in the neighborhood when he visited the city. An entire book was recently published about the history of the black middle class in Pittsburgh, which I plan to pick up a copy of soon.

Things were not all good for Sugar Top by any means. The Herron Avenue business district which fringed this neighborhood is now almost entirely missing - mostly destroyed in the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior in 1968. The core of the neighborhood has also seen some losses to blight and abandonment, but this is nothing compared to the rest of the Hill district - in many places, no more than 2-3 missing houses per block. The economic status of the neighborhood has slowly been decreasing however - to a significant degree the old black middle class aged in place and not been replaced by a new cohort of black professionals, who now choose homes elsewhere, whether in the suburbs or outside of the region entirely. Still, it is wealthier, and has a much higher rate of home-ownership, than the Hill District at large.

One thing I should note is the "Upper Hill" as defined by the City, is not the same as Sugar Top. The Upper Hill contains two areas most people would agree are not part of Sugar top. One is an extension of the North Oakland historic district of Schenley Farms sometimes called "Schenley Heights." This area is heavily white and wealthy. On the other side of the Upper Hill, there's a series of backwoodsy streets which are basically part of Polish Hill. Indeed, even the City of Pittsburgh doesn't actually start the Hill District at Bigelow Boulevard, but Ridgeway Street. Still, there are a number of other streets back here, like Monroe and Blessing, which share little in common with Sugar Top.

If you asked me ten years ago, I would say that the relative social stability of the Upper Hill, along with the generally decent housing stock and very close proximity to Oakland would have primed it for reinvestment, despite the lack of walkable amenities. However, if anything the area has declined a bit further since then, perhaps in part because the extensive demolition and reconstruction in other portions of the Hill has made those areas safer and more desirable to local residents, leading the Upper Hill to have its historic cache lowered slightly further. That isn't to say the neighborhood is headed downhill fast - homes are still selling here, albeit not at high prices. But it is a shadow of what it once was, and the City is that much poorer because of it.