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The Hill District Community Collaborative: An Oral History by the students of the History and Policy Project Course Carnegie Mellon University Fall 2001 David Anderson Esther Bradley Luis Carvajal Michael Fontaine Rashad Gray Chad Harper Polina Kats Elizabeth Majewski Instructors: Caroline Jean Acker Shera Moxley The History and Policy Project Course in the fall of 2001 developed an oral history of the Hill District Community Collaborative, a community-based agency that serves women whose lives have been affected by drugs and their families. Students developed background reports, interviewed agency staff, clients, fundors, staff from other agencies, and community leaders, and transcribed interviews, and wrote chapters of the final report, The Hill District Community Collaborative: An Oral History. They also developed a slide presentation and delivered an oral program with slides, entitled Trial by Fire: The Hill District Community Collaborative and Community Rebuilding, at the Hill House Association’s Irene Kaufmann Auditorium on December 12, 2001. In addition, they developed a timeline database to capture the chronology of events in the history of the Collaborative. DAVID ANDERSON wrote about the nature of community; interviewed staff; contributed to chapters on Collaborative staff and the founding of the Collaborative. ESTHER BRADLEY interviewed participants; interviewed Police Commander William Valenta; transcribed interviews; contributed to chapters on Collaborative participants and community leaders. LUIS CARVAJAL wrote about drug markets and their relationship to patterns of drug use; interviewed fundors; transcribed interviews; wrote a chapter on evaluation of the Collaborative by a University of Pittsburgh researcher. MICHAEL FONTAINE wrote about the architectural history of the Hill District; interviewed participants and staff; contributed to chapters about staff and community leaders. RASHAD GRAY wrote about the African American family; interviewed participants, and staff; contributed to chapter on staff. CHAD HARPER wrote about the history of the Hill House Association; interviewed fundors; transcribed interviews; wrote a chapter about fundors. POLINA KATS wrote about African American women and drug use; interviewed participants and community leaders; contributed to chapters on participants and community leaders. ELIZABETH MAJEWSKI wrote about patterns of drug use in America, especially patterns among women; interviewed participants and staff; contributed to chapters on the founding of the Collaborative, and participants. CAROLINE JEAN ACKER and SHERA MOXLEY were the course instructors. We are deeply grateful to the Collaborative participants and staff, and to all who contributed to making this project possible. The Hill District Community Collaborative: An Oral History Part I: The Hill District Chapter 1: Urban Renewal, Deindustrialization, and their Effects on the Hill District Michael Fontaine Chapter 2: The African American Family Rashad Gray Chapter 3: Communities David Anderson Chapter 4: The Hill House: Past and Present Chad Harper Part II: Drugs and Drug Use Chapter 5: Illegal Drugs: Markets, Crime and Chronological Use Patterns Luis Carvajal Chapter 6: Drug Users in American 1970-2001: An Overview Elizabeth Majewski Chapter 7: African American Women, narcotics, and the Legal System: United States and the Hill District Polina Kats Part III: The Hill District Community Collaborative Chapter 8: Founding the Collaborative David Anderson Elizabeth Majewski Chapter 9: The Collaborative’s Meaning for Participants Elizabeth Majewski Polina Kats Esther Bradley Chapter 10: The Collaborative’s Meaning for Fundors Chad Harper Chapter 11: The Collaborative’s Meaning for Community Leaders Esther Bradley Polina Kats Michael Fontaine Rashad Gray Chapter 12: The Collaborative’s Meaning for Staff David Anderson Rashad Gray Michael Fontaine Chapter 13: Analysis of the Hill District Community Collaborative: Evaluation by Dr. Hide Yamatani Luis Carvajal Chapter 1 Urban Renewal, Deindustrialization, and their Effects on the Hill District by Michael Fontaine The Hill District has a long, centuries old history that ranges from vibrant to distressed. Existing almost as long as the city itself, the Hill has undergone many transformations that have made it the place it is today. While enduring such movements as industrialization, urban renewal, and deindustrialization, the number and composition of the residents have changed, but the neighborhood itself has survived. From early European immigrants to today’s African-American population, the people have changed, but the physical nature of the Hill District has evolved to become a piece of history itself. It has recorded the social, political, and economic changes of time by way of its physical appearance today. As Pittsburgh started growing in the early years of the nineteenth century, its citizens began looking for places to move to, away from the dirty and congested Downtown area. One of the first locations to be settled outside of Downtown was what is now the Hill District. Located on a plateau between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers just east of Downtown, it had cleaner air, above the elevation of the pollution from the riverside industries. The earliest recorded Euro-American presence in the Hill is shown on a 1796 map where a road and a stone quarry are located along where Webster Avenue is today in the Lower Hill.1 Before that, the Hill was shown in 1784 as the “Reed Plan,” an empty 274-acre tract. By 1852, the Hill District’s population had reached 1,289, along with six churches and two schools.2 The population consisted of many Irish, Scots-Irish, Blacks, and Germans. Also by the 1850s, a horse-drawn omnibus line ran east along Wylie Avenue from Downtown to Herron Hill, then called Minersville. A coal seam that ran under much of the area attracted many early people to the Hill, as they mined out large portions underneath the area. There was also a large African-American presence in the Hill District from the time it was first settled. In 1830, the Lower Hill housed 110 black families, mostly centered in what was called Arthursville.3 Later called Little 1 Carlisle, Ronald C., Barbara J. Gundy, and Arthur B. Fox. Phase I Archaeological Reconnaissance in the Crawford-Roberts Redevelopment Area, Lower Hill District, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1991), 2.2. 2 Carlisle, 2.3. 3 Carlisle, 2.9. Hayti, Arthursville was an area centered where Roberts Street is today that consisted of mainly African-American families in the mid-nineteenth century. A station on the Underground Railroad runaway slave network is said to have been located where the Mellon Arena is now. After the end of the Civil War in the mid-1860s, a larger percentage of Jewish immigrants soon started moving into the area from Lithuania and other eastern European countries. In response, older, established families of the Hill began to relocate to newer and less dense neighborhoods after 1870. By 1875, “Litvak” Jews from Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus began replacing the older families, reaching a population of 6,353.4 In the1880s, Hungarian, Russian, Romanian, Galician (Austrian Polish), and Polish Jews flooded the Lower Hill. Prior to 1880, 3% of the Hill’s Jewish population was foreign born, after 1880, 97% were born in Europe.5 This large influx of Jews in the late nineteenth century created a vibrant atmosphere in the Lower Hill. The business of stogie production was a major industry of the Jewish population. In 1890, there were upwards of 200 cigar sweatshops in the Lower Hill. The pay was around $4.00 a week, much better than the $3.00 a month some would earn back in Russia.6 This industry was effectively shut down in 1913 after a strike by new labor unions halted production. The stogie businesses were mainly small ventures, though a few 4 Carlisle, 2.30. 5 Carlisle, 2.30. 6 Carlisle, 2.31. larger factories and breweries were located around the Hill employing people in much greater numbers. The rapid industrialization of Pittsburgh also caused many people to move to the city. They were lured by the prospects of employment in higher paying jobs than where they had come from. Mills and plants were opening up all around Pittsburgh, though mainly concentrated along the riverfronts due to the flat terrain and ease of access to other locations by boat and rail. The Hill District became a residential area for the employees of those industries, with the residents descending down steps and inclines to reach their jobs along the riverbanks. This pattern remained the same through the time of World War II, as the population of Pittsburgh continued to surge with the presence of the steel production and its related industries. With the ever-changing technology, people began to rely more upon motorized transportation to get around the city. Many of the old routes were blocked by new development. Access to the Strip District was made more difficult in the 1920s for the people of the Hill District as the opening of Bigelow Boulevard cut off many of the old inclines and steps descending down from the top of the Hill towards the Strip. Seventeenth Street incline rising up to the Hill. (Photo from Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.) The Lower Hill also featured many synagogues, numbering eleven in 1910 and fifteen by 1943.7 The Jewish population also began slowly moving out of the Hill when other groups moved in. As an influx of Italians, Greeks, Syrians, and southern blacks poured in to the Hill, the older Jewish population relocated east towards the Upper, or Herron Hill, Oakland, and Squirrel Hill after 1900. The Hill District enjoyed sanitary conditions compared to the high- density settlements located along the rivers. The early residents of the Hill appreciated the separation and privacy it offered from other areas of the city.8 During the mid-nineteenth century, the only areas of the city that had been heavily settled were along the rivers. Neighborhoods such as Hazelwood and Homestead were the upper class, elite areas to live in, being the first suburbs 7 Carlisle, 2.31.

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