East Liberty (Pittsburgh) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

East Liberty is a culturally diverse neighborhood in Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...

, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

's East End. It is bordered by Highland Park

Highland Park (Pittsburgh)

Highland Park is both a large municipal park and a racially diverse, mostly residential neighborhood in the northeastern part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.The neighborhood has 6,749 residents according to the 2000 United States Census...

, Morningside

Morningside (Pittsburgh)

Morningside is a neighborhood on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's east end. It has two zip codes, 15201 and 15206, and has a representation on Pittsburgh City Council by the council member for District 7 . It is bordered by the neighborhoods of Highland Park to the east, Stanton Heights to the west and...

, Stanton Heights, Garfield

Garfield (Pittsburgh)

Garfield is a neighborhood in the east end of the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Garfield lies about three miles as the crow flies from the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers at the City's heart. It sits on a bluff above the Allegheny River...

, Friendship

Friendship (Pittsburgh)

Friendship is a neighborhood of large Victorian houses in the East End of the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, about four miles east of Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle...

, Shadyside

Shadyside (Pittsburgh)

Shadyside is a neighborhood in the East End of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It has zip codes of both 15232 and 15206, and has representation on Pittsburgh City Council by the council member for District 8...

and Larimer

Larimer (Pittsburgh)

Larimer is a neighborhood in the East End of the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the United States. The neighborhood takes its name from William Larimer, who grew up in nearby Westmoreland County and, after making a fortune in the railroad industry, built a manor house overlooking East Liberty...

, and is represented on Pittsburgh City Council by Patrick Dowd

Patrick Dowd

Patrick Dowd is a Democratic Party politician in the United States. He is currently serving as a member of the Pittsburgh City Council from District 7, which includes the neighborhoods of Bloomfield, East Liberty, Friendship, Garfield, Highland Park, Lawrenceville, Morningside, Polish Hill, and...

. East Liberty Presbyterian Church, an area landmark, is located there.

Beginnings

Around the time of the American Revolution

American Revolution

The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...

, East Liberty was a free grazing area in Allegheny County located a few miles east of the young, growing town called Pittsburgh. (In older English usage, a "liberty" was a plot of common land on the outskirts of a town.)

Two farming patriarchs owned much of the nearby land, and their descendants' names grace streets in and around East Liberty today. John Conrad Winebiddle owned land west of present-day East Liberty, in what are now Bloomfield

Bloomfield (Pittsburgh)

Bloomfield is a neighborhood in Pittsburgh; it is located three miles from the Golden Triangle, which is the city's center, and is represented on Pittsburgh City Council by Patrick Dowd and Bill Peduto. Bloomfield is referred to as Pittsburgh's Little Italy...

, Garfield

Garfield (Pittsburgh)

, and Friendship

Friendship (Pittsburgh)

Friendship is a neighborhood of large Victorian houses in the East End of the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, about four miles east of Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle...

, and his daughter Barbara inherited a portion close to what is now East Liberty. Alexander Negley owned a farm called "Fertile Bottom" north of present-day East Liberty along the southern bank of the Allegheny River

Allegheny River

The Allegheny River is a principal tributary of the Ohio River; it is located in the Eastern United States. The Allegheny River joins with the Monongahela River to form the Ohio River at the "Point" of Point State Park in Downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania...

. Negley's land included some of present-day East Liberty and much of nearby Highland Park

Highland Park (Pittsburgh)

, Morningside

Morningside (Pittsburgh)

, Larimer

Larimer (Pittsburgh)

, and Stanton Heights.

Alexander Negley's son Jacob married Barbara Winebiddle, built a manor house, and developed a village that he called East Liberty after the old grazing commons. In 1816, Negley saw to it that the Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

-Greensburg

Greensburg, Pennsylvania

Greensburg is a city in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, United States, and a part of the Pittsburgh Metro Area. The city is named after Nathanael Greene, a major general of the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War...

turnpike was built through East Liberty, which made the area a trading center and ensured its future growth.

Growth

East Liberty truly began to develop as a commercial area in 1843, when Jacob's daughter Sarah Jane Negley married the ambitious lawyer Thomas Mellon

Thomas Mellon

Thomas Alexander Mellon was a Scotch-Irish American, entrepreneur, lawyer, and judge, best known as the founder of Mellon Bank and patriarch of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.-Early life:...

. Mellon had first visited the area of modern-day East Liberty in 1823, when as a 10-year-old he saw the Negley mansion for the first time and decided he wanted something like it. He achieved this goal and much more: after first becoming a prosperous lawyer, he made his true fortune by marrying Sarah Jane Negley, selling or renting the land near East Liberty that she inherited, and using the proceeds to finance Pittsburgh's nascent industries. Like Jacob Negley before him, Thomas Mellon worked to make East Liberty a transportation hub: Mellon convinced some of Pittsburgh's first trolley lines to pass through East Liberty.

In 1868, the City of Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

annexed what is now East Liberty. Thanks to its favorable location and Mellon's guiding hand, East Liberty became a thriving commercial center in the following years. East Liberty's merchants served many of Pittsburgh's industrial millionaires, who settled in nearby Shadyside

Shadyside (Pittsburgh)

and Point Breeze. Professionals in Highland Park

Highland Park (Pittsburgh)

and Friendship

Friendship (Pittsburgh)

Friendship is a neighborhood of large Victorian houses in the East End of the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, about four miles east of Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle...

and laborers in Bloomfield

Bloomfield (Pittsburgh)

and Garfield

Garfield (Pittsburgh)

also shopped in East Liberty. By 1950, the area (now often called 'Sliberty) was a bustling and fully urban marketplace.

Decline

Two decisions in the 1960s changed East Liberty. The first was an attempt to halt a slow trickle of businesses from the City to the suburbs. In the early 1960s, a few of East Liberty's larger merchants saw that some residents of Pittsburgh's East End were moving to the suburbs, and that suburban shopping malls were consequently growing and expanding. These merchants feared that suburban development would harm East Liberty's status as a market center, and asked the City of Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority

Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh

The Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh is the City of Pittsburgh’s economic development agency, committed to creating jobs, expanding the City’s tax base and improving the vitality of businesses and neighborhoods...

(URA) to take action.

The URA proposed creating an outdoor pedestrian mall on Penn Avenue, to be surrounded by car-friendly roads on which large stores, surrounded by parking lots, could serve shoppers just as the new suburban stores were doing. This plan required the demolition of roughly half of the 254 ac (103 ha) that comprised East Liberty. After some contentious debate, the plan was approved, and the URA stopped traffic on the busiest part of Penn Avenue (the old Greensburg-Pittsburgh turnpike of Jacob Negley's day) and routed it onto a series of new, one-way thoroughfares (called Penn Circle) that formed a ring around the central business district. Many small shops were destroyed—a million square feet of retail space in all.

While the URA was remaking the street plan of East Liberty, the City of Pittsburgh's housing authority

Public housing

Public housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a government authority, which may be central or local. Social housing is an umbrella term referring to rental housing which may be owned and managed by the state, by non-profit organizations, or by a combination of the...

made a second set of changes to the neighborhood. Housing authority planners noted that the nearby African-American neighborhood of Homewood

Homewood (Pittsburgh)

Homewood is a predominantly African American neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, officially divided into three neighborhoods: Homewood North, Homewood South and Homewood West....

was overcrowded, largely as a result of the URA's earlier demolition of the lower Hill District

Hill District (Pittsburgh)

The Hill District is a collection of neighborhoods that is considered by many to be the cultural center of African-American life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an American city. Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay once called the district "the crossroads of the world," referring to the...

to create the Civic Arena, which had forced many of the Hill's African-Americans out and into the North Side and Homewood

Homewood (Pittsburgh)

Homewood is a predominantly African American neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, officially divided into three neighborhoods: Homewood North, Homewood South and Homewood West....

. The housing authority's solution was to build three large housing complexes, each close to 20 stories tall, in East Liberty along the new Penn Circle roads.

These two measures ultimately failed to preserve East Liberty as a market center, and arguably hastened the old neighborhood's demise. By routing cars away from Penn Avenue, the URA's new street plan seemed to send a message that the neighborhood's commercial center was not worth visiting. The housing authority's massive housing complexes quickly developed a reputation as centers for crime, and this reputation, perhaps reinforced by racial prejudice against the complexes' African-American residents, likely did as much as the confusing street plan to drive commerce away from East Liberty.

In the span of just a few years during the mid-1960s, East Liberty became a blighted neighborhood. There were some 575 businesses in East Liberty in 1959 but only 292 in 1970 and just 98 in 1979. The businesses that remained tended not to serve the majority of nearby Pittsburghers, but only the captive audience that remained in what was now an urban ghetto.

Renewed Growth

In the three decades following 1980, East Liberty has slowly regained its status as a market destination for shoppers.

In 1979, Mellon Bank and other businesses created a nonprofit community development corporation, East Liberty Development, Inc. (ELDI). In the fifteen years following its founding, ELDI focused on rehabilitating some of the East Liberty’s historic commercial spaces. These included the Regent Theater (now called the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater) and Motor Square Garden

Motor Square Garden

Motor Square Garden, also known as East Liberty Market, is a building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places....

.

ELDI’s rehabilitation projects were time-consuming, and they did not make the neighborhood the destination for shoppers that it had formerly been. For example, ELDI and the Massaro Corporation recreated the Motor Square Garden building as an indoor mall in 1988, but consumers did not respond. The American Automobile Association bought the building in bankruptcy court in 1991 and now uses it as office space.

In addition to its moderately successful property rehabilitation efforts during the 1980s, ELDI was able to remove the failed pedestrian mall on Penn Avenue and return that thoroughfare to its traditional use as a two-way street

Two-way street

A two-way street is a street that allows vehicles to travel in both directions. On most two-way streets, especially main streets, a line is painted down the middle of the road to remind drivers to stay on their side of the road. Sometimes one portion of a street is two-way, the other portion one-way...

. These successes set the stage for a large and somewhat controversial series of developments in the late 1990s and 2000s.

Between 1996 and 2006, ELDI and the City of Pittsburgh worked to attract new “big box” retailers to East Liberty and to remove the 20-story housing projects that surrounded the neighborhood. First, ELDI and the City used tax increment financing

Tax increment financing

Tax Increment Financing, or TIF, is a public financing method which has been used as a subsidy for redevelopment and community improvement projects in many countries including the United States for more than 50 years...

to lure two national retailers to the neighborhood: Home Depot and Whole Foods. Both of these stores thrived, and their success convinced small local merchants and other national retailers to invest in the neighborhood. Second, after a complex and time-consuming set of transactions, two of the three housing projects that visually barricaded the neighborhood were demolished in 2005, and the third was demolished in May 2009.

Because these efforts involved resettling the largely African-American population of East Liberty’s housing projects and attracting several high-end retailers, ELDI and the City have been criticized for acting as agents of gentrification.

Gentrification

Gentrification and urban gentrification refer to the changes that result when wealthier people acquire or rent property in low income and working class communities. Urban gentrification is associated with movement. Consequent to gentrification, the average income increases and average family size...

Some of these concerns have been assuaged by new mixed-income residential developments which have begun to replace the demolished housing projects, as the new developments provide arguably nicer and safer accommodations for some of the projects’ former residents.

By 2009, East Liberty more closely resembled the busy commercial neighborhood of 1959 than the struggling ghetto of 1979. Merchants continue to invest in the neighborhood, and outside observers consider it to be fully rehabilitated.

In 2010, the New York Times published an article about the revival of East Liberty, and cited the presence of a Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

office as a sign of the neighborhood's success.

In 2011, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also known simply as the "PG," is the largest daily newspaper serving metropolitan Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.-Early history:...

published an article entitled "The trend toward shared working areas arrives" which describes the creation of The Beauty Shoppe, East Liberty's first Coworking

Coworking

Coworking is a style of work which involves a shared working environment, sometimes an office, yet independent activity. Unlike in a typical office environment, those coworking are usually not employed by the same organization. Typically it is attractive to work-at-home professionals, independent...

space. The space is owned by East Liberty Development Inc and currently houses several start ups and small businesses. The first business tenant was Thinktiv, Inc., a venture accelerator. Thinktiv was part of The Beauty Shoppe redevelopment effort alongside East Liberty Development Inc. and Edile, a real estate development firm.

Culture

In 2009, the Remnant Choir from East Liberty's Mt. Ararat Baptist Church won second place, and $20,000 in prize money, in a national contest that was sponsored by Verizon Wireless

Verizon Wireless

Cellco Partnership, doing business as Verizon Wireless, is one of the largest mobile network operators in the United States. The network has 107.7 million subscribers as of 2011, making it the largest wireless service provider in America....

, and was designed to find the "Best Church Choir in America."

Beginnings

Growth

Decline

Renewed Growth

Culture

Further reading

External links

See also