Pittsburgh: Where the Playbook Was Written

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Pittsburgh's Hill District: the majority-Black neighborhood that Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay called the Crossroads of the World, home of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Crawford Grill and the Hill District of August Wilson's ten-play cycle, and the Lower Hill of it that was declared blighted and cleared in the 1950s for the Civic Arena. This is a sibling of the Indiana Avenue course, and it goes one step further: Indianapolis did not invent the instruments that emptied Indiana Avenue, and neither did Pittsburgh, but Pittsburgh assembled and showcased the public-private redevelopment machine early and visibly enough that the postwar Pittsburgh Renaissance became a national reference case. This course applies the prerequisite Green Book method to one neighborhood, teaches the actual tools of the decision (the state redevelopment law, the blight designation, eminent domain, the public-private partnership, and the export of the model), tests the course's own headline claim against the record and reports where it weakens, looks at the arena as architecture and at the rare double absence left when that arena was itself demolished around 2011 to 2012, sends the learner to Allegheny County's own parcel records and to Pittsburgh's unfinished comprehensive plan, and ends in an August Wilson writing assignment. A 360 tour of the Lower Hill is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.