On November 16th, group members participated in a neighborhood tour of the Hill District coordinated by Terri Baltimore, the Vice President for Neighborhood Development at the Hill House Association, a prominent community organization in the neighborhood. Other participants included member of Public Allies Pittsburgh. The tour consisted of walking from the Hill House Association Headquarters (1835 Centre Avenue) down Centre Avenue towards Downtown, before turning around and heading back into the neighborhood to view more developments. Key physical aspects of the tour included the former Lower Hill neighborhood that is currently parking lot, the new Shop N Save grocery store, the Thelma Lovette YMCA, the Carnegie Library, the Legacy residential development, and associated local small businesses frequented by Hill District residents.
As useful as this tour was from a visual standpoint (i.e understanding interactions in the physical environment of the Hill District), we found that the true value was derived from the insight Ms. Baltimore provided what we could not see: the complex interactions between stakeholders in the Hill District, and just how large a role the historical context of the neighborhood plays in the structure of these interactions. Examples include the entire Lower Hill District neighborhood being removed to provide space for the Civic Arena, the removal of Eddie’s (local eatery) to renovate the Carnegie Library, and the installation of the Thelma Lovette YMCA.
This tour allowed our group to gain insight into just how complex the interactions between stakeholders in the Hill are. This includes interactions between neighborhood organizations (at the Hill District Consensus Group) as well as the interactions between the Hill District and outside entities (The City of Pittsburgh, the URA, the Pittsburgh Penguins organization). It also struck us that as CMU students, we are one of these outside groups that interacts with the neighborhood. We had whittled the scope of our project down to formulating a strategy for community interaction with the Hill District Vacant Property Strategy, in order to gain useful and productive community input on the technical recommendations within this report. This tour allowed us to view several of the actual physical vacant lots and properties, but more importantly it gave us a view into what is not physically visible in a neighborhood, and how this history shapes the interaction between the Hill District residents and various stakeholders.
Design and Policy 