Pittsburgh, like many other cities, instills a sense of local pride in its residents, from the new-to-town college student, to the lifelong resident of the Steel City. Unique to Pittsburgh however, is the specific allegiance that locals have to the specific neighborhood they belong to, and for good reason to. Each of the city’s 90 vibrant neighborhoods has a distinctive personality that distinguish one from the next, best exemplified in the coffee shops, restaurants, thrift stores, and other small businesses that take up residence alongside the people who frequent them. The merits of each neighborhood’s commercial offerings are regularly retrieved in friendly arguments on the merits of one ‘hood over the other. Arguably, no neighborhood is more up for debate on the strengths and shortcomings of its commercial core than East Liberty. The East End neighborhood is the topic of polarizing debate, not only locally, but also catapulted onto the national radar as it is the host of some of Pittsburgh’s most obvious patterns of gentrification.
From the first wave of redevelopment that swept through the neighborhood in the late 1950s in the form of the Penn Circle project to the rapid development of luxury apartments, retail and dining establishments in the last decade, East Liberty’s form has transformed drastically in all aspects, not least of these being commercially. While dialogue regarding gentrification often hones in on the human aspect and residential demographics, one needn’t forget the corresponding role of a neighborhood’s small commercial presences. Just like individuals face threats of displacement when gentrification comes to the neighborhood, such do the “mom and pop” establishments who must now compete against high-end corporate development. Sociologists Daniel Sullivan and Samuel Shaw write in their article, “Retail Gentrification and Race: The Case of Alberta Street in Portland, Oregon”, that analyzing this aspect of change is important as “retail gentrification influences the goods and services available to residents, both longtime and new ones. At a cultural level, retail gentrification creates quasi-public spaces in which (some) residents feel comfortable shopping and hanging out” and others feel increasingly unwelcomed (Sullivan and Shaw 414). East Liberty is no stranger to this phenomenon, as the public fabric of the neighborhood is in a continually evolving state of flux and its residents are left scrambling to find their niche in the transforming neighborhood.
“East Liberty had been plush once . . . businesses left, projects came . . . after they demolished all the projects and got a Whole Foods and Home Depot and a fancy bookstore, white people started calling it the East End” (Hayes 45).
Terrance Hayes’ short story, “Still Air”, offers a grim illumination of the racialized colonization of the once flourishing Black neighborhood. In East Liberty's case, there is a strong sense of the efforts to erase the lived space of the historically black population that has inhabited the neighborhood, in favor of a shiny, new (and white) façade. Space theorist Edward Soja would attribute these aims of redevelopment to the secondspace, an “entirely ideational” space, “made up of projections into the empirical world from conceived or imagined geographies” (Soja 57). Rather than using East Liberty’s rich history as a guiding framework for holistic growth in the future, developers in the neighborhood have merely used glimmers, if anything, of the East Liberty of yesterday, and more of a marketing tool to play on people’s nostalgia than it is any genuine tribute to the neighborhood’s history. One needn’t look any further than property shark, Walnut Capital’s, development of the Penn at Walnut on Highland building. The high-rise luxury apartment development is a visual representation of everything that comes to mind when thinking of gentrification: corrugated steel of bright colors, streamlined balconies, and hard lines. This modernity is sharply contrasted by the building’s ground floor white stone façade, the last remaining artifact of its past, when it housed an independent shoe store and pharmacy, among other mom and pop shops. East Liberty’s newest residents want conflicting ideals: their rose-colored “projections” of the neighborhood’s small town past but the physical comfort of new, chain presences: Whole Foods, Target, Orange Theory Fitness, the list goes on. Similar cases can be found repeating throughout the length of the neighborhood’s commercial strip. A block once inhabited by independent clothing establishments, specialty home stores, and family restaurants has been cleared for Dollar Tree and CVS. The lived experiences of longstanding East Liberty residents are inextricably tied to the strong sense of locality the neighborhood once possessed because of the cultural strongholds of independent businesses. As these small staples are increasingly priced out, East Liberty becomes more and more of a faceless urban environment, indistinguishable from any other city block of Starbucks and LA Fitness.
Can we blame these small businesses for leaving though? Take Anthon’s for instance; an independent bakery and restaurant, and a Penn Avenue mainstay dating back to the 1940s that was pushed to shutter its doors in 2015. Into the neighborhood came the young “techies”, high-income earning professionals who much prefer the likes of the Livermore, an “Italian Osteria and cocktail bar”, (where a drink will run one upwards of $10) than they do the down to earth comfort that Anthon’s and their counterparts offered their clientele, pricing out many a commercial staples. Pittsburgh resident and university professor, Nick Coles, writes in his article, “Black Homes Matter”, of the “deep injustice in the fact that many residents who lived through the period of “blight” in the neighborhood are not here to share in its renewal or in the wealth being generated” (Coles np). This sentiment can be aptly applied to the small businesses of East Liberty’s yesteryear as well. They put in the time, provide places of culture and leisure to the neighborhood, and instead are pushed out in favor of a new population’s needs and desires for the sleek and corporate. Where the future of East Liberty’s gentrifying business district lies is difficult to predict, as the neighborhood’s only constant seems to be its change. Though it can be said with certainty that the businesses and people alike will be ready to adapt and stand resilient in the face of radical evolution, just as they always have.