Hill District once beacon of culture

In this neighborhood, black residents shopped in Jewish markets that were sometimes owned by… In this neighborhood, black residents shopped in Jewish markets that were sometimes owned by their next-door neighbors. Italian, Irish and Syrian families exchanged recipes. White people enjoyed jazz in nightclubs owned by black people, and interracial couples kissed and held hands in booths in local diners.

Where is this multicultural enclave? Chicago? New York?

Actually, it once existed next door to Pitt, in the Hill District.

Laurence Glasco, an associate professor of history at Pitt, discussed the interracial dynamics of the Hill District’s history in a speech to the Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society last week. In addition to describing the racial, economic and educational integration of the neighborhood that existed for more than 100 years, he explained that, compared to that of other neighborhoods in northern cities, the Hill’s history has been largely free of racial conflict.

“It wasn’t utopia — it was far from that — but it was remarkable from our perspective today of integration: a racially integrated community living in that sort of harmony,” Glasco said.

The Hill District was integrated from its inception in the 1820s and remained a multi-racial community until the middle of the 20th century, when it became a predominantly African-American neighborhood. As Pittsburgh’s first suburb, the Hill provided a place for wealthy white settlers to build mansions and escape the congestion and pollution of the city.

But black people, particularly migrants from the Shenandoah Valley region in Virginia, lived in the Hill from the very beginning. Glasco explained that newspapers in the 1840s mention a black land speculator who may have even founded the Hill, though Glasco didn’t have any official documents to confirm or elaborate on this claim. He added that black settlers scattered throughout the Hill during a time when America was much more residentially integrated, and that the residential pattern was maintained.

The flow of Western European immigration, and later Eastern European and Middle Eastern immigration, that occurred from the 1840s and 1850s until the 1920s, added still more ethnic groups to the mix. Glasco said that the Hill District was home to some 25 nationalities, including Italian, Jewish, German, Irish, Syrian, Lebanese, Arab, Polish, and Chinese immigrants, between the 1920s and the early 1950s.

Though these groups tended to form small, neighborhood-like clusters, Glasco said, there was a great deal of overlap among different ethnic groups. Glasco explained that white immigrants who came to the Hill had not yet been “Americanized,” or instilled with the idea that it was inappropriate to live in the same communities as black people. According to the 1870 Census, 75 percent of black people in the Hill District either lived in the same house as a white family or lived next door to one.

Perhaps the clearest example of this integration exists near the birthplace of black playwright August Wilson, located at 1727 Bedford Ave. On one side of his house, the Italian Butera family ran a watch and shoe repair business. On the other, a Jewish family ran Bella’s Market, a grocery and general store. Just down the street, people worshipped at a Syrian Orthodox church and could play the numbers, an illegal lottery, at a Syrian-run candy store.

Though these different ethnic groups in the Hill were in close contact, their interactions never erupted into serious conflict throughout the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries.

“When I go to the historical record, I find no examples of race riots and the like,” Glasco said. “Sometimes things that don’t happen can be as interesting and significant as things that did happen.”

While neighborhoods in Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati were characterized by racial strife, Glasco said he counted only a few instances of racially motivated, organized violence during the anti-slavery movement. Even when black steelworkers, who were prohibited from joining steelworkers’ unions, returned to work and helped mill owners to end the steel strike in Pittsburgh in 1919, no riots erupted.

Upon speaking with people about the Hill District, Glasco said, “Older residents with memories talk mainly about the good relationships that existed there.”

This integration and harmony permeated the Hill’s business and cultural communities, as well. Glasco explained that Jim Crow laws did not affect businesses. Black people attended the same movie theaters, dined at the same restaurants, and were free to shop in the same stores as white people.

Likewise, white people in the Hill District patronized black institutions and businesses. The first black migrants in the Hill established barbershops and bathhouses that catered to an exclusive white clientele. Glasco said that even schools in the Hill were integrated as early as the 1870s, though the school system prohibited black people from teaching white students.

Glasco explained that this multicultural interaction undercuts a national idea that segregation allowed black institutions and culture to flourish, and that integration caused them to disintegrate.

“I think that the very notion that we have that black institutions and culture cannot survive in an integrated environment is mistaken,” he said. “I think the Hill District in Pittsburgh shows that it could and did occur.”

Yet when these white immigrants did assimilate into American culture, they migrated out of the Hill District to other areas, as did many members of the black middle class. The neighborhood’s housing quality had deteriorated significantly by 1955, when parts of the Hill District were torn down as part of a federally approved urban renewal initiative, which was supported by black people as well as white people, Glasco said. He explained that riots in response to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 essentially brought the community’s vivacity to a halt.

“The riots here were less severe than in other cities, but it pretty well ended the Hill as a viable community, and it’s been struggling to come back ever since,” he said.

Though the Hill is now overwhelmingly populated by black people, Glasco said, vestiges of the Hill’s interracial history still exist in buildings created by white settlers and immigrants. Former Syrian Orthodox churches and Jewish Synagogues now house black Methodist, Episcopal and Pentecostal congregations. Even the Hill House, a human services agency, is located in what used to be the Irene Kaufmann Settlement House.