The Hill District, Crossroads of the World

If you had walked through Pittsburgh's Hill District on a Saturday night in nineteen forty-five, you would have heard jazz coming out of a dozen clubs. You might have found yourself at the Crawford Grill, a jazz club where Art Blakey, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane all played in its heyday. You would have been in one of the premier jazz neighborhoods in the United States, a place that locals called the Crossroads of the World, and that the broader country sometimes called Pittsburgh's Little Harlem.

The Hill District sits on the high ground overlooking downtown, and its story begins with the Great Migration. From nineteen ten through the nineteen thirties, African Americans moved north in enormous numbers, fleeing Jim Crow violence and looking for industrial work. In Pittsburgh, Black workers in the steel mills were largely kept in the most dangerous and lowest-paying jobs. They settled in the Hill, which was already dense with Jewish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrant communities.

By the nineteen twenties and thirties, the Hill had its own newspapers, its own businesses, its own political organizations, and its own extraordinary cultural life. The Pittsburgh Crawfords Negro League baseball team played at Greenlee Field, built and owned by Black entrepreneur Gus Greenlee. The Crawfords of the nineteen thirties had five future Hall of Famers: James Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, Judy Johnson, and Satchel Paige.

August Wilson, who grew up on Bedford Avenue in the Hill, would later say that he simply listened to what people said on the stoops and in the barbershops, and wrote it down. Nine of his ten plays in the Century Cycle are set here. The Hill gave American theater some of its most enduring work.