Urban Renewal and the Civic Arena

In the mid nineteen-fifties, city planners decided that the lower Hill District, the most densely populated part of the neighborhood, would make an ideal site for a new civic arena and a broad boulevard connecting downtown to the freeway system. The project was framed, as urban renewal projects typically were in that era, as slum clearance. City officials called it progress. The people who lived there called it something else.

Approximately eight thousand residents were displaced. Four hundred businesses were forced to close or move. Eighty city blocks, roughly one hundred acres of densely settled neighborhood, were demolished. The community that had produced jazz clubs, churches, fraternal organizations, corner stores, and political institutions built over generations was physically erased. The process note: historical accounts of the precise displacement numbers vary somewhat across sources; the range commonly cited runs from eight thousand to nine thousand residents.

The Civic Arena opened in nineteen sixty-one. It had a retractable dome of polished steel, a genuine engineering marvel of its day, and it was nicknamed the Igloo after the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team moved in. It sat in a cleared landscape that was never fully rebuilt around it. The housing and commercial life that had been promised to return did not return on anything close to the original scale. The Hill District was cut off from downtown by what had been built in its lower section.

The arena was demolished in twenty-eleven. The site sat largely empty for years afterward while developers, the city, and Hill District community organizations argued over who had the right to shape what came next. That argument, about who gets to decide what a neighborhood becomes, is still unresolved. The lower Hill today is a construction zone with contested plans and a population fraction of what it once was.