A Personal Perspective On Urban Decay
I live in
Pittsburgh, right on
5th Avenue.
Cars pass by my apartment building all day heading in and out of the
city. I’ve been
downtown quite a few times, on
bus or by car but not until I looked at a
map one morning did I realize that I live only 3.5
miles from the center of the city and, most importantly,
Point State Park. There is a lovely view of the
three rivers there: the
Allegheny,
Monongahela and the
Ohio. I decided that I’d
run there. It couldn’t be hard, I just had to follow 5th Avenue.
I have never walked from my
house to the
skyscrapers downtown before. And that day I learned an important lesson. Between The
University of Pittsburgh,
Carnegie Mellon and
The Point is an old
neighborhood known as the
Hill District.
To get to the Hill you must cross or go under the
freeway. The freeway cuts the neighbors off from the rest of the city. The foundations of buildings, tore up in the 50s, are still there: twisted
metal rises from the ground, then there is a clean
concrete barrier and the
cars roaring by. It is one of the most
pedestrian unfriendly areas of the city, no
cross walks or
ramps. The
curb ends abruptly at the
Smithfield Street Bridge and you must hop down on to the
pavement and run hoping not to be
hit.
You know you are in the
Hill District when you stumble on to
crumbling sidewalks covered with
trash and
overgrown vines, when you see house after
abandoned house, many
fire damaged. As you walk along you’ll here the sound of people
clicking the auto locks on their car doors closed.
It was not always this way. My
grandfather talks about a different kind of Hill District. He talks about people keeping
city gardens and
chatting over the fence while the kids played on Saturday afternoons. That’s all gone now. The question is:
Why?