| East Liberty (pittsburgh) |
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BEGINNINGS Around the time of the American Revolution , the area now known as East Liberty was a free grazing area in Allegheny County located near the eastern edge of the town then known as Pittsburg. (In older English usage, a "liberty" was a plot of common land on the outskirts of a town.) Two farming partriarchs owned much of the nearby land, and their descendants' names grace streets in and around East Liberty today. John Conrad Winebiddle owned land west of present-day East Liberty, in what are now Bloomfield , Garfield , and Friendship , and his daughter Barbara inherited a portion close to what is now East Liberty. Alexander Negley owned a farm called "Fertile Bottom" north of present-day East Liberty along the southern bank of the Allegheny River . Negley's land included some of present-day East Liberty and much of nearby Highland Park , Morningside , Larimer , and Stanton Heights . Alexander Negley's son Jacob Negley married Barbara Winebiddle, built a manor house, and developed a village that he called East Liberty after the old grazing commons. In 1816, Negley saw to it that the Pittsburgh - Greensburg turnpike was built through East Liberty, which made the area a trading center and ensured its future growth. East Liberty truly began to develop as a commercial area in 1843, when Jacob's daughter Sarah Jane Negley married the ambitious lawyer Thomas Mellon . Mellon first visited the area of modern-day East Liberty in 1823, when as a 10-year-old he saw the Negley mansion for the first time and decided he wanted something like it. He achieved this goal and much more: after first becoming a prosperous lawyer, he made his true fortune by marrying Sarah Jane Negley, selling or renting the land near East Liberty that she inherited, and using the proceeds to finance Pittsburgh's nascent industries. Like Jacob Negley before him, Thomas Mellon worked to make East Liberty a transportation hub: Mellon convinced some of Pittsburgh's first trolley lines to pass through East Liberty. RISE AND FALL In 1868, the City of Pittsburgh annexed what is now East Liberty. Thanks to its favorable location and Mellon's guiding hand, it became a thriving commercial center in the following years. East Liberty's merchants served many of Pittsburgh's industrial millionaires, who settled in nearby Shadyside and Point Breeze , as well as professionals in Highland Park and Friendship and laborers in Bloomfield and Garfield . By 1950, it was a bustling and fully urban marketplace, and was in fact the third-busiest retail center in Pennsylvania, behind only center city Philadelphia and downtown Pittsburgh . The 1960s changed East Liberty, and not for the better. In the early 1960s, a few of East Liberty's larger merchants saw that some residents of Pittsburgh's East End were moving to the suburbs, and that suburban shopping malls were consequently growing and expanding. These merchants feared that suburban development would harm East Liberty's status as a market center, and asked the City of Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) to take action. The URA did indeed take action, but its cure was worse than the disease it tried to treat. The URA implemented a plan that required the demolition of roughly half of the 254 acres that comprised East Liberty. Many small shops were destroyed -- a million square feet of retail space in all. The URA stopped traffic on the busiest part of Penn Avenue (the old Greensburg-Pittsburgh turnpike of Jacob Negley's day) and routed it onto a series of new, one-way thoroughfares (called Penn Circle) that formed a ring around the central business district. At the same time, the City's housing authority perceived another problem: its planners felt that nearby Homewood was overcrowded. The housing authority's solution was to build three large housing complexes, each close to 20 stories tall, in East Liberty along the new Penn Circle roads. The housing complexes looked like giant walls cordoning off the Penn Avenue business district, and quickly became centers for crime that scared away merchants and shoppers alike. Within a few years, East Liberty became a blighted neighborhood. There were some 575 businesses in East Liberty in 1959, but only 292 in 1970, and just 98 in 1979. East Liberty's physical isolation increased in 1983, when the Port Authority of Allegheny County opened the East Busway. The Busway is a dedicated road that allows bus commuters to travel rapidly from downtown Pittsburgh to the East End and to eastern suburbs. It was built along the border between prosperous Shadyside and East Liberty, and so it physically divided East Liberty's merchants from some of the area's most affluent shoppers, acting like a moat to keep the one from the other. RISE AGAIN? Despite the damage done by the urban renewal of the 1960s and the isolating Busway of the 1980s, East Liberty's location still made it a good potential site for retail businesses. Though its tarnished reputation now kept many customers away, East Liberty remained close to some of the Pittsburgh area's most prosperous residents, who had not left the City for the suburbs, but continued to live in Shadyside and Point Breeze , and also in Highland Park , and Friendship . Additionally, the containment of East Liberty within Penn Circle led to a loyal customer base. In the 1990s, the City of Pittsburgh worked to undo some of what it had done in the 1960s, by returning some of the neighborhood's roads to their pre-1960 traffic pattern. After 2000, the City also used Tax Increment Financing to lure two national retailers to the neighborhood: Home Depot and Whole Foods. Both these stores throve, and their success convinced other national retailers to invest in the neighborhood. Around this time, two other positive changes occurred. First, local entrepreneurs opened new, successful businesses in East Liberty, including the Shadow Lounge nightclub, targeted at artists and musicians, and several upscale restaurants, targeted at young professionals from Shadyside . Second, after a complex and time-consuming set of transactions, two of the three housing projects that visually barricaded the neighborhood were demolished in 2005. The last will be demolished within the next few years. The City still has plans to return the roads of Penn Circle from one-way throughfares to two-way streets, and otherwise to return the neighborhood to the way it was during its heyday. But the success of national and local retailers, and the destruction of the three housing projects, suggests that in the years following 2005 East Liberty will, if not thrive, at least take modest steps in that direction. REFERENCE EXTERNAL LINKS
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