MEMORIES OF THE HILL DISTRICT

 

This photo was taken in the late 1940s and shows Wylie Avenue stretching East away from downtown Pittsburgh. Wylie was the main thoroughfare in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, starting at John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church and ended downtown at the Allegheny County Jail. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Hill fostered a thriving social life marked by the intersection of music, entrepreneurship, and a shifting demographic landscape. Wyle embodied the range of the community’s dynamics, which was marked by a steadily increasing African American population interspersed with Italian, Syrian, Lebanese, Irish and Jewish immigrants. At it’s creative height, from the 1920s to the 1960s, the Hill combined a strange and shifting combination of vice and piety, poverty and economic innovation, and segregation and self-sufficiency.

 

In the 1940s, the intersection of Fullerton Street and Wylie Avenue was often referred to as the “Crossroads of the World” by black DJs and columnists writing for the Pittsburgh Courier. This title says a great deal about how the identity of the Hill District was contested. For those living outside the Hill, the intersection represented vice, poverty, and violence. White newspapers typically reported on the Hill only when there was a murder or a raid on liquor bootleggers or numbers runners. But for the African American community on the Hill, this intersection was a source of pride. On or near this intersection were black-owned or run businesses, two social clubs that catered to the city’s black elite, and a range of nightclubs where nationally recognized figures and performers would convene on a daily basis.

 

The Crawford Grill Development Team is currently raising the development funds needed to complete the renovation of the Crawford Grill Jazz Club facility and to purchase additional properties surrounding the facility for additional parking and possible synergistic ventures such as urban gardens and additional educational and rehearsal spaces.