Demographics and History
About 40 percent of the Hill District's residents live below poverty level, and the vast majority of residents are black or African American; about 6 percent of the population is white.
Many residents view a major turning point in the neighborhood's history as the 1960s, when the city of Pittsburgh displaced about 8000 residents and 400 businesses in the Lower Hill to build the Civic Arena. The displaced people moved into the East Liberty and Homewood-Brushton neighborhoods, causing (white & black) middle-class families to flee these areas.
Recent initiatives have aimed to revitalize the area, which has struggled for decades with varying levels of dilapidation and crime.
A project to open a new grocery store—the neighborhood has lacked one for 30 years—is expected to come to fruition in the next few years. The YMCA is building a $9 million branch in the neighborhood, complete with a rooftop garden. A group of investors have gathered to restore the New Granada Theater, a historic jazz club where Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington once performed. And Duquesne University, a nearby college, plans to open a new pharmacy for residents in the neighborhood by the end of 2010.
Read more about this topic: Hill District
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)