Garfield (Pittsburgh)

Garfield is a neighborhood in the City of Pittsburgh's East End, about three miles as the crow flies from the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers at the City's heart. It sits on a bluff above the Allegheny river. Garfield is bordered on the South by Bloomfield and Friendship (at Penn Avenue), on the East by the Allgheny Cemetery (at Mathilda Street), on the North by Stanton Heights (at Mossfield Street), and on the West by East Liberty (at Negley Avenue). Like so many parts of Pittsburgh, Garfield is a fairly steep neighborhood, with north-south residential streets running at about a 20% incline from Penn Avenue at the bottom to Mossfield Street at the top.

Like nearby Bloomfield and Friendship, the land comprising modern-day Garfield was claimed by Casper Taub from the local Delaware tribe. Taub sold it to his son-in-law, Joseph Conrad Winebiddle, in the late 1700s. About a hundred years later, Winebiddle's descendants broke the family estate into lots and sold them to new residents of an expanding City of Pittsburgh. The first owner of a lot in present-day Garfield bought his plot in 1881, on the day that U.S. President James Garfield was buried, so the neighborhood was named for the late President.

Garfield's earliest settlers were predominantly blue-collar Irish laborers and their families, who worked in the mills and foundries down along the Allegheny River, shopped in local stores on Penn Avenue, and built and lived in modest, yet solid brick fourquare homes on the streets running up from Penn Avenue. The community, then almost exclusively Catholic, built St. Lawrence O'Toole Parish on Penn Avenue in 1897. From 1880 until about 1960, the neighborhood remained as it began: a solid, working-class area, with all the closeness and xenophobia that such a place entailed. Neighborhood activist Aggie Brose described Garfield in 1960 as a place where "You sponsored each other's kids, you went to all the weddings and funerals, you never wanted for a baby-sitter, you never had to call a repairman, you didn't need for a social. When you put the kids to bed, the women went out on the stoops."

Things changed in the 1960s. Some Garfield residents began to leave the City for nearby suburbs in Shaler and Penn Hills, In response, the City made several decisions that, in hindsight, were disastrous. The City's Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) used eminent domain and attempted to change nearby East Liberty from an urban shopping area, then the third-busiest retail center in Pennsylvania, to a suburban one. The URA knocked down many small shops, accessible on foot or by bus, and thereby opened land for larger ones, accessible by car. At the same time, the City's housing authority built several massive public housing complexes on Garfield's borders: Garfield Heights, a 600+ unit complex high up on Fern Street, and the East Mall, a 20+ story tower straddling Penn Avenue at the entrance to East Liberty.

These changes, designed to halt the slow trickle of Garfield residents to the suburbs, instead turned a trickle into a torrent. In 1969, the federal goverment gave the City funds to enforce housing codes in Garfield, in an attempt to ensure that as old residents fled, their homes were not allowed to deteriorate. This move also backfired: long-time residents, told that homes built in 1900 (and often passed through families over the years) did not meet codes written in 1960, moved away rather than pay for upgrades. Thus began a textbook case of white flight: in 1970, Garfield had a population of roughly 10,000 people, 80% of them white. In 2000, Garfield's population had been cut almost in half to 5500 people, 80% of them black.