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 Allegheny 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. East Liberty lost most of its businesses, and the new housing projects, inhabited by poor African-Americans, unnerved Garfield residents.

To add insult to injury, 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.

The old neighborhood did not die without a fight. In 1975, parishioners at St. Lawrence O'Toole founded the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, a Community Development Corporation that used federal funds and activism to attempt to halt the neighborhood's slide. In the 1980s, a similar group called the Garfield Jubilee Association began to do likewise. These two groups have worked to organize community activities, to call police attention to trouble spots, to rehabilitate abandoned or neglected housing, to build new and affordable housing, and to keep businesses like banks and stores open along Penn Avenue.

Nevertheless, the old neighborhood did die. The working-class Irish haven described above by Aggie Brose is no more; in its place is a blighted African-American neighborhood comprised largely of renters and not homeowners. Garfield residents today are largely poor and black, and their children face the sadly usual litany of obstacles between them and a better life: poverty, illegitimacy, racism, and the other legacies of slavery. (These are, in Pittsburgh, exacerbated by the collapse of the manufacturing sector of the economy, which gave the former Irish residents their livelihoods, but no longer exists to do the same for today's residents). Drug dealing and prostitution are not uncommon in Garfield, and children attending the local schools quickly fall behind their peers on national tests. Against these forces, even the best efforts of groups like the BGC and GJC have been unable to prevail -- and these groups now draw many of their members from outside the neighborhood.

Might Garfield rise again? Commercially, there are some grounds for optimism, as Penn Avenue is slowly recovering from the flight of local businesses in the 1970s and 1980s. Some bastions of the old neighborhood remain (e.g., Calabria's Pizza, Kraynick's Bicycles), and groups like the BGC and GJC have done much to keep some banks and stores along Penn Avenue. Since 1990, these have been joined by newcomers: African-American barbershops and salons, tiny family-owned Vietnamese restaurants, and a series of arts-related businesses (e.g., theatres, galleries, an architecture studio, a glass factoy, a coffeeshop, and much more) attracted by the Friendship Development Associates, a group based in relatively well-to-do Friendship that has turned its attention to Penn Avenue. The East Mall and Garfield Heights housing projects are being destroyed in 2005, and their absence should benefit the neighborhood.

Visitors to Garfield today will see a neighborhood in transition, a seemingly lighted community that, on closer inspection, contains a few scattered reminders of its blue-collar Irish past, a few collapsing legacies from the City's misguided attempt at urban renewal, and several promising suggestions of a possible renaissance, to be fuelled by Asian immigrants and the arts.