lived in Pittsburgh for practically my entire life, and I’m still not quite sure where Pittsburgh ends and Wilkinsburg begins. I suspect it occurs when Braddock Avenue is crossed, but again I’m not certain.”7 The buildings looked the same to me, too, as well as the people. Wilkinsburg was Pittsburgh without the “h.”
At the point when we started building up a healthy sweat, the smells of the Nabisco cookie factory, located in the Black-majority neighborhood of East Liberty, hit us in the face. The changing color of the street signs from green (Wilkinsburg) to blue (Pittsburgh) was supposed to let people know they were leaving one municipality and entering the other. A more substantive indication for me was the smell of cookies. Pittsburgh was so close you could smell it.
Sometimes we ran past my biological mother’s house. Karen lived about four miles away, in the Garfield neighborhood, another Black area along my Penn Avenue running route, closer to downtown Pittsburgh. To break up the monotony of a down-and-back run on Penn, we often headed west on Fifth Avenue into the Oakland neighborhood, home of the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Carlow College. If the timing was right, we’d see runners from one of the local college teams. Occasionally, we stopped to watch them doing intervals in the nearby parks of Schenely or Frick.
I didn’t realize during my cross-country days that Wilkinsburg was in transition, becoming majority Black. When I was born in 1970, Wilkinsburg was approximately 20 percent Black. By 1990, the Black population rose to 52 percent. From 1990 to 2010, its population fell to 15,930 from 21,080, and the population changed to more than two-thirds Black. Those who remained were more likely to be poor. The poverty rate among Wilkinsburg families rose to 20.9 percent in 2016 from 14.3 percent in 1990.
Those of us who lived in Wilkinsburg in the seventies and eighties were flush with pride from all the assets that were in front of us, and understandably so. We taunted kids from Pittsburgh by saying we lived in Wilkinsburg. The economic anchor of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company sat on the outskirts of Wilkinsburg, as did the ABC television affiliate WTAE Channel 4. We saw the bustling activity generated by those companies on the commercial corridor of Penn. I saw my friends’ parents come from Westinghouse to shop in Murphy’s and donate clothes to the Red, White, and Blue store. My peers got their first jobs in those businesses. As a skinny ninth-grade runner from Wilkinsburg, I had prestigious postsecondary institutions, retail outlets, banks, libraries, parks, and Black people in my sights. I saw the flow of commerce and the resulting prosperity pass into Black communities and Black families. The world was at my feet.
When I returned to Wilkinsburg for an all-class reunion in 2017, I retraced my old Penn Avenue running route. Whereas the foot traffic of Wilkinsburg’s sidewalks had constricted my runs in the past, the distractions of what used to be slowed my steps this time. My alma mater, Wilkinsburg High School, no longer exists. In 2016, the Wilkinsburg School District dissolved its middle and high schools, conceding its educational responsibility to Westinghouse High School of Pittsburgh Public Schools.8 The high school building designed for big kids now houses elementary school students. Twenty-five students comprised Wilkinsburg High’s last graduating class. Wilkinsburg graduated about the same number of male graduates that year as ran on the cross-country team in 1985.
The primary school I attended, Johnston Elementary, is now Community Forge, a nonprofit business incubator dedicated to speeding up the growth of Wilkinsburg start-ups. The building had sat vacant since 2012 when Community Forge purchased Johnston from the school district for $225,000, and opened in 2018.9
Traditional business incubators strive to do just as their name suggests—they incubate or help develop businesses so they can eventually leave the nest to fly on their own. Incubators provide a physical office space and offer business services such as printing and internet, conference rooms, and even management training to those who apply and/or pay rent.10 Accelerators (not to be confused with incubators) are businesses that provide intensive technical assistance (most often not offered in college) and access to practitioner-mentors in the field to selected entrepreneurs. It’s comparable to the TV show Shark Tank, with similar pitch competitions to attract potential investors. Some incubators and accelerators help germinate an idea or business with investments of private capital in exchange for an ownership share or profit percentage. Incubators and accelerators are central elements of the start-up tech culture that has proliferated in the last decade. Community Forge, which is featured in chapter 4, hopes to make incubators a community development tool.
The Borough of Wilkinsburg integrated its fire department into Pittsburgh’s in 2011, after the department became financially insolvent.11 Pittsburgh also manages the borough’s waste removal. Wilkinsburg’s downtown today is but a shell of its previous self. The loss of so many businesses and stores only throws into relief the typical poverty shops; cell phone dealers, discount stores, and check cashing places offer a monotonous set of options for passersby.
As I moved closer to the city of Pittsburgh on my 2017 run, the once-invisible border between the cities became remarkably apparent. The intangible aroma of buttery Ritz crackers had vanished, the fragrant boundary between the two cities replaced by a physical one—the colorfully decorated offices Google had set up in East Liberty where Nabisco used to be. Apart from the new windows, multicolored lighting, and pressure-washed brick, the outside looked familiar. But inside, the heavy machinery of the past had been replaced by an open-space cubicle farm for software developers, featuring playrooms with musical instruments, videogames, and hammocks, and with snack stations throughout.
The tech giant anchors a ballyhooed innovation hub in East Liberty, not too far from Peabody, the high school I transferred to in my junior year. In 2009, that high school became the Barack Obama Academy of International Studies. A year later and a mile away, Google established a second Pittsburgh office, also on Penn Avenue, complete with famously fanciful workspaces, on the grounds of the old Nabisco factory renamed Bakery Square. The mixed-use development includes apartments, fancy retail, a commercial gym, and many work-play-live conveniences that highly paid employees expect. Google employees can walk across a footbridge to the latest addition to the campus, Bakery Square 2.0, which opened in 2017. Bike trails wind from the square to adjacent Mellon Park with its walking paths, basketball and tennis courts, and grassy knolls for those who just need some quiet and sun.
The conversion from East Liberty to Bakery Square illustrates how urban planners institute a process for community development that “capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, and … results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people’s health, happiness, and wellbeing,” according the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit that helps people create and sustain public spaces.12 This process is described by the jargon “placemaking”—a verbal waffle that is quite deceiving.
“Places already exist,” said New Orleans based architect Bryan Lee, who heads his own planning firm. Placemaking minimizes architects and planners’ sordid history of transforming a place into what they feel is best for Black communities, which in actuality is rooted in what the architect would do for him/herself. In 2017, only 2 percent of all architects were Black. When Whites are the default placemakers, the projects taken on will undoubtedly carry implicit biases. When it comes to community development in Black-majority neighborhoods, the person, firm, or group orchestrating the actual development can’t be ambiguous. Black communities need reimagined spaces just like everyone else. But architects and planners must be deliberate about not imagining Black-majority spaces as places that are suitable for White, middle-class residents.
If community development is the goal, architects and planners should invest in how people of a particular place already
