Oblivious to our sordid surroundings, we climbed atop those treacherous heaps—claiming ourselves kings of the hill.1
I was six years old then, the youngest in a poverty-stricken family of eight, twice displaced by the civic auditorium project. Nevertheless, my story is but one drawn from such a bad time experienced by many.
In time, the mayor’s 1950’s urban renewal project was proven to be nothing more than a giant steel chastity belt purposed to preserve white virtues, wow the wealthy, and, in the process, castrate the Hill District’s cultural crotch. The brutal renewal plan nearly succeeded in destroying the Hill District in its entirety, but the Hill community, declaring the steps of St. Benedict the Moor Church and the run-down sidewalks at the intersection of Crawford Street and Centre Avenue as their recognizable line in the sand, fought heartily against the mighty political power of city hall.
Arm in arm, the community stood in solidarity, launching protest marches from the renowned intersection against the city’s ongoing aggression. Massive well-organized protest marches from that corner addressed loss of housing, employment, police brutality and social ills that coincided rightly with the nationwide Civil Rights Movement, and thereby thwarted Pittsburgh’s 1950’s renaissance plan and its potential expansion beyond Crawford Street. Understandably, and deservedly so, many people accepted the well-known intersection at Centre Avenue and Crawford Street as Freedom Corner.
In essence opening day for the Freedom Corner Monument was an unstated victory celebration for a community moving forward in its decades-long fight against displacement by the city’s failed 1950’s urban renewal project.
I was almost thirty-years old by the time I suspected any personal emotional damage done. Even as Councilman Udin praised the community and its achievements, I stood silent among them, for, even then, I had yet to recognize my place among the joyous people and truly appreciate my part in the daylong celebration.
Over a span of 16 years, I lived at 15 different addresses throughout the Hill, a love/hate relationship at best, never truly accepting the neighborhood as home. The Lower Hill was both playground and plaything for me, but coming of age there during its downfall made it seem that I was born into a bad time, conditioned by it, raised by it.
The familiar African proverb—It takes a whole village to raise a child—applied to my brothers and me. Although our home was a place of refuge and my mother cared for us, she didn’t nurture by definition of the word, and, in that sense, a lesser-known African proverb—One knee does not bring up a child—extended beyond home and family to the pitiful neighborhood at large. More often than not, anonymous elders scolded, “you kids leave that alone, you kids stay out of there” or “stop throwing those rocks!” to quell our naughty ways. For the most part, time spent on the cobbled streets guided us. The weedy lots, ransacked houses, and stray cats game for chase were our calling. I recall more about the pathways, alleys, and byways I played in than I remember the workings of apartment spaces we lived in. Later, as I worked in white-collar America, I often denied ever having lived there.
Embattled for nearly a century, the district had welcomed generation after generation of immigrants into its swollen belly, and despite its broken condition, it had cradled my family too. Living there, on the brink of its demise, mine was a family without a legacy, so it seemed, for we did not have family traditions or practice ceremonial behavior in accordance with any ancestral wish, nor did we declare love for the decrepit places we lived in. I had not set any roots there, and I carried that shame with me to Freedom Corner’s opening day.
Having designed the monument, I had reached the height of my art career, but, for reasons I had yet to understand, I felt unworthy.
I had left the Hill 1970 and moved to Pittsburgh’s Manchester neighborhood, hoping never to return. But following a near-fatal head injury in a cycling accident, and haunted by my own mortality, I wanted to pursue my beginnings. Returning to the Hill, I wandered through the vacant buildings, just as I had done as a child on the Lower Hill many years before. For nearly a year, the few blocks between Crawford and Roberts Streets, where most all the dilapidated buildings waited for the wrecking ball, served as my place for introspection. Regarding the area as my sanctuary, I braved those unfamiliar places hoping to revive my dampened spirit. Sometimes sadness outweighed any desire to sketch or to make a photograph. I’d set up my tripod and camera, stand in the darkness and look through the viewfinder, hoping to sense that ineffable spirit of being. But no matter how angelic the view, my camera would have never captured what I was seeking, for there was no substitute for what I had been missing for so many years, the Lower Hill—my heritage so to speak.
Every trip to the Hill revealed a changing landscape, particularly between Arthur Street and Crawford Streets. Weeds outlined spaces where junked cars had rusted in place. Sagging telegraph cables no longer laced telegraph poles to the avenues and byways. Like odd-shaped tombstones, crumbled walls and twisted pipes marked block-long burial plots where homes had once stood. In a matter of weeks, dump trucks rumbled where the Hurricane Bar used to be, and bulldozers shadowed the façade of the Palace Hotel Bar. Within months, all of my sanctuaries were gone, every deserted space that had provided stability and a sense of order. Nevertheless, the loss—the demolition there—had somehow unearthed feelings for what I had been missing from so many years before.
Addressing the matter through art and journaling, I never suspected that my reaction to conditions there had resulted from myriad issues stemming from demolition of the Lower Hill years before, nor did I realize how emotional my connection was. I didn’t know whether to address issues from my past or present. Attempting to understand my dilemma more clearly, I created a diptych composed of two photographs, in which one double-exposed image symbolized past and future simultaneously, and a second image represented the present.
Belonging to any single place and time seemed an impossible task. Having one foot buried in the past and the other striving toward an unknown future was a dilemma. While I searched incessantly for my identity in both, I had neither. Nor did I feel a sense of place or belonging to the Hill District.
No one was aware of my hidden, simmering feelings, not even those closest to me. My artwork was the only mirror reflecting how I felt. To the novice my art was “nice work,” and always in demand for Black History Month exhibitions. Oftentimes wondering, who am I to exploit a downtrodden community for the sake of art, seemed a pointed question through welling tears.
“In my Sanctuary” by Carlos F. Peterson, circa 1975
Unbeknownst to me, Dr. Mindy Fullilove had been working with inner-city communities around the country—including Pittsburgh’s Hill District—over many years, guiding them through the aftermath of comparable development projects gone wrong and planting initial seeds toward healing and recovery. But, even if I had known that the gifted professor of clinical psychiatry from Columbia University was holding public workshops nearby, I would have never asked for help. Being the brooding artist, wallowing in misery, seemed to be more a part of my creative process than possible aftereffects of Pittsburgh’s so-called urban redevelopment.
My emotional health wasn’t perceptible to anyone—at least I didn’t think it was. But then, Freedom Corner Committee Chairman Sala Udin introduced me to Dr. Fullilove. Dr. Fullilove sidestepped my artist façade and, getting straight to the point, defined root shock as a traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem. Hearing that, I didn’t need to hear any more. I didn’t need therapy—I didn’t need diagnosis. She had answered provocative questions that the troubled artist within me had been tussling with for so long: what was I missing from my past, and how could a bad time from so long ago continue to
