TAKING UP SPACE
FOUR THINGS I LEARNED FROM MY COLLEGE NEIGHBORHOOD
By: Chloe Simpson
Pittsburgh’s neighborhood of Oakland, where I lived for four years while attending university, has taught me four things:
Look into what our land is used for. What it is not used for. Who it is available to. Who it is not available to. Who claims ownership over it. Who assigns value to it. Don’t let these things go unnoticed–question them.
History lives in the present. It’s all around us, whether we see it or not.
Nothing is promised and nothing is given away freely.
The way things are is not the way things have to be.
I sit writing this, in the first fall of my post-graduate life, in a slightly chilly art exhibit featuring the work of a famous dead architect. A projection of his visions for Pittsburgh plays on an immersive wall before me: digital renderings of a ten-story megastructure with an opera house, a movie theater, a zoo, a planetarium, an aquarium, and parking lot complete with shiny 1940s cars. A plaque on the wall tells me Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD) rejected his plans, to replace them with two slightly less extravagant options - Point State Park, at the convergence of the three rivers, and the Civic Arena, a massive concert venue with a retractable roof in the Lower Hill District.
In the early 1950s, the Lower Hill was a lively neighborhood, known both as the “crossroads of the world” and “Little Harlem,” due to its multi-cultural history and artistic and musical inspirations 2. In a process called urban renewal, Mayor David L. Lawrence and the cities’ Urban Redevelopment Authority decided that land was blighted, evicted over 9,000 people, and tore down their homes and businesses to build the Civic Arena 3. The context of this history is not mentioned in the exhibit, but the pleasant music and imaginings of the dead architects’ visions for a great civic center take up an immersive three walls, and give me a bit of an eerie feeling, the way looking at pictures of the Civic Arena does.
Look into what our land is used for. What it is not used for. Who it is available to. Who it is not available to. Who claims ownership over it. Who assigns value to it. Don’t let these things go unnoticed. Question them.
The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), in the mid-1950s to the mid-60s, under Chancellor Edward Litchfield, undertook similar large-scale processes of urban renewal, with the university buying up and tearing down whatever they could: houses, businesses, warehouses, gas stations, and notable ballpark, Forbes Field, to build their own institutional and medical buildings. At this time, the neighborhood of Oakland, in which the university is situated, was home to a great many European immigrants who came to Pittsburgh with their families looking for work at the steel mills. Over time, there were less and less families, and more and more Pitt students, as the university grew and Pittsburgh’s general population decreased. In the 1960s, the post-war boom meant a great deal of middle class families moved out of inner city neighborhoods into the suburbs 2. Suburbanization, combined with the shuttering of Pittsburgh’s steel mills in the 1980s, did a great deal of damage to the cities’ population and provided the perfect opportunities for land speculation on behalf of the university, as well as slumlords. Today, much of the housing stock in Oakland is the same Victorian architecture it once was, although most of it rots away uncared for under absentee landlords and a transient student population. On campus, the great brutalist structures of Wesley W. Posvar Hall and David L. Lawrence Hall, named after the powerful men of Pittsburgh, and imagined under the idealism of Chancellor Litchfield, mesh and merge with the shiny glass skyscrapers of today’s urban architecture.
History lives in the present. It’s all around us, whether we see it or not.
Allow me back up a little and tell you about myself. I attended the University of Pittsburgh, starting in 2021. It took me two whole years to realize there was something missing: a lack of non-alcohol social spaces in the neighborhood.
Who could have known that community, even on a college campus, was hard to find - where on earth were the artists and the weirdos hanging out?
I changed my major to urban studies, which gave me the tools I needed to be curious. I began to research the history of the neighborhood and conduct interviews of people who existed in it before my time, pouring deeply into its cultural background as well as its now-dead venues.
To my frustration, I found out that in the last few decades of the 20th century, and the first decade of the 21st, Oakland was in fact the home of a great number of music venues and social spaces. There was the Electric Banana, a disco-turned punk rock venue, and the Decade, a rock and roll venue and bar where legends such as U2, the Police, Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, and Joe Grushecky and the Iron City Houserockers tore the house down. There was Syria Mosque, a former shiner’s club where groups and artists like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Allman Brothers, and R.E.M. performed. There was Club Laga and Graffiti, a multi-floor club in a former bowling alley/movie theater, where vinyl spun, electronic music played, and Erykah Badu once performed. There was a co-op grocery store, record stores, thrift stores, used furniture stores, hippie stores, and an iconic coffeehouse called the Beehive that showed art films. Oakland used to be the place to go for a night out, not just for college students but Pittsburghers everywhere.
I was disappointed and disheartened. I felt like I had missed out, like something had been taken from me. Now, as imagination falters in the faces of corporate conglomerates, and real estate prices skyrocket in university-adjacent areas 4, Oakland has lost much of its gritty charm. Chain restaurants line Forbes Avenue and garbage from these restaurants migrate out in piles in the streets of central Oakland. These old homes I have come to love are torn down due to demand for high-volume student housing, and replaced by luxury apartments with arguably less soul than the chain restaurants that surround them.
Nothing is promised and nothing is given away freely.
I’m painting a bleak picture. I don’t mean to say that the university is evil - I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t learned what I did there. I believe the university is a complicated entity made up of people; some who care about the same things I do, and some who do not. I believe it is working exactly as it has become designed to function - to grow its endowment. Chancellor Litchfield brought his corporate management experience to Pitt in the 1950s - and it stuck. Good business is investing in real estate. Good business doesn’t care about people’s feelings, or their history.
I don’t mean to say that Oakland is lacking in personality or culture, either. Yes, it has all the elements of a college town under our current version of late-stage capitalism - heavy drinking, careless trash disposal,, expensive fast food stores - but it also has live music.
Moving your body and experiencing art is an essential part of being human - and even if there are no traditional venues to support it, live music happens anyway; in basements, parking lots, or living rooms of rental houses. Like a persistent weed, the scene will never die. Most of my weekend nights in my first year of college were spent in sweaty basements with sticky floors, listening to bands play their hearts out on whatever equipment was thrown together an hour before.
As my time in college went on, hope returned. I witnessed firsthand how love for live music will create spaces where it can happen. Mark Riggio, Eli Alfieri, and Adam Klenovich, all young people, all previously involved with DIY shows in the neighborhood, rented out the former Holy Spirit Byzantine Catholic Church and started putting on live shows there, complete with top-notch sound and lighting. Being an alcohol-free space, this old church provides that deeply missing social and creative space in the neighborhood. There was something missing in the neighborhood before this place of live music, so aptly named Haven.
The way things are is not the way things have to be.
So what I’m saying is this: all is not lost.
P.S.
If you enjoyed reading this, I made a film about Pittsburgh music history called The Scene Will Never Die, available on YouTube. I am also in the final stages of editing my first personal short film, about Oakland, coming out January 25, 2026. It’s called TAKE UP SPACE, and it will be premiering first at Haven. To RSVP, visit https://www.joy-is-revolutionary.com/rsvptus .
Bibliography
1 , “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania: The Pittsburgh Projects” The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Fallingwater, and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives
2 “Crossroads of the World: How Urban Renewal Changed the Hill.” Heinz History Center, 5 July 2023, www.heinzhistorycenter.org/blog/crossroads-of-the-world-how-urban-renewal-changed-the-hill/.
3 Venatta, Grace. “The Civic Arena - a Mid-Twentieth Century Transformation of the Hill District .” Hill District Digital History,
4 Ober, Holly. “Does the Presence of Colleges and Hospitals Increase Home Prices?” UC Riverside News, 18 Apr. 2019, news.ucr.edu/articles/2019/02/07/does-presence-colleges-and-hospitals-increase-home-prices#:~:text=They%20found%20that%20average%20home,rent%20of%20one%2Dbedroom%20homes.