Your walk enters the East End of Pittsburgh, the collection of neighborhoods stretching east from downtown that contains some of the city's most dramatic stories of decline and renewal. East Liberty was one of Pittsburgh's early commercial centers, a thriving streetcar suburb that declined sharply in the 1960s when an urban renewal project destroyed the street grid and replaced it with a pedestrian mall that severed the neighborhood from surrounding streets. East Liberty has staged a remarkable revival since 2000, attracting Google's Pittsburgh engineering office and waves of new restaurants and housing.
The Hill District, nearby, was the center of Black Pittsburgh for most of the twentieth century, home to jazz clubs, newspapers, and a vibrant community that playwright August Wilson memorialized in his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle. Wilson grew up in the Hill District and set his plays — Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson — in the houses and yards of that neighborhood. The Hill was devastated by construction of the Civic Arena in 1961, which displaced thousands of Black residents.