Writing

James Brown. Michael Jackson. Stevie Wonder. Back then, when Sala Udin wanted to see the big names play Pittsburgh after they released a new record or eight-track or cassette, he knew they’d play the Civic Arena. The dividing line between Downtown and the historically African-American Hill District, the bubble-shaped arena boasted a retractable roof that enhanced 17,000 concertgoers’ experience with a night-sky canopy. But for Udin, the concerts were always bittersweet.

You went to the arena, but with mixed feelings. You had to push those memories of your crushed childhood to the back of your mind. You try to enjoy the show, but then, as you’re leaving, you look back over your shoulder at this flattened space, at this cement parking lot, and you remember the good times, but you also feel that pain.

That “flattened space,” that parking lot, had once been Udin’s home.

Brown, Jackson, and Wonder played on the same hallowed ground where Eckstein, Gillespie, and Horne had bopped and crooned decades earlier, back when the Hill served as a second rendition of the Harlem Renaissance. But those artists played Hill hot spots such as the New Granada Theater, Crawford Grill, and Savoy Ballroom long before the Civic Arena opened in 1961. During the first half of the 1900s, the Hill had welcomed newly arrived steelworkers—European immigrants and then African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. A dense grid of streets and alleys housed tightknit families and what became a center of black cultural life.

But then came “urban renewal” in the 1950s: the government’s plan to “revitalize” a community by razing portions of it. The Civic Arena and its parking lot displaced 8,000 residents and more than 400 businesses from the Lower Hill, disfiguring a lively community while reinforcing barriers between neighborhoods and races.