Squirrel Hill: A Neighborhood History

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INTRODUCTION

Helen Wilson, Vice-President, Squirrel Hill Historical Society

Squirrel Hill is the largest and most populous of the ninety neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It has over 26,400 people in an area of 3.89 square miles—the size of a small city in itself. Its settlement began in the 1700s, but events occurring long before that had a major effect on its development. In this book, the Squirrel Hill Historical Society will trace the flow of Squirrel Hill’s history from distant past to vibrant present.

The timeline of Squirrel Hill’s development is fairly straightforward and can be divided into ten broad eras:

1. Prehistory: Geologic forces shape Squirrel Hill eons before humans arrive.

2. Before the mid-1700s: Native Americans use Squirrel Hill as a hunting ground.

3. Mid-1700s: A few French and British trappers and traders roam the area, claimed by both the French and British. The French and Indian War ends in 1763. European settlers, mostly from Great Britain, arrive and claim land for farms.

4. Late 1700s: The American Revolution ends in 1783. Farming and coal mining are the major occupations in Squirrel Hill.

5. Early to mid-1800s: Some farms are bought by wealthy Pittsburghers for large country estates. Squirrel Hill is not yet part of Pittsburgh.

6. Mid- to late 1800s: Squirrel Hill is annexed by Pittsburgh in 1868. Large country estates and farms are divided into smaller but still substantial estates as wealthy industrialists and entrepreneurs move to Squirrel Hill to escape the pollution of the industrializing city.

7. Late 1800s: First major spurt of urban residential development occurs along new electric trolley routes. Farms and estates in northern Squirrel Hill are subdivided into large residential lots for the emerging upper middle class. The first wave of Jews—assimilated Jews from Allegheny City (now the North Side)—moves into northern Squirrel Hill.

8. Early 1900s: Subdivision of land into smaller residential lots takes place in central and southern Squirrel Hill, spurred by the development of automobiles. Nearly half of the people moving in are Eastern European Jewish immigrants from the Hill District and Oakland, giving Squirrel Hill its Jewish character. The retail corridor of Forbes and Murray Avenues begins to develop. Jewish institutions from other parts of the city begin to relocate to Squirrel Hill.

9. Mid- to late 1900s: By the 1930s, Squirrel Hill is filled with housing. Successive waves of Jewish immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe, come to Squirrel Hill during and after World Wars I and II and from Russia in the 1970s and 1980s. The retail corridor, consisting mainly of Jewish-owned establishments, grows and prospers.

10. Early 2000s: Squirrel Hill’s diversity increases; many new arrivals come from Asia. Types and ownership of businesses in the retail corridor change to reflect the new demographics.

Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods, showing the location of Squirrel Hill. Map by Lauren Winkler.

This timeline is a broad outline of Squirrel Hill’s development. The chapters in this book will illustrate different phases of that development. The first few chapters set the stage, describing what the neighborhood is like today and what factors caused it to develop the way it did. The following chapters are stories about the men and women—the Girtys, Browns, Mellons, Fricks, Schenleys, Watkinses and others—who were instrumental in shaping Squirrel Hill’s development through its more than 250 years of existence.

No community exists in a vacuum, and Squirrel Hill’s development was, and still is, dependent on factors outside its borders. So this book will also look at how Squirrel Hill fits into the rest of Pittsburgh’s development. The bold and innovative people who called Squirrel Hill home had wide-ranging interests that affected not only Pittsburgh but, in many cases, the whole country. They saw opportunities and took advantage of them to succeed in a variety of endeavors.

We hope you find the results of our research informative and interesting.

1

SQUIRREL HILLS TODAY

Helen Wilson

Take a drive around Squirrel Hill. Look at the people, the businesses, the buildings, the topography. Like all of Pittsburgh’s ninety-plus neighborhoods, it has its own distinctive character. If you ask people what comes to mind when Squirrel Hill is mentioned, you’ll hear: It’s Pittsburgh’s Jewish neighborhood. It’s upscale, with substantial houses and stately mansions. It has a lively business district with lots of restaurants. It’s a great place to live.

Squirrel Hill is all that and more. In this chapter, we’ll look at the qualities that make it unique among the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh.

Squirrel Hill has 26,400 people living on 3.89 square miles of land. Within its borders are a number of schools, parks, religious institutions and business establishments. It has three public schools: Pittsburgh Colfax K–8, Pittsburgh Minadeo PreK–5 and the city’s premier public high school, Pittsburgh Allderdice. Private educational facilities include the Jewish schools Hillel Academy, Community Day School and Yeshiva Schools; nondenominational St. Edmund’s Academy; the Day School at the Children’s Institute, serving children with disabilities; and numerous preschools. Official City of Pittsburgh maps put Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University and Central Catholic High School within Squirrel Hill’s borders.

As for religious institutions, because of Squirrel Hill’s Jewish heritage, Jewish places of worship outnumber Christian churches. Among them (generally in order of founding) are Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha, Shaare Torah, Poale Zedeck, New Light, Kether Torah, Beth Shalom, Young Peoples Synagogue, Temple Sinai, Dor Hadash, Young Israel of Pittsburgh and Chabad Lubavitch of Pittsburgh. Church congregations within Squirrel Hill’s borders include the Sixth Presbyterian Church, Church of the Redeemer (Episcopalian), Browns Hill Bible Chapel, Greater Pittsburgh Church of Christ and the Upper Room Church Community.

Squirrel Hill’s business district today. Photo by Helen Wilson.

In addition, just across the street from Squirrel Hill are the Mary S. Brown Memorial–Ames United Methodist Church, Third Presbyterian Church, Rodef Shalom, Holy Spirit Byzantine Catholic Church, St. Bede Roman Catholic Church and Bet Tikvah Congregation.

Squirrel Hill has two cemeteries with very different histories. One is the large Smithfield East End Cemetery, uprooted twice before it came to rest in Squirrel Hill across Dallas Avenue from the Homewood Cemetery in Point Breeze and now administered by it. The other is tiny half-acre Turner Cemetery, the second-oldest graveyard in Pittsburgh and the place where Squirrel Hill’s earliest settlers are buried. It straddles the border between Squirrel Hill and Greenfield at 3424 Beechwood Boulevard near Browns Hill Road. Just on the other side of the border in Hazelwood is Calvary Catholic Cemetery.

Pittsburgh’s two largest city parks, Frick and Schenley, are both in Squirrel Hill and bookend it on the east and west. The stories of their creation will be told in chapter 11 of this book.

A major interstate highway, the Parkway East (I-376), literally runs through Squirrel Hill by way of the 4,225-foot Squirrel Hill Tunnel. Near the tunnel’s eastern portal, a huge reclaimed slag dump has become the new residential community of Summerset at Frick Park.

Because of the way Squirrel Hill developed, most of it is residential, except for the bustling business district along Forbes and Murray Avenues, where almost all the restaurants, banks, stores and other commercial enterprises are located.

SQUIRREL HILL’S BORDERS

When talking about Squirrel Hill, a frequent question arises: Just where are its borders? Public perceptions and opinions vary, but the City of Pittsburgh has drawn up definitive maps of its neighborhoods. This book uses the official city maps of Squirrel Hill North and South published in 2003 as its basis.

If you try to drive around Squirrel Hill’s outside border, you’d soon find it to be impossible. Reflecting Squirrel Hill’s varied topography, parts of the border are roads, while other parts consist of creeks, walking trails or no trails at all. Some parts end at bridges, with the border continuing in the valley beneath.

To follow the border around Squirrel Hill, let’s begin at an arbitrary starting point at the intersection of Forbes and South Dallas Avenues, and follow Forbes east to the Fern Hollow Bridge near South Braddock Avenue. Under the bridge, the border continues south along Fern Hollow Creek to where it flows into Nine Mile Run and then follows the run all the way to the Monongahela River. The border then goes a short way southwest along the riverbank to under the Homestead Grays Bridge. From there, it zigzags north up the bluff to Desdemona Avenue to a bit west of Imogene Street and then follows Imogene to Browns Hill Road. At the top of the hill, the border makes a right turn onto the tail end of Hazelwood Avenue and then makes a quick left onto Saline Street. It goes north along Saline to Monitor Street, where a left turn takes it back to Beechwood Boulevard, but only until it reaches the Forward Avenue Parkway East underpass. The border then follows the southern edge of Schenley Park west to Junction Hollow, a deep valley separating Squirrel Hill from Oakland. It goes north up Junction Hollow Trail, which becomes Boundary Street, which becomes South Neville Street, until it meets Fifth Avenue. It turns right onto Fifth and follows it east to Shady Avenue, then turns right onto Shady and runs southeast in a skewed W-shape from Shady to Wilkins to South Dallas to its intersection with Forbes Avenue.

Borders of Squirrel Hill. Map by Lauren Winkler.

A NOTE ABOUT ZIP CODES

ZIP code 15217 does not totally correspond with the borders of Squirrel Hill. While most of Squirrel Hill is in 15217, so are parts of other neighborhoods, including half of Greenfield, part of Hazelwood, including Calvary Cemetery, all of Duck Hollow (officially part of Swisshelm Park) and the Homewood Cemetery in Point Breeze. On the other hand, places with other ZIP codes are within Squirrel Hill’s boundaries, such as most of Frick Park (15218), Carnegie Mellon University (15213) and Chatham University and the area around it (15232).

SQUIRREL HILL NORTH,

SQUIRREL HILL SOUTH

Squirrel Hill has an inner division as well as an outer boundary. The city divides it into two parts—Squirrel Hill North and Squirrel Hill South. The dividing line between them, starting from the west, is Frew Street to Schenley Drive to Forbes Avenue to South Dallas Avenue.

Despite the city’s division of Squirrel Hill, it is universally considered to be a single neighborhood. Some differences exist between the two sections—Squirrel Hill North’s population is statistically a bit wealthier and better educated than Squirrel Hill South’s—but both sections rank near the top of the list among Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods in those categories. The houses in the north are generally larger and have bigger lots, but both sections are mostly residential and contain a mix of substantial houses, smaller ones, townhouses and apartment buildings. The mile-long business district is shared by both sections. One thing that differentiates the two sections is that most of Squirrel Hill North is in City Council District 8, while all of Squirrel Hill South and a small part of Squirrel Hill North are in City Council District 5.

SQUIRREL HILL’S STREETS

Since this chapter is about the physical layout of Squirrel Hill, it is a good time to take a look at Squirrel Hill’s main roads, because they will be mentioned throughout the book. Of Squirrel Hill’s more than two hundred streets, the best known are Forbes and Murray Avenues, which intersect in Squirrel Hill’s main business district to form its bustling hub—the place most people think of when they think of Squirrel Hill.

Neither avenue was an important road until the late 1800s and early 1900s, when trolley and automobile traffic brought residential and commercial development to the northern part of Squirrel Hill and improved its connections to other neighborhoods. Squirrel Hill’s urbanization truly began when Murray Avenue was constructed in 1895 as a trolley route south to Greenfield and later Homestead and when the first Fern Hollow Bridge was built in 1901 to carry Forbes over Fern Hollow to the east.

Forbes and Murray were named for men who lived in the early days of Pittsburgh. John Forbes (1707–1759) was a British general best known for capturing Fort Duquesne during the French and Indian War and for giving the city of Pittsburgh its name. Although Forbes Avenue runs through the heart of Squirrel Hill, General Forbes never marched there. The route he took to the Point is now Penn Avenue. Murray Avenue is named for Magnus M. Murray (1787–1838), the fourth mayor of Pittsburgh, who supported public improvements and humane causes. He probably didn’t come to Squirrel Hill, either, but his son bought an estate to the north of the business district and named it Murray Hill, which might have been the impetus for Murray Avenue being named after his father.

Naming new streets after historical figures reflected the desire to honor these figures right at the time when trolleys created the necessity of cutting new roads in rapidly developing areas. In 1893, Julia Miller Harding wrote in Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt, Early Names of Pittsburgh Streets, In days when a less utilitarian spirit prevailed, and association was still powerful, the City of Pittsburgh acknowledged its debt of gratitude to the soldiers, statesmen and early settlers who made its unexampled prosperity possible, by naming for them many of its streets and suburbs.

Another Squirrel Hill road named after an early historical figure is Forward Avenue, named for Walter Forward (1786–1852), whose estate was located there. Among the positions Forward held were U.S. congressman, secretary of the treasury and presiding judge of the District Court of Allegheny County.

Forward Avenue intersects with Murray Avenue almost at the opposite end of Squirrel Hill’s business district from Forbes. The three roads form the basically U-shaped, mile-long business district of Squirrel Hill, where most of the retail establishments, banks, medical buildings and restaurants are located.

Forward Avenue is an old road, based on a route that travelers from eastern Pennsylvania took through Squirrel Hill to get to downtown Pittsburgh. Another old road, Shady Avenue, first called Shady Lane, intersects with both Forward and Forbes Avenues on its way north to connect Squirrel Hill with Point Breeze and Shadyside. It originally ran all the way to East Liberty.

Two other significant roads of Squirrel Hill—one of the oldest, Saline Street, and one of the newest, Beechwood Boulevard—will be discussed in later chapters of this book. Neither of these roads is part of the main business district.

As Julia Miller Harding pointed out in 1893, by studying the names of the streets in an area, the early history can be traced.

2

THE PRESENT WAS CREATED

BY THE PAST: THE GEOLOGY OF

SQUIRREL HILL

Helen Wilson

In conjunction with Albert Kollar, geologist,

Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Squirrel Hill, as you can tell from its name, is a hill, and the fact that it is a hill is the major reason why the neighborhood developed the way it did. This chapter examines the powerful geologic forces that formed Squirrel Hill.

If you look at any vista in Pittsburgh, you’ll notice that the horizon line is almost always level, no matter how hilly the terrain. The remarkably even horizon line indicates that Pittsburgh is located on the Allegheny Plateau, which is part of the Appalachian Plateau. Ages ago, the region was a flat plain. The high areas we call hills were formed