East Liberty Apartments
East Liberty Apartment Listings
East Liberty is a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Pittsburgh’s East End. It is bordered by Highland Park, Morningside, Stanton Heights, Garfield, Friendship, Shadyside and Larimer. East Liberty Presbyterian Church, one of the more impressive churches in Pittsburgh, is located there.
Despite the damage done by the urban renewal of the 1960s, East Liberty’s location still made it a good potential site for retail businesses. East Liberty remained close to some of the Pittsburgh area’s most prosperous residents, who had not left the City for the suburbs, but continued to live in Shadyside, Point Breeze, Highland Park and Friendship. To revitalize the neighborhood, community groups in East Liberty worked to lure these potential shoppers back.
In the 1990s, the City of Pittsburgh took a first step in this direction by returning some of the neighborhood’s roads to their pre-1960 traffic pattern. After 2000, the City also used tax increment financing to lure two national retailers to the neighborhood: Home Depot and Whole Foods. Both these stores thrived, and their success convinced other national retailers to invest in the neighborhood.
The success of Home Depot and Whole Foods sparked a great deal of investment in East Liberty. Local entrepreneurs opened successful restaurants, nightspots, and other businesses, many of them targeted at local artists, musicians, and young professionals from Shadyside. National stores did likewise. And after a complex and time-consuming set of transactions, two of the three housing projects that visually barricaded the neighborhood were demolished in 2005. The last will be demolished within the next few years.
The City of Pittsburgh still has plans to return the roads of Penn Circle from one-way throughfares to two-way streets, and otherwise to return the neighborhood to the way it was during its heyday. But the success of national and local retailers, and the destruction of the three housing projects, suggests that the neighborhood has recovered from its struggles in the period from 1965-1995, and will once again become a retail center in the greater Pittsburgh area.
