Garfield Apartments
Garfield is a neighborhood in the east end of the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Garfield lies about three miles as the crow flies from the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers at the City’s heart. It sits on a bluff above the Allegheny River. Garfield is bordered on the South by Bloomfield and Friendship (at Penn Avenue), on the West by the Allegheny Cemetery (at Mathilda Street), on the North by Stanton Heights (at Mossfield Street), and on the East by East Liberty (at Negley Avenue). Like many parts of Pittsburgh, Garfield is a fairly steep neighborhood, with north-south residential streets running at about a 20% incline from Penn Avenue at the bottom to Mossfield Street at the top.
Garfield, which had been a haven for working-class Irish-American homeowners, is now called home by African-American renters, and the steady industrial jobs that supported the older Irish-American residents are gone for good. Garfield’s current residents have established some of their own traditions, including the “Turkey Bowl,” a formal, full-contact football game on Thanksgiving Day played in full pads by teams called the Old Heads and the Young Bucks. But some of the neighborhood’s current traditions are negative ones: drug dealing, prostitution, and illegitimacy are not uncommon in today’s Garfield, and children attending the neighborhood’s Fort Pitt School often fall behind their peers on national tests.
To halt what they perceived as the neighborhood’s decline, in 1975 parishioners at St. Lawrence O’Toole founded the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, a Community Development Corporation that uses private and government funds and activism to encourage homeownership and business development. Over the years, the organization has built or renovated dozens of housing units, and renovated commercial properties for dozens of small businesses, from restaurants to art galleries to theater companies.
In the 1980s, a similar group called the Garfield Jubilee Association formed, with a goal of creating affordable housing. In recent years, the two groups have joined together in a joint project to build dozens of new single-family homes. In 2000, the BGC and Friendship Development Associates, Inc. formed the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative. The PAAI encourages artists to live and work along the Avenue by rehabbing properties, making small loans or grants for facade renovations, and organizing joint marketing events such as Unblurred, held the first Friday of each month, where the venues of Garfield and Friendship open for special events.
Efforts by groups like these, along with a recent recognition that massive, 1960s-style social welfare projects often had negative consequences, have helped to revitalize the neighborhood. Commercially, Penn Avenue is recovering from the flight of local businesses in the 1970s and 1980s. Some bastions of the old neighborhood remain, as groups like the BGC and GJA, and FDA have worked to keep some banks and stores along Penn Avenue. Since 1990, these have been joined by newcomers: African-American barbershops and salons, tiny family-owned Vietnamese restaurants, and a series of arts-related businesses (e.g., theatres, galleries, an architecture studio, a glass factory, a coffeeshop, and much more) attracted by the PAAI. There has also been some positive residential development: the East Mall and Garfield Heights Senior high-rise was razed in 2005, and the townhouse units are scheduled to be demolished in 2007 -2008, and replaced with mixed income units, as well as new replacement homes scattered through the neighborhood. Visitors to Garfield today will see a neighborhood on the rise, a formerly blighted community that is now becoming a vibrant community, with a focus on the arts, while not forgetting its roots.
