Pittsburgh: Bringing Down “The Great Wall of Manchester”

Posted October 18, 2024

The Biden/Harris Administration has given Pittsburgh a grant through the Reconnecting Communities Initiative (RCN) to create a formal plan to reconnect the majority-Black Manchester and Chateau neighborhoods, which were divided from one another in the 1960s by construction of Highway 65. Formerly a single, coherent neighborhood (known simply as Manchester), construction of the elevated highway razed the community’s commercial core along Beaver Ave (image above), transforming the corridor into a 15’ high/150’ wide wall, and dividing the area into two neighborhoods (image below). In addition to the businesses, churches, and schools that were destroyed by government bulldozers, roughly 2,700 residents were displaced for the highway, which became known as the “Great Wall of Manchester” (1).

While the grant is small ($1.4m), it is an important step. Especially exciting about Pittsburgh’s award: it will be directly administered by the Manchester Citizens Corporation (MCC), a not-for-profit community development organization which neighborhood residents founded in 1965 to oppose highway construction and ongoing “urban renewal” projects in the area. LaShawn Burton-Faulk, MCC’s Executive Director, says the organization “was formed as a result of Route 65, because our forefathers legit stood in front of bulldozers to keep them from demolishing what’s currently intact residential housing.” Burton-Faulk continues, “While some of the physical demolition did occur, the mental and emotional resilience was not trampled on” (2). 

Since the highway’s construction, the MCC has worked to protect/renovate existing affordable housing in the neighborhood, while overseeing the construction of new affordable units (3). Additionally, “for years, its small staff has worked to find ways to topple, or at least puncture, Manchester’s ‘Great Wall’,” writes the PGH City Paper (4). With the full support of City Hall and local officials, the funds the Biden/Harris Admin has provided the MCC will be a significant boost towards that goal. Shown here is one possible alternative, which would replace the elevated highway with a surface-level boulevard (5). 

Historically, planning/construction grants (like the RCN) from the Federal Department of Transportation (USDOT) have generally been awarded to state DOTs, rather than directly to the cities where the projects were actually being built (or, especially rare, to community orgs like the MCC). A positive thing about the RCN is that it is open to cities and orgs to apply, which genuinely shows thoughtful leadership from this Administration’s USDOT.

The reason this expanded eligibility is good is that state DOTs have a well-documented bias towards investing in and expanding highways at the expense of all other modes—and at the expense of local communities. Historically, many state DOTs actually had their start as “State Highway Departments,” and were responsible for many of the highways I discuss on this page (6) (7). On the other hand, cities & community organizations are more directly accountable to those who actually live there, and responsive to local needs, which can lead to more thoughtful design. 

The unfortunate reason I bring this up is that Trump’s “Project 2025” specifically calls for the elimination of the USDOT’s discretionary grant-making ability, which would end programs like the RCN (8). While the RCN itself is definitely not perfect—and the projects it proposes only address a fairly surface-level component of the community destruction caused by these highways—it is nonetheless a necessary step to address “Segregation by Design.” While I’m sure if you’ve made it this far you don’t need reminding to vote, for folks in Pennsylvania (and elsewhere) who may know somebody that’s on the fence about who they are voting for (or whether to vote at all), my hope is that projects like this one in Pittsburgh show that the current Admin has at least made some small steps towards justice, and that a Harris Admin would be well-positioned to continue. 

Back to Pittsburgh, the MCC hasn’t endorsed a specific option, so what you see in the “future” images are conceptual. “My preference is whatever the people want,” Burton-Faulk said. “I want connections. That’s the whole goal here” (9). 

Manchester is located across the Allegheny River from Downtown Pittsburgh. In the early 20th century, Manchester housed low-income workers, both Black and white, employed at the nearby waterfront or commuting via streetcar to Downtown. Accordingly, because of its diverse population, the neighborhood was redlined in the 1930s (10). After WW2, the government incentivized white flight from city center neighborhoods, like Manchester, through programs such as the GI Bill, which provided returning veterans with heavily subsidized mortgages in the suburbs—suburbs which, in Pittsburgh and across the country, were closed to people considered nonwhite due to the use of racially restrictive covenants (11) (12). White flight led to a spatial reordering in which the employment center of Downtown (the Golden Triangle) became surrounded by primarily-nonwhite “inner-city” neighborhoods, which in turn was surrounded by primarily-white suburbia. PGH’s highway program, like so many of the cities covered on this page, was designed to punch through the “inner-city” neighborhoods to better connect the suburbs to the jobs Downtown (13).

To repeat a quote I’ve used before, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in 2013: “White flight was not a mystical process for which we have no real explanation or understanding. White flight was the policy of our federal, state, and local government. That policy held that Americans should enjoy easy access to cities via the automobile and live in suburbs without black people, who by their very nature degraded property and humanity.”

Congresswoman Summer Lee, who played a key role in securing this grant for Manchester, called construction of the highway “a case study in urban planning gone wrong” (14). With hope, this project can become a case study in reconnection done right—and one that a Harris Administration can emulate.

ENDNOTES

  1. Wiggan, Jamie. “North Side Neighborhoods Are Still Scarred by ‘The Great Wall of Manchester’.” Pittsburgh City Paper, 2023. https://www.pghcitypaper.com/news/north-side-neighborhoods-are-still-scarred-by-the-the-great-wall-of-manchester-23918312 (accessed 10/17/24). (@pghcitypaper). (@jamie.wiggan).

  2. Wiggan, Jamie.

  3. “The Manchester Neighborhood Plan.” Manchester Citizens Corporation, 2023. https://www.manchestercitizens.org/ (accessed 10/17/24). 

  4. Wiggan, Jamie.

  5. “The Manchester Neighborhood Plan.”

  6. Schmitt, Angie. “Too Many State DOTs Are Little More Than Highway Departments.” Streetsblog USA, 2017. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/08/23/too-many-state-dots-are-little-more-than-highway-departments (accessed 10/17/24). (@schmangee). (@streetsblog).

  7. Wilson, Kea. “State DOTs Spend Even More Money on Highway Expansions Than We Thought.” Streetsblog USA, 2024. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2024/02/22/state-dots-spend-even-more-money-on-highway-expansions-than-we-thought (accessed 10/17/24). (@keareads). 

  8. Delahanty, Ray. "Project 2025: As Bad for Cities as You Think It is.” CityNerd, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmKtZ34IVYc (accessed 10/17/24). (@nerd4cities).

  9. Wiggan, Jamie.

  10. Nelson, R. K., Winling, L, et al. “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America.” Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond, 2023. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining (accessed 10/17/24). 

  11. Rotenstein, David. “Built for White People: The Hidden Racist History of Some Pittsburgh Neighborhoods.” Public Source, 2024. https://www.publicsource.org/pittsburgh-racially-restrictive-covenants-barring-black-buyers-suburbs-subdivisions-racism/ (accessed 10/17/24). 

  12. Susaneck, Adam. “Mr. Biden, Tear Down This Highway.” New York Times, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/08/opinion/urban-highways-segregation.html (accessed 10/17/24). 

  13. Blazina, Ed. “Grant designed to ‘right a wrong,’ reconnect Manchester with Chateau.” Pittsburgh Union Progress, 2023. https://www.unionprogress.com/2023/04/01/manchester-grant/ (accessed 10/18/24).

  14. Joseph, Kéya.  “Reconnection: A Step Towards Mobility Justice.” Bike PGH, 2024. https://bikepgh.org/2024/02/05/reconnect-manchester-chateau/ (accessed 10/17/24). (@bikepgh).