[East Edge]

Thanks for the back up but I am sure this statement wont have popular opinion...Looking back at that old picture I'm glad that Pittsburgh leaders at the time had the vision to expand our downtown and have an innovative performance venue to compete on the world stage. I wasnt around then but it looks pretty run down to me...Where else was downtown supposed to expand? Makes sense to just keep the triangle going backwards. I'm tired of hearing the rhetoric that it was just to eliminate certain demographic groups from the city. That may have been what happened but I highly doubt that was the whole reason behind expanding the city center. They just happened to be the population living in the most obvious and strategic area to expand our growing city at the time. Further more the population that was displaced then are probably not even still around or even care what happens there at this point. To me the street grid has been restored to create a stronger link to downtown and a commemorative park for just one of the demographic groups that were living in the Hill at the time is being implemented as we speak. The only park in the city commemorating one particular demographic group i will add! When is enough enough? What happened in the past is in the past. Lets move forward and thrive. There are endless opportunities to create quality low income housing all over the city in neighborhoods that all but disintegrated. Lets attract the top developers that specialize in innovative low income housing solutions to be the center piece of those neighborhoods' revitalization and let this Penguins site explode to become a worthy addition to our treasured skyline! What happened on this site over 60 years ago is no different that what happened in major cities all over the world that started out as small towns. Please lets move on.

Originally Posted by BrianTH

Personally I agree with East Edge, but that battle was lost long ago. It was hard enough just getting an allowance for ANY decent-sized buildings, and the compromise was this view corridor stuff with the higher buildings along the perimeter and lower down.

And while, again, I personally agree the Hill incumbents would likely be better off with a generally denser Lower Hill development, that's not how too many of them saw (and see) it. In their way of thinking, the prize is "re-connecting" the Hill to the Golden Triangle, and they see dense development of the Lower Hill as walling them off instead. I think that reflects a lack of imagination as to what would happen with a densely-developed Lower Hill, but it is always harder to sell people on something speculative (the benefits of proximity to a Lower Hill that doesn't yet exist) versus something more concrete (the benefits of connection to a Golden Triangle that already does exist).

And then there is the history--the story told over and over is how the Lower Hill was plowed down, and Crosstown was added, and it cut the Hill off from Downtown. Once again, there are different ways of telling a new ending to that story. But I think simply undoing that history has a certain natural appeal to many. Which, again, to them means developing the Lower Hill more along the lines of what it used to be, versus as something entirely new.

ETA:

So this is the sort of historic image I think many people who are very conscious of the history of the Lower Hill have in mind:



Compare that with this vintage 2012 rendering, and you can see where they are coming from at least:



OK, so now the 2019 plan looks something like this:



And yeah, I would go denser still. But that's a long way from the historic Lower Hill, and a long way from what a lot of people were thinking would happen circa 2012.