Speaking of federal highways built after WWII (potentially through communities), Interstate Route 80 runs through Stroudsburg and East Stroudsburg. President Johnson mentions the recent completion of this highway in his letter to Stroudsburg’s mayor celebrating the borough’s sesquicentennial:
The recent completion of the Interstate Highways through the Poconos has made Stroudsburg and the communities around it more accessible than ever before. The Federal Government is proud to have played an important role in this acheivement.
Letter from President Johnson dated May 31, 1965
I do not know if any communities were demolished to build this interstate highway. It is likely that the presence of this interstate is part of the reason why some New Yorkers chose to relocate here following 9/11. It is certain that some of the local bridges owe part or all of their existence to this interstate. Many of the local bridges also owe their existence to the several creeks in the area.
The Seventh Street Bridge spans both Route 80 and McMichael’s Creek. (According to signs on this bridge it’s name is Sherrifs Forrest B. Sebring and Todd A. Martin Bridge, but the Pocono Record’s article on the renaming of this bridge highlights the controversy and public backlash to this renaming which was led by a State Representative.) Further east, the freeway and the creek are farther apart and so two separate bridges carry Broad Street over both obstacles. Heading back west, another bridge carries Main Street over Pocono Creek.
Pocono Creek and its bridge (the J. Summerfield Staples Memorial Bridge) appear to mark the western boundary of the historic core of town. On the other side of the bridge, there is an uptick in the number and frequency of auto-oriented uses and building designs.
Seventh Street Bridge
Seventh Street BridgeView from Seventh Street Bridge 1View from Seventh Street Bridge 2
Broad Street Bridges
Broad Street Bridge 1View from Broad Street Bridge 1Broad Street Bridge 2View from Broad Street Bridge 2
After WWII, while the federal government was building highways — sometimes through communities — and subsidizing and incentivizing the construction and purchase of detached single-family dwellings — that is, if you were of the “right” race, ethnicity, and economic level, — there was a growing sense that cities, and perhaps even towns, weren’t safe places to live. As people and jobs, or jobs and people, or some people and jobs starting leaving cities in large numbers, the cities started looking for ways to reinvent themselves to reattract people and jobs in order to survive. Pittsburgh was a leader at that time, inventing and defining the process of Urban Renewal. Other cities like Bethlehem looked up to Pittsburgh and tried to adopt the strategies and techniques of Urban Renewal used in Pittsburgh. Often these cities, as illustrated by Bethlehem, lacked the resources and power to pull off Urban Renewal on the same scale as Pittsburgh.
Revisiting the once familiar environs of Stroudsburg (pop. 5,950) and East Stroudsburg (pop. 9,669), I realized that even these small towns adopted practices and principals of Urban Renewal. And similar to the pairing of Allentown (pop. 125,944) and Bethlehem (pop.75,624), the larger of the two municipalities implemented more Urban Renewal projects while the smaller implemented more historic preservation practices.
Below is a very biased sample of the the Urban Renewal practices I believe I identified in the Stroudsburgs:
Urban Renewal Practice #1 – The Ring Road
Both boroughs contain a partial or complete loop of one-way streets around portions of their downtowns. This traffic pattern now appears to me as strongly reminiscent of the circles Pittsburgh built around important commercial neighborhoods – which subsequently nearly died, possibly because they were already dying, but probably aided by being choked off by these ring roads. In Stroudsburg and East Stroudsburg, it didn’t appear that the ring road has the same sort of death grip on the commercial enterprises they encircled. Several of the business I remembered were still operating and I didn’t notice significant numbers of vacant properties – though the couple vacant businesses I noticed were in East Stroudsburg. However, they weren’t areas that were tempting to explore more closely because they were sites developed along the second Urban Renewal practice.
Urban Renewal Practice #2 – Auto-oriented Uses
Both boroughs contained drive-through businesses in the center of their ring roads. In addition, strip malls are off to the right as you enter each borough on the ring road. In Stroudsburg, the auto-oriented uses felt like they were tightly centered on the ring road; nearby and spilling into the ring road was a dense, walkable downtown. On the other hand, in East Stroudsburg, it felt like the auto-oriented uses were spilling beyond the immediate environs of the ring road and into what was presumably once a much more extensive dense, walkable downtown.
Urban Renewal Practice #3 – Demolition for Underutilized Parking Lots
Part of what made the experience in East Stroudsburg feel more auto-oriented was the larger number of visible paved lots, presumably for parking, but largely empty. While I was most likely day-dreaming about the plot of my latest story featuring either princesses or cowboys when I previously spent time in downtown East Stroudsburg, there was a feeling of familiarity in the near empty parking lots suggesting that I would have felt uncomfortable if they were actually parked to capacity in the same way I felt uncomfortable passing locations where trees I used to know had been cut down.
Stroudsburg’s Ring Road Encompasses Auto-Oriented usesWalkable Downtown Spills into Stroudsburg’s Ring RoadEast Stroudsburg’s Ring Road (left two roads) with Auto-oriented Uses Spilling beyond the Ring (mid-frame parking lot)
One of the key ingredients for the stability component of “home” is safety. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was a concern about the safety of living in cities and living in New York in particular. The Pennsylvania boroughs of Stroudsburg and East Stroudsburg were among the places considered safe by those leaving New York City. Knowing this going in and comparing it to the lessons learned from Bethlehem, I assumed that the religious buildings would reflect a sense of stability.
Of the two boroughs, Stroudsburg has a more centralized concentration of religious buildings that was easy for me to explore on foot within the limitations of my post-injury recovery phase. The results of this survey confirmed my hypothesis. Of the seven buildings I found, only one was converted to a secular use. Another one appeared to be having a renovation of it’s primary entrance but was still looked actively used as a church. (Facebook confirmed that it is still active with a video of the Polish language mass from a few days before the date I looked it up.) A third building was a storefront that is a First Church of Christ, Scientist.
Comparing Stroudsburg with other Pennsylvania towns where I’ve explored the status of religious buildings, it fits the pattern well. Stroudsburg’s peak population was in 1950, the same as Pittsburgh and Wilkinsburg. Below is an updated chart of the population loss for these cities and a broad impression of the state of their religious buildings.
City
Population Loss Since Peak (Peak Year)
Status of Religious Buildings
Bethlehem
1% (1960)
Primarily active sacred uses
Erie
26% (1960)
Primarily active sacred uses
Homestead
85% (1920)
Significant numbers closed or converted to secular uses
Pittsburgh
55% (1950)
Significant numbers closed or converted to secular uses
Stroudsburg
14% (1950)
Primarily active sacred uses
Wilkinsburg
49% (1950)
Significant numbers closed or converted to secular uses
Last month’s look back at the 40th Street Bridge wrapped up the Allegheny River watershed portion of our 10-year anniversary Then & Now series. This month, we start revisiting bridges in the Monongahela River watershed.
The Terminal Way Bridge – now called The Highline – is unique in the Pittsburgh bridges I’ve walked as it is not a through-way. It is an elevated passage that connects five buildings of a former large warehouse operation. The bridge was previously a car road and parking lot. Pure speculation based on the small factoids and selection of historic photos on the Highline website suggests that at one time, this road was were good were loaded onto local delivery vehicles. Now, it is closed to all vehicular traffic and is instead an outdoor amenity space, exclusively for pedestrians and bicyclists.
While I walked over the bridge multiple times before the renovation, I was never inspired to take a photo of the parking lot that it was. I did, however, take photos of it from below which are still able to show the change from car parking to planters. They also show the change from former warehouse to a place poised to become a hip place is town.
Terminal Way Bridge View 1 – September 2012Terminal Way Bridge View 1 – September 2022Terminal Way Bridge View 2 – September 2012Terminal Way Bridge View 2 – September 2022Terminal Way Bridge View 3 – September 2012Terminal Way Bridge View 3 – September 2022
At the November 2021 ribbon cutting for the Frankie Pace Park on the CAP, Governor Wolf said, “A great injustice was done in the ’50s and this is finally a way to address that injustice.” He was referring to Pittsburgh’s poster child Urban Renewal project that demolished thousands of homes and businesses that once formed the physical infrastructure of a community whose members were predominantly Black, poor, or both. The buildings of the Lower Hill neighborhood were demolished, and the people dispersed to make way for the Civic Arena, a cultural amenity for the wealthy and White featuring opera performances. This erasure of community was followed in the early 1960s by the construction of a moat between the Lower Hill and downtown for the I-579 freeway, also known as the Crosstown Boulevard. The CAP now covers that moat and provides an educational park (and a pedestrian connection between downtown and the Penguins arena).
In addition to the infrastructure restitching the physical gap between downtown and the Lower Hill, the public art installed throughout the park aims to at least partially stitch the cultural gap that is one of the legacies of Urban Renewal and other segregationist policies. An educational display tells the stories of Frankie Pace, a 20th century activist for the Hill District neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, and Martin Delany, an abolitionist, journalist, and doctor in 19th century Pittsburgh. Throughout the park, proverbs of African heritage are etched on the walls and on metal blocks as reflective as Chicago’s Cloud Gate.
Below is a slideshow of some of the public art in the park. At the end of the post, there are links to all the previous posts in the series.
When I first explored the interior of the Frankie Pace Park, I was surprised by the wayfinding approach. A series of signs are posted throughout the site describing different features of the park, such as the rain garden. The surprising part was the choice of a Black girl narrator who wants you to join her as you journey through the park. It felt like the intended audience is elementary school-aged children. Given the park’s location adjacent to the tallest office skyscrapers downtown, adjacent to the first new building to be built on the Lower Hill – another office building, and kitty-corner-ish to the Penguins hockey arena, children seem to be a very small percentage of the prospective users of the park.
The CAP is a project in Pittsburgh “fixing the mistakes” of Urban Renewal. The Crosstown Blvd was built in the 1960s creating a freeway in a canyon dividing the Lower Hill neighborhood from downtown. The Lower Hill neighborhood, formerly predominantly poor and black, had already been demolished by this point to make way for the Civic Arena and other cultural amenities that were never built.
The CAP is a park on a bridge built over the Crosstown Blvd and is intended to reconnect downtown and the Lower Hill, while the Lower Hill is being rebuilt by the Penguins hockey team. Construction began in June 2019 and was completed in November 2021.
Below is a slideshow of these wayfinding signs. At the end of the post, there are links to all the previous posts in the series.
This week, I took a lunch-time walk through the new Frankie Pace Park to see what the completed CAP project looks like and how it is used. There were two men sleeping on benches in the park and a handful of other people walking the paths singly or in pairs. Prior to 2020, I would have interpreted this as a failure of the park to attract users because any green space downtown between 12 and 1 was always full of people. However, in the continuing fallout of the pandemic, a handful of people walking or using the seats is typical even of the parks that you used to need to arrive before 11:59 if you wanted to find a seat to eat your lunch.
The CAP is a project in Pittsburgh “fixing the mistakes” of Urban Renewal. The Crosstown Blvd was built in the 1960s creating a freeway in a canyon dividing the Lower Hill neighborhood from downtown. The Lower Hill neighborhood, formerly predominantly poor and black, had already been demolished by this point to make way for the Civic Arena and other cultural amenities that were never built.
The CAP is a park on a bridge built over the Crosstown Blvd and is intended to reconnect downtown and the Lower Hill, while the Lower Hill is being rebuilt by the Penguins hockey team. Construction began in June 2019 and was completed in November 2021.
Below is a side-by-side comparison of the four corners of the CAP from November 2019 when I first started this photographic series and from my August 2022 walk. At the end of the post, there are links to all the previous posts in the series.
The Photos
CAP Northwest view – November 2019CAP Northwest view – August 2022CAP Southwest view – November 2019CAP Southwest view – August 2022CAP Southeast view – November 2019CAP Southeast view – August 2022CAP Northeast view – November 2019CAP Northeast view – August 2022
The next look back at the bridges I first walked 10 years ago moves “downstream” or toward downtown on the former riverbed now east busway and railroad route. From the East Liberty Pedestrian Bridge featured in February, the inbound buses and trains pass underneath three bridges in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood (the South Negley Avenue and South Aiken Avenue Bridges and the Graham Street Pedestrian Bridge) before reaching the approximately parallel Centre Avenue and Baum Boulevard Bridges. The bus station next to the Negley Avenue bridge is currently under reconstruction, otherwise the three bridges and their surroundings in Shadyside are relatively unchanged – except perhaps for some deterioration due to long deferred maintenance. On the other hand, the surroundings of the Centre Avenue and Baum Boulevard Bridges have seen a couple new developments since I first walked these bridges.
The first of these developments is the Luna Parking Garage for employees of the local, ever-expanding hospital giant UPMC. UPMC Shadyside is on Centre Avenue two blocks away from this new(ish) garage on Baum Boulevard. Work had already begun on the parking garage when I walked by in 2012. The permit in the first photo in the then & now sets below is to finish the demolition of the structure formerly on the site. In the paired photo, the landscaping appears in good condition several years after completion of the construction. The second set of photos shows the formerly sloped site change into a massive retaining wall with multi-level garage. On a side note: the “Luna” in the garage’s name is a reference to the Luna Park amusement park that had a short life in the early 1900s on a site across the tracks and two blocks up the hill.
Between the Baum Boulevard and Centre Avenue Bridges is a site that has had a much longer life. Originally a Ford plant and showroom, this building and site were redeveloped by the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) into a research and development space with laboratories, offices, an auditorium, and parking (Pittsburgh Business Times, May 5, 2022). Prior to the redevelopment, this site had caught my eye as I rode the bus by every day on my way to Pitt. The floating doorways and loading docks captured my imagination. My imagination now speculates that these openings were used to create connections with the new addition seen in the fourth photo pair. The pedestrian experience walking by the sloped parking lot in the early 2010s wasn’t pleasant. While the sidewalks felt larger now, the experience was still unpleasant as I felt like I was walking through a pedestrian unfriendly loading and service area while the cantilevered building towering over me felt oppressive. The final photo pair shows the sidewalk experience on both sides of the new addition.
Intersection of Luna Garage site and Baum Blvd Bridge (July 2012)Intersection of Luna Garage site and Baum Blvd Bridge (June 2022)Northwest view from Baum Blvd Bridge (July 2012)Northwest view from Baum Blvd Bridge (June 2022)Baum Blvd Bridge from Centre Ave Bridge (July 2012)Baum Blvd Bridge from Centre Ave Bridge (June 2022)Former Ford Plant from Centre Ave Bridge (July 2012)Former Ford Plant from Centre Ave Bridge (June 2022)Centre Ave Bridge from Baum Blvd Bridge (July 2012)Centre Ave Bridge from Baum Blvd Bridge (June 2022)Centre Ave side of new addition to former Ford Plant (June 2022)Morewood Ave side of new addition to former Ford Plant (June 2022)
urbantraipsing turns 10 in May. To mark a decade of urban-traipsing and bridge-walking, I will be revisiting twelve of the Pittsburgh bridges I walked early on to see the changes 10 years brought to them and their surroundings.
I started walking and photographing bridges to get different angles and views of the city. In 2012, the 16th Street Bridge provided views of two major, controversial development sites: the Produce Terminal and the former St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church.
During the summer of 2012, the Produce Terminal seemed on the cusp of being redeveloped, and partly demolished. However, significant opposition to the demolition plans killed that proposal. For years there was no visible progress. Eventually, after extensive negotiations, a new development proposal was approved and implemented (see the first photo pair below). Simultaneously, several new developments popped up nearby, replacing much of the sea of parking I complained about in my original post on the bridge (see the second and third photo pairs below).
The former St Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church was visible from the 16th Street Bridge in 2012. Six months later, it was demolished to make way for the widening of Route 28 despite parishioners efforts to save their church (see a 2013 Tribune Review article for more). I followed the story of their fight for their building closely at the time, which is what I believe prompted me to take a photo of the church from the bridge (see the fourth photo pair below).
View of inland side of Produce Terminal (Smallman St) June 2012View of inland side of Produce Terminal (Smallman St) January 2022View of the riverside of Produce Terminal – June 2012View of riverside of Produce Terminal – January 2022Southwest view from 16th Street Bridge – June 2012Southwest view from 16th Street Bridge – January 2022View of the former St Nicholas site – June 2012View of the former St Nicholas site – January 2022
This year’s Architectural Dessert Masterpiece was inspired by a trip to Vermont where I explored 14 covered bridges within an hour’s drive of Rutland. I was surprised by the amount of variety in these bridges. Most were only wide enough for one car lane, but one was definitely made for two-way traffic and a couple had sidewalks incorporated. The colors and shapes varied from bridge to bridge. Some appeared to be based on a truss-type structure while at least one looked like it had an arch infrastructure. Ages also ranged from the 1830s (Taftsville Bridge) to 1970s (Quechee Bridge). You can view all 14 bridges in the slideshow below.
Sadly, shortly after construction, my covered bridge experienced a collapse. While the incident is still under investigation, an anonymous authority stated that the collapse is believed to have been trigged by a motorist exceeding the posted 5 mph speed limit.
I’m surprised that this is my first total collapse over the eight Architectural Dessert Masterpieces that I’ve created. My first, the Parthenon, experienced a partial collapse that actually made it look even more like the original. The next closest to disaster was the Marina Tower that merged into the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
The collapse highlighted several tips for future constructions. First, I confirmed that pretzels really do make excellent piers as I originally demonstrated in my Pittsburgh suspension bridge. Second, I learned that wheatless gingerbread still has the same (or similar) strength as traditional gingerbread as the roadbed remained secure throughout the disaster. Third, I found that wheatless gingerbread is more pliable than traditional gingerbread, which resulted in more warping when transferring the pieces to the baking sheet and during baking. However, the other side of the pliability is that it is easier to trim after baking than traditional gingerbread. If I use this recipe again, I will plan to make adjustments to the dimensions of the pieces post baking. I believe that will resolve the structural issues by creating straight edges that can support each other.
urbantraipsing 