Driving Squirrel Hill

By Helen Wilson, Vice President, Squirrel Hill Historical Society

IN SQUIRREL HILL, IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT GETTING AROUND MORE EASILY.

In 2017, Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation (PHLF) asked me to help plan a walking tour of Squirrel Hill. As I thought about it, I concluded that a two-hour walk wouldn’t allow people to see more than a slice of the business district and maybe a few residential streets. I felt it would be better to drive the neighborhood to experience the entire scope of its many distinctly different historical and geological places, so we put together a bus tour instead.

Squirrel Hill North and South together form a neighborhood larger and more populous than any other in Pittsburgh and bigger than many municipalities surrounding the city. Within its 3.89 sq. mile area are a mile-long business district, Frick and Schenley Parks, a golf course, Carnegie Mellon and Chatham Universities, Pittsburgh Allderdice High School, a number of other public and private schools, dense areas of large and small apartment buildings, the Murray Hill Avenue Historic District, synagogues, churches, several urban villages, and various kinds of residential areas ranging from imposing mansions on wide avenues to vintage houses on old rural roads. It has the oldest domestic log structure in Pittsburgh—the Neill Log House in Schenley Park—and the newest residences—in Summerset, the brand-new neighborhood of gracious homes built on an old slag dump in Nine Mile Run valley. Squirrel Hill also has a section of an interstate highway and what could be the seventh longest tunnel in Pennsylvania—the Penn-Lincoln Parkway and Squirrel Hill Tunnel. It has over 200 avenues, streets, roads, lanes, terraces, courts, places, ways, bridges, and boulevards. There are around 70 miles of roadways within Squirrel Hill and miles of hiking trails in the parks.

But wait—there’s more!

Squirrel Hill’s geology is the reason everything developed in the neighborhood the way it did. The neighborhood sits on a high hill almost completely surrounded by deep valleys—Nine Mile Run and Fern Hollow to the east, the Monongahela River valley to the south, the Saline Street ravine and Junction Hollow to the west, and Fifth Avenue to the north. It wasn’t until trolley bridges spanned those valleys, beginning in the late 1800s, that urban development began in earnest. Before that, the hill was almost inaccessible. From early on in Pittsburgh’s history, development swirled around the base of the hill along the wide, flat valleys created by melting ice sheets during the Ice Age, which later became Wilkinsburg, East Liberty, Shadyside, Hazelwood, Oakland, and Downtown Pittsburgh. Railroads ran through the valleys; industries and factories opened along their routes; bustling business districts grew.

The first Murray Avenue bridge (pictured in 1913) connecting northern Squirrel Hill and southern Squirrel Hill/Greenfield. Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, 1901-2002, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

Squirrel Hill didn’t. It remained a rural area of country estates and farms well into the 1800s because its steep slopes were too difficult to climb. Squirrel Hill was unsuitable for factories and mills because railroads couldn’t climb the slopes. Before trolleys, industrial workers had to live close enough to walk to their places of employment, so Squirrel Hill never developed the densely packed and often substandard housing found in industrial areas. When electric trolleys came to Squirrel Hill in 1893, not only did they climb the slopes, they traveled across bridges that soared over the deep valleys and rough terrain. A little-known part of Squirrel Hill’s development is how much the hill has been “manicured.” Steep slopes have been shaved down, ravines filled in, and streams culverted. The landscape looks natural, but much of Squirrel Hill has been groomed and its contours smoothed out.

“Street Car #1753 at Carnegie Mellon University.” Pittsburgh Railways Company Collection, Blaine S. Hays, February 5, 1966, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

The trolleys sparked the growth of Squirrel Hill’s business district. Forbes and Murray became a crossroads, taking people back and forth from Downtown, south to Homestead, east to Wilkinsburg and Braddock, and north to East Liberty. When the hill became accessible for residential development, the brand-new houses attracted wealthy owners of factories and businesses that catered to the workers in other parts of the city.

Automobiles joined trolleys in the early 1900s, quickening the pace of urban development in Squirrel Hill. Trolley right-of-ways gave way to paved roads that brought increasing numbers of residents to the neighborhood, making the business district thrive. A business district can’t exist without a population to support it. Many of the newcomers were Jewish, giving the business district its distinctly Jewish flavor. Through the years, the character of the business district has become more eclectic, with stores and restaurants of many nationalities now offering a global assortment of goods and services. In a little over a century, Squirrel Hill transformed from a sparsely inhabited rural area into a destination of its own.

Driving around Squirrel Hill is a great way to experience all of its history. You can access an expanded version of the PHLF driving tour on the Squirrel Hill Historical Society website, squirrelhillhistory.org. I teamed with SHHS member Lauren Winkler, a Geographic Information Systems Specialist extraordinaire, to morph the original tour into an online, interactive “Driving Tour of Squirrel Hill” that features a map of the route, descriptions of more than fifty places of interest to see, and suggestions for getting out of the car and walking to other nearby things to see. The route is designed to touch on all areas of Squirrel Hill, from its lowest to its highest points and from its beginnings to its future. The tour can be found by clicking on the “Driving Tour of Squirrel Hill” link in the main menu of the SHHS website.

You might have noticed in reading this article that I didn’t go into detail about the route and the sights to see. That’s for you to discover when you check out the driving tour for yourself. The route is around fourteen miles long. It can be dizzying as it maneuvers around Squirrel Hill’s curvy roads and altitude changes from riverbank to Beacon Heights, but it’s well worth driving to experience the whole of Squirrel Hill.