Know Your Price. Andre M. Perry
the heart of town. Single file, the team would patiently weave between shoppers and workers, who animated the physical assets shops and transportation hubs that Wilkinsburg possessed. As it did then, Wilkinsburg still has the infrastructure and location that should sustain investment in the borough. But as I was coming of age, the percentage of Black residents grew, which seems to alter the value of assets beyond what their intrinsic qualities would suggest.
Historically, Penn follows the same military throughway that was known as Forbes Road, or, during the colonial period, Great Road.1 In the late 1700s, Forbes became a “de facto civilian highway, providing settlers and traders from eastern Pennsylvania with a land route to … the fledgling community of Pittsburgh that took root in its shadow.”2 It would later be named the Greensburg and Pittsburgh Turnpike before it was called Penn Ave.
The road ran east to west through the 266-acre tract purchased in April 1769 by European settler Andrew Levi Levy Sr.; he named it Africa. Wilkinsburg was later sited within that tract.3 It’s unclear when the original name of Africa was dropped (or why Levi Levy called it that in the first place). In 1788, Levi Levy sold the tract to General William Thompson, who died a year later. Thompson’s heirs transferred the deed for the land to Colonel Dunning McNair, an officer in the Pennsylvania state militia who became a prominent Pittsburgh area legislator, businessman, and land speculator.4 McNair named some of that land McNairstown and laid out its street plan. McNair would later rename the tract Wilkinsburgh in honor of his friend General John Wilkins Jr. (the “h” was dropped in 1878). The name Wilkinsburg stuck, and the fledgling borough grew rapidly.
Because of Penn Avenue, Wilkinsburg has been favorable to commerce since its christening. The 1841 General Business Directory listed twenty-two businesses and people, but the village of “Wilkingsburgh” had fewer than 100 people.5 When the railroad began stopping in Wilkinsburg in 1852, more people and businesses came to the municipality. “In 1880, there were 3,000 residents; by 1910, there were 19,000,” according to the Wilkinsburg Historical Society.6 Although the city has realized many ups and downs since the turn of the last century, I grew up seeing the productivity of generations’ past.
Wilkinsburg High School sat only two blocks off Penn Avenue. In 1985, Wilkinsburg’s downtown offered something for everyone. Heavy street traffic kept our cross-country training runs confined to Penn’s busy sidewalks. George Westinghouse’s extremely profitable company, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing, was on the cutting edge of technology and was based in the adjacent borough of East Pittsburgh, and a good many of its 20,000 workers used Penn to get there. Westinghouse was good for Wilkinsburg business, bolstering the borough’s retail corridor on Penn Avenue.
Mom’s daughter, my auntie Mary, routinely took the family to the same establishments I passed on my training route. G. C. Murphy, the local five-and-dime, anchored the corridor. Mary would go there to collect the money that Cheryl, a manager at Murphy’s, owed for watching her sons David and Jamar. From there, Mary would take us to the Red, White, and Blue Store, a second-hand clothing store also located on Penn Avenue. Mary often stopped in Don’s Appliances as well as Steel City Vacuum on her way to Mellon Bank down the street to make a deposit.
Eateries like Smith’s Bakery and Angelo’s Pizza were always busy after school. My classmates bought candies from the Pittsburgh Asian Market, which was a full-scale supermarket catering to the Asian diaspora. I bought my first pair of name-brand tennis shoes from David’s Shoes, which was conveniently nuzzled up next to Sol’s clothing store, whose owners smoked cigars while they showed you their goods. They’d size you up on the spot and hem your smoke infused pants within minutes. Next to Sol’s sat the Montgomery Ward department store, the classic catalog store from back in the day. Touch of India sold Indian clothing and curios, but it also catered to the edge of Black culture, with its ten-karat hollow gold chains, New York fashions, baggies, and pipes for drugs. New comics came out on Tuesdays, and the family would head to Zern’s magazine shop; Marvel’s Kung-Fu was my favorite.
Once the team crossed the above-ground bus expressway, East Busway All Stops, better known as the EBA, we got a little more elbowroom. The two-lane bus-only highway in Wilkinsburg connecting Pittsburgh with the Black neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city. We passed Columbia Nursing Home and Forbes Hospital, which sat cattycorner from each other on Penn Avenue. Back then, I didn’t realize how much economic power our tiny borough wielded. Wilkinsburg was so busy I would sometimes not even realize when we crossed over into Pittsburgh proper, sitting cheek by jowl as the cities do, with only the lonely street of Point Breeze as border. Writer and Wilkinsburg native Damon Young wrote in a column about Wilkinsburg, “I’ve lived in Pittsburgh for practically my entire life, and I’m still not quite sure where Pittsburgh ends and Wilkinsburg begins. I suspect it occurs when Braddock Avenue is crossed, but again I’m not certain.”7 The buildings looked the same to me, too, as well as the people. Wilkinsburg was Pittsburgh without the “h.”
At the point when we started building up a healthy sweat, the smells of the Nabisco cookie factory, located in the Black-majority neighborhood of East Liberty, hit us in the face. The changing color of the street signs from green (Wilkinsburg) to blue (Pittsburgh) was supposed to let people know they were leaving one municipality and entering the other. A more substantive indication for me was the smell of cookies. Pittsburgh was so close you could smell it.
Sometimes we ran past my biological mother’s house. Karen lived about four miles away, in the Garfield neighborhood, another Black area along my Penn Avenue running route, closer to downtown Pittsburgh. To break up the monotony of a down-and-back run on Penn, we often headed west on Fifth Avenue into the Oakland neighborhood, home of the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Carlow College. If the timing was right, we’d see runners from one of the local college teams. Occasionally, we stopped to watch them doing intervals in the nearby parks of Schenely or Frick.
I didn’t realize during my cross-country days that Wilkinsburg was in transition, becoming majority Black. When I was born in 1970, Wilkinsburg was approximately 20 percent Black. By 1990, the Black population rose to 52 percent. From 1990 to 2010, its population fell to 15,930 from 21,080, and the population changed to more than two-thirds Black. Those who remained were more likely to be poor. The poverty rate among Wilkinsburg families rose to 20.9 percent in 2016 from 14.3 percent in 1990.
Those of us who lived in Wilkinsburg in the seventies and eighties were flush with pride from all the assets that were in front of us, and understandably so. We taunted kids from Pittsburgh by saying we lived in Wilkinsburg. The economic anchor of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company sat on the outskirts of Wilkinsburg, as did the ABC television affiliate WTAE Channel 4. We saw the bustling activity generated by those companies on the commercial corridor of Penn. I saw my friends’ parents come from Westinghouse to shop in Murphy’s and donate clothes to the Red, White, and Blue store. My peers got their first jobs in those businesses. As a skinny ninth-grade runner from Wilkinsburg, I had prestigious postsecondary institutions, retail outlets, banks, libraries, parks, and Black people in my sights. I saw the flow of commerce and the resulting prosperity pass into Black communities and Black families. The world was at my feet.
When I returned to Wilkinsburg for an all-class reunion in 2017, I retraced my old Penn Avenue running route. Whereas the foot traffic of Wilkinsburg’s sidewalks had constricted my runs in the past, the distractions of what used to be slowed my steps this time. My alma mater, Wilkinsburg High School, no longer exists. In 2016, the Wilkinsburg School District dissolved its middle and high schools, conceding its educational responsibility to Westinghouse High School of Pittsburgh Public Schools.8 The high school building designed for big kids now houses elementary school students. Twenty-five students comprised Wilkinsburg High’s last graduating class. Wilkinsburg graduated about the same number of male graduates that year as ran on the cross-country team in 1985.
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