A Black Geography of Pittsburgh's Civic Arena

Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring graduate fellow, Kale Doyen.

As a Black press photojournalist and lifelong Pittsburgher, Charles “Teenie” Harris photographed dramatic changes to his city during its mid-century urban renewal. Harris’s archive catalogs the demolition of Pittsburgh’s predominantly Black Hill District neighborhood, and the subsequent construction of an expressway interchange, luxury apartments, and the steel-domed Civic Arena. Through the conceptual framework of Black geography, this chapter analyzes the Civic Arena through its shared geography with historic ecological and cultural events—including industrial coal mining, the razing of a Native American burial mound for downtown urban development, and the site’s shifting land use as documented by Harris and his surviving communities. By reading this architectural biography alongside its racialized spatial history, the now-razed Arena and its contentious legacy can be understood within a historical pattern of racial capitalist extraction at the foot of Pittsburgh’s Hill.

Respondents include Diana Nguyen from English + Dr. Alaina Roberts, Associate Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh. This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two prior to the event.