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Monday, 16 August 2010 11:26

Written by Diana Nelson Jones

People often ask me to decipher the confusing and often hotly-contested boundaries that make Pittsburgh a particularly intricate jigsaw puzzle of neighborhoods. Yeah, we got ‘em: 90 neighborhoods, and neighborhoods within them.

Lately, I’ve been asked a lot about Uptown, as in, “What the heck is this Uptown? Isn’t that just part of the Hill?”

Welllll...... no.

The city’s planning department refers to the Bluff as the area that is being reinvented by stakeholders there as Uptown. I used to hie to the city’s official designations until I realized that I am writing for people who live in the neighborhoods, and what they call where they live is what matters.

Some people in the Hill scoff at Uptown as just a new brand, but the name makes complete sense, vis a vis Downtown. It’s the area that begins more or less where the Civic Arena and Consol Center sit and moves east along Forbes and Fifth, including Duquesne University and Mercy Hospital, and ends roughly at Kirkpatrick and the Birmingham Street bridge.

On the map, it looks like a sleeping bag. It has about 700 households, not counting students. (That's Uptown in the photo, looking west to Downtown.)

I’ve been looking with fascination at the 34-page report that architects at Rothschild Doyno Collaborative created from the Uptown Partners’ planning discussions over several years.

The community vision plan is posted online at http://www.uptownpartners.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Uptown-Vision-one-document.pdf.

The architects have synthesized all the place names into an Uptown that’s “four neighborhoods in 1”: Fifth and Forbes, Central Uptown, the Bluff and Soho. So glad to see Soho put back into circulation, although I wonder what it ever referred to. (For instance, Soho in New York means south of Houston (Street).)

Uptown has a unified plan and developers' eyes roaming all over it. That plan is supposed to show those eyes how to roam and not to leer. You want some action Uptown, buddy, you have to follow the style manual.

One day, maybe not too long from now, Fifth Avenue will no longer be a freeway between Oakland and Downtown. You might want to catch the trolley for a fun evening out along that corridor...

... OK, the bus. One fantasy at a time.

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