Obama Headquarters in Pittsburgh

I visited the Obama campaign’s Pittsburgh headquarters this afternoon to get a sense of their activity level in the city. I walked in and immediately was directed to the campaign’s Press Guy. I had two big cameras strapped around my neck, and I guess that tipped them off. So, I asked this fellow Gen-Xer, “Is this in the East End or East Liberty?”

The Obama campaign is located in a rapidly changing part of the city alternatively called East Liberty or East End. East Liberty or “Sliberty” as it is often referred to locally, had been an economically depressed and declining part of eastern Pittsburgh for decades. Growing up in Pittsburgh, I’d always associated it with towering public housing projects, boarded up store fronts, vacant lots, and flagrant drug dealing. I also knew it as the place where I’d go on Saturday mornings during Winter to play basketball in the (now closed) Reizenstein school gym. There I saw (and got schooled by) the human side of Sliberty and ultimately came to appreciate it as a gritty place filled with families like mine and superb shot blockers.

Enterprising developers saw opportunity in Sliberty, situated as it is next to the most exclusive and wealthy neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, and began developing out from neighboring Shadyside into Sliberty. It began with Whole Foods and Starbucks. Now there’s Trader Joe’s, boutique wine and high-end bicycle shops, and commercial construction all along Penn Avenue in the heart of Sliberty’s commercial district. Condos, high-end retail and a luxury hotel are going up where an old Nabisco factory once stood vacant, and Aspen Dental has just renovated an abandoned YMCA building. Old houses are being torn down and rents are rising.

The Sliberty community has decidedly mixed feelings about all of this development. Recently, an engaging documentary, East of Liberty by Chris Ivey, was produced on the history of and often difficult relationship between the community of people in Sliberty and development. It opened last year in the newly renovated Kelly-Strayhorn theater on Penn Avenue in Sliberty.

One of the local manifestations of the controversy over gentrification concerns rebranding efforts that rename East Liberty as East End. East Liberty lost Sears, but the East End attracted Trader Joe’s. At the end of the day, it’s the same space in the city. The name chosen does, however, suggest something about the namer. Chances are good that if you’re speaking to someone who’s in the East End, that person probably either originally hails from out of town, as would say a university student, or at least conceives of Sliberty in terms of its new development. Likewise, if you’re speaking with someone who’s in East Liberty, that person probably is a long-time African-American resident or at least not part of the condo crowd. So, when I asked one of the staff members at Obama headquarters where the building was located, I was asking a loaded question.

The Press Guy was obviously from out of town and had been in the Burgh only long enough to reply that it was in Pittsburgh. The room was staffed mostly by young volunteers, probably from the nearby universities, though there were a number of middle-aged African-American ladies as well. I would have loved to have asked that question to everyone in the room to get a sense for the local dynamics within Obama’s core constituencies, but I was told by the Press Guy that everyone in the room was on background. That, and the fact that they were all feverishly phone banking, prevented my asking.