Written on 2014-04-22

So many of my early memories circle around my Grandmother Duncan’s apartment on “The Bluff.” I swear I can still draw an accurate layout, room by room, complete with cabinets, gas space heaters in the fireplaces and even the wallpaper on those high ceiling rooms. At the time that my grandparents lived there, it was a lower class neighborhood, not a bad neighborhood, but one where hard working people lived. You would find men who worked in the steel mills below the Bluff, along the Monongahela River or in the Pepsi bottling plant about a half block up from their place on Locust Street. Duquesne University was several blocks away, but I can’t remember ever walking there. It was also convenient for the people who worked in downtown Pittsburgh as clerks, secretaries and sales people. That is, if you consider convenient involving walking down long sloping streets or the concrete steps, literally hundreds per each one, which rose from Fifth Avenue all the way to the top arch of Locust Street. If you did take the steps, Mercy Hospital was several blocks to the left and my grandparent’s place to the right.

There was a store at the crest but I can’t remember ever going in. My sister, Bonnie Mitsch, said the owners of the store were named Rothman. I do remember the little grocery store, close by just over the crest, dark, all wooden shelves, boxes of cereal and other dry goods stacked so high on the upper shelves that the shop owner needed a special device with a long wooden stick and a claw on the end to grab the items. I can also remember the banging wooden screen door and the cats who wandered in and out. Funny the little details which come back to you.

Looking on the internet, it appears that the Bluff is now called “Uptown,” as opposed to Downtown. In some places, it is still referred to as the Bluff. I will always think of it as The Bluff. I saw that around the turn of the 20^th century, it was called Soho and before that, in the late 1890’s, it was called Boyd’s Hill. The internet had more details and history but if I go there, I will get so off track, I may have trouble finding my way back. But the history of this regions and elsewhere in Pittsburgh is so interesting. I may consider checking it out later. And like Boyd’s Hill and Soho, the building where my grandparents, aunts and uncle and maybe even my father, are gone, torn down sometime in the early 1960’s to make way for the expansion of Duquesne University. I have never been back to that area since my Grandmother and Aunt Alice moved out and into Swissvale.