The Hill District: Jazz, Baseball, and Drama

Location: 1908 Wylie Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15219

The Hill District is the heart of Pittsburgh’s African-American working-class culture, buttressed to the east by Homewood and to the west by North Side.

The Hill’s Greenlee Field was home to the Pittsburgh Crawfords, with the local Homestead Grays one of the greatest teams in base- ball history.

The Hill was the center of a vibrant music and club scene that sprouted around the Crawford Grill. Top musicians made their way to the union hall of the black Musicians’ Union Local 471 after working gigs downtown just to hang out and jam with the local talent. The town overflowed with great musicians: Earl “Fatha” Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Billy Strayhorn, Errol Garner, Ahmed Jamal, Kenny Clark, Ray Brown, Billy Eckstein, George Benson and many others.

Operating Engineer Nate Smith and Playwright August Wilson

The mandated integration of the black and white union locals in the late 1960s, combined with the urban “renewal” of the Lower Hill, hurt the black musicians community and its rich culture.

Two great literary interpreters of Pittsburgh working class life are the Slovak Thomas Belland the world famous, twice Pulitzer Prize winning, African-American dramatist August Wilson. Wilson’s astonishing ten-play cycle presents each decade of the Twentieth Century life in Pittsburgh’s Hill. The strength, soul, pride, and humor of the African American experience are told nowhere better. August Wilson skipped high school to read every day in the Carnegie Library, and he listened intently to the language of his people in the bars, barbershops, churches, and on the street.