Pittsburgh
Founded in freedom. Built from nothing.
Founded in Freedom
Pittsburgh, Atlanta was not built by industrialists or land speculators. It was built by people who had been enslaved — freedpeople who, in the years after the Civil War, came to Atlanta seeking work and built a community from nothing in the industrial shadow of the railroad yards.
The neighborhood was established around 1876, roughly a decade after emancipation, and formally chartered in 1883. Its founders settled south of the Pegram railroad repair shops, one of the largest rail maintenance facilities in the region. The air was thick with smoke and soot from the yards — so thick that the neighborhood was compared, sometimes derisively, to the industrial Pennsylvania city of the same name. The name stuck. Pittsburgh, Atlanta was born wearing a joke about pollution as its identity, and it wore that name with dignity.
For the people who built it, the smoke was beside the point. What mattered was that they were free, that they owned their homes, that they were building something that belonged to them.
Carrie Steele Logan: A Legacy That Outlasted Everything
Among the founding generation of Pittsburgh’s residents, no figure stands taller than Carrie Steele Logan — and few figures in the history of Atlanta, of any neighborhood or era, did more with less.
Carrie Steele had been enslaved. After emancipation, she found work as a maid at Union Station for the Central of Georgia Railway. While working there, she witnessed something that would not leave her: the growing number of Black children — orphaned, abandoned, homeless — living on the streets of downtown Atlanta. She began quietly bringing those children home with her.
When her own cottage could hold no more, she did something extraordinary: she wrote her autobiography, sold copies door to door throughout Atlanta’s Black community, and used the proceeds — along with her own savings from decades of domestic labor — to purchase land in Pittsburgh. In 1888, at the corner of Roy and Windsor streets, Carrie Steele opened the Carrie Steele Orphan Home: the first orphanage for Black children in the state of Georgia.
She did this without government support, without foundation grants, without wealthy patrons. She did it with her own words and her own labor. The institution she founded — eventually renamed the Carrie Steele-Pitts Home — operated in Pittsburgh until 1963 and continues to serve Atlanta’s children today, more than 135 years after its founding. Carrie Steele Logan is buried in Atlanta. Her orphanage outlasted the Jim Crow era that surrounded it.
A Community That Built Itself
Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pittsburgh developed the full texture of a self-sufficient Black community. Black-owned businesses lined McDaniel Street, the neighborhood’s commercial spine. Churches anchored community life. Families put down roots and built equity in homes they owned.
The street names tell part of the story. Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard — the road that forms Pittsburgh’s northern boundary — is named for one of the most important figures of the American civil rights movement: King’s closest lieutenant and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Abernathy spent much of his adult life in Atlanta, leading marches, going to jail, and building the infrastructure of the movement. The street named for him runs directly through the neighborhoods he fought for.
Pittsburgh was not on the national stage the way some Atlanta neighborhoods were. It was doing the quieter, harder work: surviving, building institutions, raising children, maintaining community life under a system designed to make that impossible.
Decline and the Weight of Disinvestment
The mid-twentieth century brought the same forces to Pittsburgh that devastated so many Black Atlanta neighborhoods. Federal redlining policy — the explicit, government-sanctioned practice of denying mortgage loans and insurance to Black neighborhoods — had starved Pittsburgh of investment capital since the 1930s. Highway construction remade the city’s geography in ways that consistently prioritized white suburban commuters over Black urban communities.
By the late twentieth century, Pittsburgh had lost much of its population and many of its businesses. The physical fabric of the neighborhood had deteriorated. But the community had not disappeared. Long-term residents, neighborhood associations, and local organizers kept Pittsburgh’s identity alive through decades when the city seemed to have moved on.
Pittsburgh Yards and the BeltLine: A New Chapter
The story of Pittsburgh’s revival begins with a brownfield and a foundation that decided to do something different. In 2006, AECF Atlanta Realty — a subsidiary of the Annie E. Casey Foundation — acquired a 31-acre industrial site in the heart of Pittsburgh that had sat vacant since UPS abandoned it. Rather than develop it for outside investors, the foundation committed to community-driven, equitable development. Residents shaped the project through years of monthly engagement meetings and working groups.
The result is Pittsburgh Yards: a mixed-use development anchored in entrepreneurship, job creation, and community wealth-building. The Nia Building — a former trucking terminal, LEED Silver certified — opened to tenants in 2020, housing entrepreneurs in wellness, financial services, real estate, youth development, e-commerce, and the creative economy.
In August 2023, Atlanta BeltLine, Inc. acquired 13.7 acres adjacent to Pittsburgh Yards specifically to guide equitable development along the Southside Trail corridor. Pittsburgh is also home to one of Atlanta’s most vibrant mural traditions — walls stretching longer than two football fields, the result of Artoberfest and the Atlanta Crossroads Mural Festival, insisting on being seen in a neighborhood where history has so often been paved over.
Pittsburgh was founded by people who refused to be erased. That refusal is still visible here — in the murals, in the community market, in the memory of Carrie Steele Logan, in the BeltLine trail that will soon connect this neighborhood to the rest of the city it helped build.