When I look out my window, all I see is the empty lot where my childhood home once stood. The City of Pittsburgh condemned the property and tore it down in 2015, soon after my father — who had a hoarding disorder — passed away.
I’ve lived on Moultrie Street in West Oakland since 1964, when my Hungarian immigrant parents bought a house across the street from the one I live in today. Over the course of my lifetime, I watched white flight change the neighborhood from mostly white households, to a racial mix, to a predominantly Black community.
As neighbors came and went, one thing stayed the same: a neglected hillside at the end of the block, dotted with litter and thick with unsightly weeds. I couldn’t stand looking at it and occasionally tried to tame the poison ivy, stinging nettles and other perennial pests myself. Sometimes I’d pick up the trash, too.
With help from my neighbor, Linda Lewis, and the community redevelopment nonprofit Uptown Partners of Pittsburgh, I eventually transformed that blighted slope into a whimsical pocket park unofficially named Central Park. We filled it with art, books and play areas for kids — all shaded by the diverse tree canopy I planted.
The project was my way of giving back to a neighborhood I felt I’d made worse while in the throes of addiction. For years, I bought illicit drugs on our street while suffering from stimulant use disorder and alcohol use disorder. I’d been abstinent for more than a decade when I was inspired to build the park — with my own two hands — to offer something good to my community.
The park is an homage to New York’s Central Park, which I fell in love with during annual work trips there in the 1980s and 1990s. As much as I enjoyed that city’s street life, I could see how those who created that vibrant culture were being pushed out by the forces of urban renewal and gentrification at the time.
I hear echoes of that displacement today on Moultrie Street, which sits at the confluence of Uptown and West Oakland, in the shadow of the Hill District. Longtime, low-income residents like me have deeply felt the historic disinvestment in those neighborhoods. Now, we’re watching houses on our street — worth a few thousand dollars not so long ago — sell for between $150,000 and $275,000. Linda and I don’t own the land we built the park on, and fear it could be taken away from us by the city or a developer — a possibility that became clear when a developer proposed building a parking garage near our street a few years ago.
These are the hallmarks of gentrification, which I’ve expressed my opposition to through the artwork I created for the park. As the neighborhood transforms, I hope I’ll be able to afford to stay here and keep contributing to this wonderful green space for the community.
A working-class, immigrant-kid upbringing
I’m the child of working-class immigrants who eked out a living in mid-century Pittsburgh.
My father, active in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, became a political refugee when he fled from Soviet Union forces and resettled here. Trained as a lawyer, he drove a cab because his education wasn’t recognized by American employers. He met and married my mother, another Hungarian who worked in an Uptown laundromat.
They bought a house on Moultrie Street when I was a toddler and raised my sister and me in West Oakland. We were the only immigrant family on the block and I was constantly bullied by the other kids for being different. Then my mother died of rheumatic heart disease when I was a teenager. Those traumas might be why I turned to alcohol and drugs in high school.
Despite my substance use disorders, I was functional enough to work a dental technician job as a young adult. My employer at the time sent me to dental conferences in New York, and I spent my spare time enjoying the natural beauty of Central Park. I was drawn to the park’s democratic mission: It was built for everyone to enjoy in the mid-1800s — a time when immigrants weren’t always welcome to use the city’s facilities.
I kept that job for many years, but my diseases eventually caused me to lose it. I dipped into my retirement savings to keep buying crack cocaine and was running out of money. I hit a low point the day my father burst into the house on our block where I was buying a stash. He dragged me out of there and took me to the hospital.
A pocket park for the people
I entered treatment for my addictions soon after my father’s intervention and have been abstinent for almost 25 years. I attended meetings as part of a 12-step program for more than a decade, then found another way to stay out of trouble: Working with my hands to maintain the house I’d bought in 1984 on Moultrie Street for $5,000 — just across the street from where my father lived until he died.
While cleaning up the hillside near my home, I wondered what could be done to make it look better. My joyful memories of Central Park came to mind, and I decided to give everyone in our neighborhood a safe and inclusive space to play, explore, read and experience nature: I’d build a pocket park inspired by my favorite Central Park landmarks, using everyday objects and discarded scraps to make something beautiful.
I planted Chinese elms, purple-leaf plums, a weeping willow and other ornamental trees. They blend with the existing maples and honey locusts to form a canopy for shade on hot days. The winding paths I carved around the trees evoke the Ramble, known as the heart of Central Park. To mark our park’s inner core, I made a sculpture from bowling balls I found at a Goodwill store, arranging them on metal rods to look like planets in a galaxy.
Using leftover bathroom tiles, I recreated Strawberry Fields and the “Imagine” mosaic — the iconic memorial to slain rock musician and Beatles band member John Lennon. And community members can cook and dine al fresco using the brick oven and grill, called Tavern on the Green after the famous restaurant.
Linda soon joined the effort: A retired director of a human services nonprofit, she was immediately on board with my vision for a tranquil green space for all. Her contributions include placing colorful solar lights to give the park a magical ambience after dusk, and urging me to set up educational plaques identifying insects and other wildlife in the area.
Our pride and joy is the park’s registered Little Free Library: I carved a wooden replica of the main branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in Oakland, which holds diverse books supplied by Linda, myself and the broader community.
I’ll often see people taking from or adding books to the collection. Someone even put the overdose reversal drug NARCAN in there, which may have been used because it was gone when I checked.
Gentrification and an uncertain future
Jeanne McNutt*, the former executive director of Uptown Partners, played a huge role in getting the park off the ground: The group helped us get a grant from the city, which sanctioned our use of the land. The Department of Public Works removed the concrete barriers at the base of the hillside and supplied us with cobblestones and other building materials for the park.
I’m grateful to Uptown Partners for its support, but our relationship is complicated: I clashed with the architects they brought in to help design the park, whose vision for the space differed from my own. I learned to compromise and drew on their expertise to build a cobblestone stairway to a lookout point from which you can see the entire park.
When you reach the top, you’ll see another mosaic spelling out “RENT” in tribute to Jonathan Larson’s rock opera on class, poverty, disease and addiction in a gentrifying, late-1980s East Village. From there, I hope to build a footbridge across the hillside connecting the park to Andy Warhol’s birthplace on Orr Street. People come here from all over the world to see where the artist grew up, so I’ve started building a small, free Andy Warhol museum for them to visit.
I hope I’ll be around to finish it: I’m a working-class person who got lucky enough to buy a house at a time when homeownership was still possible for people like me. Making art for the community is my act of resistance against the forces that could kick people out of their homes — and threaten Central Park — at any time.
*Jeanne McNutt is the co-owner of the building in which PublicSource rents its newsroom.
Joseph Szabo is a dental technician, landscaper and artist based in West Oakland. He can be reached at joeszabo162@gmail.com.
Venuri Siriwardane is PublicSource’s health and mental health reporter. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @venuris.
This reporting has been made possible through the Staunton Farm Mental Health Reporting Fellowship and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation.
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