The Hill and the Bluff offer another example of two Pittsburgh neighborhoods tightly linked. The first is oriented toward the Allegheny River and the second to the Monongahela, with 5th and Forbes avenues forming a corridor between them. Both neighborhoods are a world away from downtown Pittsburgh in topography, social function, scale, and architectural character, but anything that happens downtown for good or ill impacts these two communities that stand immediately uphill.
The Hill had farmhouses on it around 1800; then from the 1820s to the 1860s, immigrants from Ireland and Germany settled here; followed by eastern Europeans, notably Jews; and, from the 1880s to the 1920s, African Americans from the southern states. The Bluff was laid out on paper in the mid-nineteenth century. The rows of brick town houses surviving now date mainly from the 1860s to 1900.
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