Josh Imhof | staff writer

The historic Bluff Street Steps reopened Sunday, after a week-and-a-half-long renovation project kept them closed for the beginning of the new year.

The steps, which serve as a popular walking route for students traveling between campus and the South Side, have long sat in a state of partial disrepair, with many treads missing and some areas having unstable railings.

“We had made a couple small board replacements when school first started, but we knew that in order to really address the concerns and to get the most life out of it, we would have to majorly impact the steps by shutting them down to fully replace some sections,” Erin Feichtner said.

Feichtner is the Senior Project Manager at the Pittsburgh Department of Mobility and Infrastructure. She said that the current renovations are complete, but the city will continue to monitor the steps’ condition and make more repairs if necessary.

Travellers will now find a fully rebuilt wooden section toward the bottom of the staircase that bridges the two concrete sections together. The fresh planks overlook the ruins of the previous passage.

“Maintaining and repairing our city steps is essential to ensuring safe, reliable access for pedestrians who use these routes every day,” said Mayor Ed Gainey in a Department of Public Works press release.

Pittsburgh’s over 700 sets of city steps are a crucial, yet often overlooked part of the city’s history, with roots right here on the Bluff.

“We believe that that was one of, if not the first location of city steps in the city of Pittsburgh,” said Charles Succop, a city archivist and co-author of the book “City Steps of Pittsburgh: A History and Guide.”

Before the current Bluff Street Steps were built, another staircase constructed in 1872 connected Second Avenue to the hilltop. Back then, a railroad ran along what is now the highway and houses stood on the grounds of the Allegheny County Jail.

“People needed to get up to the Bluff or down to Second Avenue. The students from that neighborhood would go to Forbes Street School, which is today where Mercy is,” Succop said. “They would have to take the stairs up.”

These steps were also an important route for mill workers.

During the Civil War, the city’s industrial economy exploded, with entrepreneurs such as Andrew Carnegie opening factories all along the city’s three rivers. These factories created thousands of jobs, leading to a massive influx of immigrants and their families coming for work.

The immigrants would often settle in the hills to escape the thick layers of smog created by the mills and for many of them, public transportation was too expensive.

Though sometimes extremely dangerous, the steps were the only way up.

“We know that there were a lot of injuries, whether you were a millworker or just a business person,” Succop said. “We have documented cases of every lawsuit that was filed against the city of Pittsburgh for steps injuries. Many people lost their lives.”

Despite these dangers, the steps retained steady foot traffic until the 1980s when the steel mills began shutting down. Pittsburgh’s population steeply declined and people began using alternate forms of transportation, including cars, buses and eventually the T.

The steps were largely forgotten.

However, after almost 20 years of dilapidation, Pittsburgh’s oldest form of transportation finally got some much needed attention.

In 1999, Bob Regan, a former geophysics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, mapped out 712 sets of steps across the city on his bicycle. He shared this data with the city and his findings paved the way for eventual rejuvenation projects, including the 2023 allocation of $7 million in federal funds to repair the steps.

There have also been more efforts made by community members to embrace the steps and honor their long history.

“Standing on these steps… I really didn’t see it as a landing, but a little stage. The steps themselves were kind of like stadium seats. You had everything you needed to perform,” said Paola Corso.

Corso, a Pittsburgh native, is a poet, photographer and author who has been fascinated by city steps since her return to the city from New York in the mid 2010s. She became interested in them after partaking in a volunteer stair cleanup program with her sons in Troy Hill.

“I wanted us to have a kind of new eyes on a city that I grew up in and what it offers,” Corso said. “It was a wonderful experience that moved me to want to perform on the steps and to find an organization that celebrated the steps and Pittsburgh’s diversity.”

From this experience came “Steppin’ Stanzas,” a poetry performance project created by Corso that aimed to celebrate the steps and honor those who had used them before. Artists performed poems along the South Side StepTrek and other staircases taken by workers and residents for over 100 years, including Corso’s grandfather and father who were both crane operators at steel plants.

Events like these help spread awareness about the steps. However because of administrative differences and other existing infrastructure problems, they are not always a top priority.

Despite this, individuals like Corso and Succop remain optimistic that things are on the right track.

“I’m glad to see the new investment and the new interest. I think the more support the public gets behind this will influence local leaders,” Succop said. “Hopefully more repairs will be down the road.”