In August Wilson’s 1979 play Jitney, one of the Pittsburgh characters is working to buy a suburban home for his young family. In the opening scene of Act 2, Youngblood describes where the home is:

I asked Peaches if she would go with me to look at houses, cause I wanted to surprise you. I wanted o pull a truck up to the house and say, “Come on, baby, we moving.” And drive on out to Penn HIlls and pull that truck up in front of one of them houses and say, “This is yours. This is your house baby.”

And a little later in the same conversation:

Wait till you see it. It’s real nice. It’s all on one floor . . . it’s got a basement . . . like a little den. we can put the TV down there. I told myself Rena’s gonna like this. Wait till she see I bought her a house.

In this conversation, the home in Penn Hills is part of achieving the American Dream: a pleasant place where a family can settle in and children can achieve.

Later in the same scene, the older character Becker hears of the potential move and approves of the community:

Good! They got some nice houses out there. That’s a smart move, Youngblood. I’m glad to see you do it. Ain’t nothing like like owning some property.

The vision of a suburban property contrasts sharply with the fate of the jitney station as the city will soon board up the property with some vague notion of redeveloping the land in the future.

But there are also hints that Penn Hills might not be a paradise. In the final scene (Act Two Scene 4), another character comments on Penn Hills:

They ain’t as nice as the houses in Monroeville. Most people don’t even buy houses in Penn Hills no more. They go out to Monroeville.

Reading this reminded me of Benjamin Herold’s book Disillusioned that includes Penn Hills as part of the argument of how the American Dream of suburban living did not extend beyond white families. Penn Hills grew quickly after World War Two, increasing from over 15,000 residents in 1940 to over 62,000 in 1970. But since then white families left (as development extended to Monroeville and other places), the population declined, and Black families who moved to the community found a suburb struggling to maintain its tax base and fund local infrastructure.

Penn Hills may have looked in the early 1970s to hold out hope regarding a successful suburban life but Herold suggests it cannot now promise the suburban American Dream. By the late 1970s, it was changing. The struggles of and in Pittsburgh neighborhoods that Wilson describes extended out to Penn Hills. What was a place of hope turned out to be different than depicted.