Adrian Jones never shops at Whole Foods, but when we meet up for a walking tour of East Liberty, it’s the first place he wants to show me. We stand at the corner of Penn Avenue and Euclid in East Liberty as I peer at the screen of his smartphone. He taps the screen, calling up an architectural rendering of the Penn Plaza Apartments in a new app he’s created. The building was demolished in 2017. But on Jones’ smartphone screen, it hovers as an overlay, beyond which I can still see the present-day Whole Foods building.
As we look at the scene on his screen, he tells me a story: Penn Plaza was home for many people for generations. Constructed in 1966. Demolished in 2017. But the people who lived there didn’t go without a fight. When the realty group that owned Penn Plaza served eviction notices to the building’s tenants, they mobilized, forming Penn Plaza Support in Action. They banded together and tried to stop the demolition.
“I want people to visit these places,” Jones says, “to be able to see artifacts, photos of the past, to read these descriptions of what happened here and then use augmented reality to change how we view the present.”
Jones describes himself as a “creative technologist” — an artist and burgeoning archivist whose training and day job are in software development. His new app, Looking Glass, uses augmented reality technology to create a sort of digital palimpsest where landmarks from East Liberty’s Black history float to the surface, overlaying, but not obscuring, a present-day site. When a Looking Glass user comes within 35 feet of a marked location, they can hold up their smartphone and see an architectural rendering or a photograph of what was once there.
“I grew up in an apartment complex that was like Penn Plaza. I have cherished memories there,” said Jones, who moved from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh in 2017. “I am interested in making this [story] accessible for Black folks to know that we … do have agency and we can look back and see remarkable stories of resilience and brilliance and strength.”
Pittsburghers know East Liberty has been the site of rapid, dramatic change over the past two decades. It’s one of those neighborhoods where, every time you go, it seems something has replaced something else: Whole Foods in place of Penn Plaza Apartments. An Alpine-themed cocktail bar where the Shadow Lounge used to stand.
Who lives in the neighborhood has changed, too: In the year 2000, more than 70% of East Liberty’s population was Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s decennial census. By 2022, the bureau’s American Community Survey estimated the Black population in the neighborhood had fallen by half, to about 35%.
The neighborhood has been a locus of change since at least the 1950s, when the now-demolished Civic Arena was built in the Lower Hill, displacing Black residents and pushing them into East Liberty, according to University of Pittsburgh economist Chris Briem. By the 1970s, the neighborhood had transformed into a hub of Black life in Pittsburgh.
Jones said the work of the late Pittsburgh photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris was one of the inspirations for Looking Glass. Over several decades, through his photographs for the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper, Harris created an expansive record of Black life in Pittsburgh. His photographs now comprise a 75,000-image archive at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
“To me, [Harris’ photographs] are just these marvelous entry points to history, to just seeing the rich lives that Black folks lived in the last century,” Jones said. “He was everywhere and captured everything.”
Another of Looking Glass’ markers is at the corner of South Highland Avenue and Spirit Street, where a luxury apartment building rises over a fast-casual restaurant selling reconfigurable bowls of vegetables and protein. But when you hold up your phone and look at the building through the Looking Glass lens, a 1960s Teenie Harris photo of the Pittsburgh Friends of COFO Freedom center appears.
The Pittsburgh Friends of COFO was part of the Council of Federated Organizations civil rights coalition. Jones said the office was involved in the coalition’s Freedom Schools, an ambitious 1964 effort which drew more than 1,000 volunteers to teach Black students in Mississippi to make up for the poor educational opportunities afforded by the public schools.
“East Liberty has been a site of so much organizing,” Jones said, “from protests where people were spilling on the street to people strategizing to protect people’s right to have a space to live.”
Jones’ advisor, social change and technology educator Xiaowei Wang, says Jones’ approach to creating the app is not only community-oriented in its subject matter, but also because it largely relies on open-source software for its technical infrastructure.
“A lot of the big software that offers augmented reality is very closed-off and profit-driven and you need to sink a lot of money into there,” Wang said. “It’s just really inspiring to see him innovate on all these different levels.”
In January, the Looking Glass app will deploy a new soundscape feature. One of its creators is Pittsburgh music producer INEZ, who was named 91.3 WYEP’s 2020 Artist of the Year following the debut of her album Voicemails and Conversations. She created two original tracks for Looking Glass, titled “Displacement” and “Reclamation.”
INEZ said she wrote the track “Displacement” to sound like “people are being moved, being marched out.” Her intent with “Reclamation” was for it to sound like “a robot was being put back together with all of these pieces. I feel like a lot of times, our experience in Black America is we’re left with pieces, and we somehow always seem to manage to find a way to put it back together.”
INEZ is from Homewood, and grew up riding through Penn Circle, getting slices at Capri Pizzeria and Bar and participating in the summer reading program at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh branch in East Liberty. In fifth grade, her cousin took her to the now-closed David’s Shoes to buy her first pair of Nike Air Force 1s.
“My parents were not the name-brand, caring-about-sneakers people,” INEZ said. “So getting on the bus, driving through East Liberty, hopping off and being able to pick up my first pair … it felt like I got crowned that day.”
INEZ said while some businesses from her childhood, like Capri, still remain, East Liberty venues feel less inclusive to her now. She said while she appreciates having different restaurants, she no longer feels the warmth and comfort she felt was integral to the vibe of the neighborhood she grew up visiting.
But she said being a contributor to Jones’ Looking Glass app has helped her absorb the changes to East Liberty.
“There’s going to be no return to the old way,” INEZ said. “But … this application serves as a tool to connect … like, this is where we’ve come from. This is where we are. But you can see both right now.”
Looking Glass is available to download now for iOS. The new soundscape with music by INEZ, Matthew Maxwell and pvkvsv will be released in January.
