In Pittsburgh, neighborhoods are often named for historic people or geographic features. Take Stanton Heights, named for former Secretary of War Edward Stanton, or the Bluff for being, well, a bluff. But tucked away in Pittsburgh’s West End, on the edge of the city limits, is a community with a unique name. The neighborhood was the focus of Good Question! asker Damian Butler-Buccilli.
“I’ve always been curious about the neighborhood in Pittsburgh called Fairywood,” Butler Buccilli said. “Why is it named Fairywood? It’s such a peculiar and interesting name.”
Pittsburgh City Council President Theresa Kail-Smith represents Fairywood and other West End neighborhoods. She said she heard its name comes from residents in the early 20th century.
“What I heard was when this school was built, that the school was surrounded by woods and it was like a magical place, Fairywood, and that’s how they started calling it Fairywood,” she said.
Despite the near-constant hum of 18-wheelers, the neighborhood is scenic, and only seven miles from Downtown.
“One of my favorite places is where the school used to be. And you look up and you can see the view is just beautiful,” Kail-Smith said.
But there’s likely more to the story — because the neighborhood received its name before Fairywood School was built in 1922.
In the early 1900s, land developer Otis B. Lane took an interest in the area that had previously been the G.W. Daly farm. According to city archives and a 1907 article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the company constructed 75 “new and modern houses.”
"Situated at the intersection of the Ridge and Broadhead Fording roads, is Fairywood, just over the boundary line of Ingram, in Chartiers Township,” wrote the Post-Gazette. “Fairywood is the name chosen by the Otis B. Lane Building Company for its hamlet of attractive and picturesque houses now being completed, and which will soon be placed upon the market.”
Perhaps the people already living in the area gave Otis Lane the inspiration — or perhaps the enchanted name was just a marketing tactic to sell houses.
The City of Pittsburgh annexed what’s now Fairywood in the 1920s. Through the years, it grew until a peak population of around 5,000 in 1950, according to the U.S. Census.
Barry Arlet, whose parents grew up on farmland in the area, lived most of his young life on the nearby Steuben Street. He said he remembers driving through Fairywood as a child and having his father talk about cattle being driven through the neighborhood, picking from apple trees and working the land (his parents met on a farm). Later, he became a roofer.
“They did many of the houses in Fairywood,” Arlet said. “We’d be driving down the road [and he’d say] ‘We put a roof on that one, put a roof on that one.’”
He also recalls the construction of Westgate Village and Broadhead Manor, both housing developments for low-income families. Broadhead was a former military housing complex that included more than 400 apartments, while Westgate offered potential residents one-to-three-bedroom townhomes.
Harry Carr, his parents and four brothers moved into Broadhead in the early 1960s. He said he has great memories of living in the complex.
“There were kids, people to play with everywhere,” Carr said. “Each family had four to five to six kids, so there was always somebody doing something, [like] pick-up baseball games, basketball.”
Newspaper articles from the time reflect Carr’s experience — big families, both Black and white, Boy Scout meetings, a regular clinic on-site and generally good relationships in the complex.
“We would swim in the creek, [the neighborhood] had great apple trees and strawberries that would grow wild that we would bring home,” Carr said. “You had kind of a dichotomy of living in the city, but also in the suburbs.”
In the next few decades, however, the neighborhood would change. Through the years, Broadhead and other buildings fell into disrepair. Fairywood’s population plummeted. Crime also dominated headlines about the neighborhood.
Vivien Smith moved to Fairywood more than 50 years ago. And then she and her toddler daughter moved to Broadhead in 1973. When she first got there, she worked on-site.
“I did community work,” Smith said. “I was a litter-picker.”
But the community was shifting, and like many metropolitan areas in the ’70s and ’80s, drugs were making their way into neighborhoods.
“At the time when crack came in, it was a mess,” she said. Fairywood School closed in 1984 . Broadhead was closed slowly beginning in the 1990s, as were most of the amenities like the pool and gathering spaces that once served the many residents.
Today in Fairywood, only 1,000 residents remain in the neighborhood. Most of the homes are off of its main stretch, Broadhead Fording Road. The peninsular neighborhood is mostly filled with warehouses, including some for Amazon and Giant Eagle. There’s a Salvation Army, some railroad tracks and a lot of trees.
Councilor Kail-Smith said when she was first elected in 2009, the area was struggling.
“I felt like the residents weren’t valued as much as they should have been just because they were a smaller area,” she said.”
Currently, Kail-Smith said there are plans for new housing for seniors in Fairywood. And the city and developers plan to build two 150,000 square foot warehouses on the former Broadhead Manor site. She says she hopes these types of projects bring opportunities to the neighborhood, and bring the community together.
