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Pittsburgh’s Black history is a multifaceted narrative shaped by culture, resistance, and resilience. The city’s African American community has been a cornerstone of its identity, contributing to the arts, labor movements, and civil rights efforts. The Great Migration brought many Black families to Pittsburgh, where they supported the city’s industrial growth and laid the foundation for a thriving cultural scene.
But urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s saw the displacement of thousands of Black residents, leaving behind a fragmented cultural legacy. These waves of displacement, often masked as “beautification” or “revitalization,” have been part of a broader, troubling trend of exclusionary urban policies. Today, Pittsburgh’s Black community continues to face the challenges of gentrification, economic inequality, and the erasure of this cultural legacy.
This cultural erasure motivated artist Adrian Jones to create Looking Glass, an iOS app that brings Pittsburgh’s Black past into the present through augmented reality. Jones cites writer bell hooks, specifically her work on the practice of remembering, as living “at the heart of Looking Glass.“
“Remembering can involve traveling to a site of memory, gazing at a photograph, or digging through an archive,” Jones tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “This practice acknowledges that any visit to the past has the potential to change your perspective on the present and thus influence the future.”
The app allows users to explore historical sites in real-time, offering an interactive way to engage with a history being lost to gentrification. Adrian’s connection to the city’s history contributed greatly to the app’s creation.
“Looking Glass grew out of three core experiences,” he shares. “Tracing my family’s history, discovering the work of Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris, and actively listening to elders here in the city all formed the foundation of this work. Gaining access to these stories was like collecting fragments of myself and my people that I didn’t even know I was missing.”
This exploration coincided with witnessing the effects of gentrification on Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods. “In this context,” Jones shares, “emerged a vision of a lens that could unearth the stories that were buried in gentrified spaces.”
The rapid pace of gentrification has affected many Pittsburgh neighborhoods, particularly in the East End, where long-time residents have been and continue being displaced. Cultural landmarks that once defined predominantly Black communities such as the Hill District are gradually fading.
It’s not just about physical displacement; it’s about a larger, more insidious erasure of cultural history, an aspect too often overlooked in the broader conversation about revitalization and urban growth. This leaves many Black residents feeling like strangers in once-familiar spaces.
This isn’t just about new development or economic growth — it’s about the slow but steady erasure of the culture and history that made these neighborhoods vital.
“For folks whose culture and history have long been subject to erasure, these cycles of disinvestment and displacement pose a significant threat to our collective memory and identity,” says Jones.
Adrian explains that his goal was never to elevate the future over the past but rather to bridge the two.
“So much of technology is driven by a fixation with the ‘future.’ If there’s been any challenge in designing with the intent of bridging past and present, it’s been making peace with the resistance to this goal,” he says. “I don’t believe in elevating the future over the past or the present. Every conception of the future contains a set of assumptions about the past, and often these are faulty or incomplete understandings. In order to realize a just and equitable future, we need to make redress for past harms, gather ancestral wisdom, and fill the gaps in our memories.”
Resisting the future-centric nature of technology makes Looking Glass a unique and necessary tool. By allowing users to engage with augmented reality, the app brings Black Pittsburgh’s history directly into the spaces being reshaped by gentrification.
Jones shares that “in each story from Black Pittsburgh’s near and distant past, I’ve seen vibrancy, ingenuity, and enormous resilience.”
“From the color palette to the language used in the story summaries, I wanted to embed celebration and reverence within Looking Glass,” he says. The stories it reveals aren’t just historical facts — they are living narratives that challenge us to reconsider the present and, by extension, the future.
Jones relied on collaboration and community input while designing the app. Before writing any lines of code, he spent time with residents and experts, including Charlene Foggie-Barnett, archivist for Carnegie Museum of Art’s Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive; Joe Trotter, a professor of history and social justice at Carnegie Mellon University; John M. Brewer Jr., a historian and consultant for the Pittsburgh Courier archive project; University of Pittsburgh history professor Laurence Glasco; and Terri Baltimore, creator of the Black-Jewish history tour of the Hill District.
“It was critical that I was able to listen and verify whether Looking Glass would provide any value to the community,” he says. “Looking Glass is ultimately accountable to the people whose stories are represented in the archive.”
Adrian highlights the importance of remembering the past in conversations about urban revitalization. “To me, terms like renewal and revitalization are charged,” he explains. “Black homes, businesses, and institutions were razed in the name of beautification and renewal. In the eyes of others, decades of disinvestment and neglect have created the present conditions for revitalization and redevelopment.”
The app underscores the need for “real repair and restitution,” which many see as an urgent priority as gentrification reshapes Pittsburgh. Looking ahead, Adrian plans to expand Looking Glass with an Android release, guided tours, and an audio library with original music and oral history interviews. He expresses excitement over upgrading the app’s AR capabilities in ways that would allow users to interact more deeply with the city’s history. “Stay tuned,” he says, hinting at even more upcoming developments.
Jones cites the work of multimedia artists Alice Yuan Zhang, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Jeffrey Yoo Warren as demonstrating what can be further explored within VR and AR spaces, and is optimistic about the potential of immersive media being used elsewhere to challenge narratives.
“The kind of erasure that Looking Glass confronts is not limited by geography,” says Jones. “What I’ve observed in Pittsburgh is visible in other cities across the country and, frankly, the world. I believe it’s certainly possible to replicate Looking Glass elsewhere, and I’d love to explore that in the future.”
As Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods change, Looking Glass ensures that Black Pittsburgh’s history remains visible. By connecting people to place, amplifying underrepresented narratives, and fostering community engagement, the app offers a blueprint for how technology can be used to preserve cultural memory and inspire action.
Jones hopes that “folks who engage with Looking Glass are able to see that history is not lifeless or irrelevant.” For anyone concerned about the future of Pittsburgh’s Black communities, Looking Glass offers an opportunity to both remember and participate in shaping a more equitable future.
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2025.
