From Eloise to Urban Renewal

by Carolyn Ristau

Image from eloise.com/books

This morning I took a literary planning journey.

I am reading Eloise: The Ultimate Edition by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight as a literary example of hotel living. This is one of several housing types that has been systematically outlawed in the US over the last 100 years through zoning regulations, building codes, financing policy, and social stigmatization, contributing to our long-standing and on-going housing crisis.

In this book, I learned about the Literary Landmarks Register. My curiosity peaked, I found a website for this register. There are 6 literary landmarks in Pennsylvania: 5 in Philadelphia and 1 in Bethlehem. Bummed that there weren’t any in Pittsburgh, I selected the Bethlehem landmark to learn more about. That landmark honors the poet Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961) who grew up in Bethlehem.

Hilda’s childhood home was demolished in one of the few Urban Renewal projects that Bethlehem was able to implement after learning from the experts in Pittsburgh how to demolish neighborhoods for civic projects (per Stronger than Steel: Forging a Rust Belt Renaissance by Jeffrey A. Parks; see also urbantraipsing’s post on adaptive reuse in Bethlehem). The Bethlehem Area Library now stands on the site where Hilda grew up.

So while Pittsburgh may not currently host any Literary Landmarks, our city has made its mark on at least one. And in another twist of interconnectedness, while I do not remember reading Eloise as a child, I do remember visiting the Bethlehem Area Library as one of my family’s secondary libraries.