How the Latino community pulled Beechview back from the brink
Jacob Geanous / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
First in an occasional series looking at Pittsburgh neighborhoods.
On any given day — rain, snow or shine — the alluring aroma of grilled chorizo, barbacoa, onions and tortillas wafts from the corner of Broadway and Hampshire avenues in Beechview.
The mouthwatering scents are intentional, said Missy Berumen, who owns Las Palmas Mexican grocery and taco stand with her husband, Gabriel, as a way to draw customers into the market. Las Palmas has been offering authentic Hispanic goods, spices and ingredients — like El Milagro tortillas, chipotle peppers or Tajin — in the neighborhood since 2014.
The taco stand and adjoining grocery store — one of three in the Pittsburgh area — have done much more than attract hungry customers over the years.
It has also acted as a beacon for a booming Hispanic population, with new immigrant businesses revitalizing the once dilapidated neighborhood despite opposition from some resisting the change.
The Hispanic population in Beechview grew by about 75% — from 444 residents to 780 — between 2010 and 2020, when it accounted for just over 10% of the neighborhood's population of about 7,600, according to data from the University of Pittsburgh Center for Social and Urban Research.
About 4.2% of Pittsburgh's just over 300,000 population is Hispanic, according to the latest U.S. Census Data data. But immigration court figures show migrant movement to Allegheny County has grown exponentially over the past few years.
“My husband’s vision was always to be the Hispanic Walmart,” Ms. Berumen said. “There’s always a risk, but it’s worked out.”
Since the turn of the century, Beechview’s identity has shifted away from its Italian and Irish roots, becoming a hub for the Latino community. Families from countries including Mexico, Venezuela and Peru now call the neighborhood home, and some of them have started businesses of their own.
The transition, however, has not historically been a smooth one.
The neighborhood struggled to recover after developer Bernardo Katz bought a large portion of the business district along Broadway Avenue in 2004 and 2005 — using more than $700,000 in loans from the Urban Development Authority of Pittsburgh. He then fled the U.S. to return to his native Brazil, defaulting on the mortgages and leaving the properties in limbo.
The ordeal nearly crippled the neighborhood, leading the URA to hire consultant David Brewton in 2014 to try to attract businesses and breathe life into the neighborhood.
One problem immediately stood out to Mr. Brewton: The neighborhood was fraught with racial tension.
“I think everybody was concerned that there wasn’t a lot of new businesses springing up and it was complicated by issues surrounding race and ethnicity that made things challenging,” Mr. Brewton said last week. “Beechview was seeing an influx of Hispanic people into what was a heavily Italian neighborhood and it was very challenging for people.
“There were some longtime residents who poured their heart and soul into Beechview [who] I think were hoping that it would stay the same. Others wanted more diversity, so there was a difference of opinion about what the vision would be.”
Las Palmas-affiliated locations in both Beechview and Brookline were the targets of vandalism.
In January 2016, a large rock was hurled into the window of the Casa Rasta restaurant in Beechview. A month prior, someone wrote “Go back to Mexico” on the Las Palmas grocery store in Brookline.
“Of course it was horrible, but it wasn’t going to stop us, either,” Ms. Berumen said.
Mr. Brewton recalls the atmosphere of the neighborhood at the time being a tense one as the Latino community continued to grow.
“It was hard,” he said. “Some people knew well enough that they couldn’t speak up against it, but they didn’t like it, so they found ways [to oppose it], kind of behind the scenes, terrible rumors started, not too far from, ‘They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.’”
On the campaign trail last fall, President-elect Donald Trump made the claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were kidnapping and eating neighborhood pets, resulting in bomb threats and evacuations of government buildings and schools there in the weeks that followed.
‘A city of immigrants’
By the end of Mr. Brewton's tenure as a consultant in Beechview in early 2016, a lot of the potential he saw in the neighborhood remained somewhat unrealized.
“I think the plan was built on optimism about people getting along across racial and ethnic lines,” he said. “There were quiet detractors that said '[expletive] no’ and it just didn’t take off the way it could have, in my opinion.”
As progress in Beechview stalled, the Latino community would begin stepping up in a more pronounced way.
The Pittsburgh Hispanic Development Corporation, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring economic growth for Latinos in the region, came into Beechview in part due to the burgeoning immigrant business community and residential population.
Since then, the PHDC has helped nearly 400 Latino entrepreneurs from more than a dozen countries, including Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela, plan, launch or accelerate their businesses.
The organization has also helped 168 families buy or rent a home through its housing initiative, which helps connect landlords and tenants to bolster access to the local market.
“The grocery stores began to attract Latinos and the fact that the train is here, its very convenient for them to take the train and go Downtown and mobilize in that way,” said Guillermo Velazquez, PHDC executive director. “Beechview was declining … in essence, Latinos started to rise in a way to kind of rescue the neighborhood without even thinking about it and that started to create a great number of tenants.”
Since 2018, at least one Latino restaurant has opened in the area each year.
“Things developed over time,” Mr. Velazquez said. “Pittsburgh has been a city of immigrants and immigrants have been dictating what the personality of neighborhoods become. Immigration is not coming from Europe, it’s coming from other parts of the world and Latinos happen to be the ones that started to arrive in Beechview and that’s how it took, what I call, its hybrid personality.”
‘We’re not going anywhere’
This burgeoning personality continued to attract others, including Shelbin Santos, owner of Peruvian restaurant Chicken Latino. The restaurant relocated to Beechview in 2020 in the wake of rising rent prices in the Strip District and the onset of the pandemic.
The restaurant serves authentic cuisine like Pollo a la Brasa — chicken marinated overnight, seasoned with cumin, garlic, cilantro and dried Peruvian chiles, cooked in a wood-fired oven Ms. Santos imported from Peru.
“I saw the opportunity for me to move to Beechview because that’s where my people are and the people who know my food,” she said.
Despite the progress, there remains work to be done.
In October, Casa San Jose broke ground on a $6.3 million community center to offer services that include mental health support, immigration case management and English classes.
Its executive director, Monica Ruiz, said the nonprofit has assisted an estimated 6,000 people over the years, with more turning to it for help following the pandemic.
Efforts continue amid rising concerns among immigrant communities as Trump prepares to take office. He campaigned on a promise to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history.”
“Trump is going to fulfill his campaign promises, I’m sure, and do the best he can to try to deport as many people as he can,” Ms. Ruiz said. “But at the end of the day, if you look at places like Beechview, it was dilapidated.
’There were no businesses, there was nothing, and the Latino community has really brought that up. We’re here and we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to continue to grow the neighborhood.”