I'm up here on a hilltop overlooking the Nine Mile Run Valley in the neighborhood of Somerset.

It's a beautiful spot.

There's trees all around.

There's birds chirping in them.

It's a really nice spot to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city, even if just for a minute, until you look at the soil, because it's not really soil upon close inspection.

It's this weird, concrete like material.

What if I told you that this mountain is entirely manmade, and it's far from the only one in Pittsburgh like it?

I'm Noles, and I'm here to explore and explain.

Nine Mile Run in 1921 was the largest contiguous, undeveloped strip of land anywhere in the city, as well as the only remaining natural corridor to the Monongahela River.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Junior wrote in one of his many reports on the city that it would be a striking place for a park, and I quote it's long meadows of varying width would make ideal play fields.

The stream, when it is freed from sewage, will be an attractive and interesting element in the landscape.

The wooded slopes on either side give ample opportunity for enjoyment of the forest, for shaded walks and cool resting places.

And above all, it is not far from a large working population in Hazelwood, homestead, Rankin, Swissvale, Edgewood, Wilkinsburg, Brushton and Homewo And yet it is so excluded by its high wooded banks that the close proximity of urban development can hardly be imagined if taken for park purposes.

The entire valley, from one top of one bank to the top of the other should be included.

For upon the preservation of these wooded banks depends much of the real value of the park.

End quote.

Well, that's a nice description, isn't it?

For the first 20 years or so of the last century, various civic groups and government officials proposed and attempted to turn the nine mile run into parkland.

Nobody could agree on the specifics, however, and it was zoned residential.

In 1923, when the city enacted its first zoning plan.

However, the year before that, the Duquesne Sleigh Company had purchased 94 acres on the west bank of the valley.

This meant they were exempted from the zoning ordinance and could remain grandfathered into their land use for the entirety of their time in the valley.

What was that land use?

Dumping molten hot slag a nine mile round valley, of course.

Until 1962, they continued purchasing land and expanding their slag pile, which they dumped for giant steel in the US, steel Works and Rankin.

Now those mills used iron ore and coke to make carbon steel.

Slag is simply the waste product created by steel production, specifically from blast furnaces.

It contains carbon, silicon, manganese, phosphorus, and a little bit of iron.

For every ton of iron produced, more than a half ton of blast furnace slag was produced.

The next step, steelmaking, produced a quarter ton of slag for every ton of steel.

The slag becomes stronger over time, and in recent decades, there have been advancements in reusing slag as roadbed fill and for other uses in the 1900s, however, the preferred method of disposal was just dumping it as quickly and cheaply as possible.

By 1937, the pile was 25ft high and covered an area of about 50 acres.

A rail spur was built from Doc Hollow and three shifts a day dump.

The slag into the pile.

As more housing was built in the southern part of Squirrel Hill and in Swisshelm Park during the 1940s and 50s.

More people lived in close proximity to the slag dumps, and thus they became more controversial.

There was a lot of pushback to their expansion in the 50s, but it was reasoned that if J&L couldn't dump their slag there, that might threaten the company's survival.

And if Pittsburgh wasn't the Steel City, then what was it?

Plus, if they stopped in, the area would become an unused eyesore, which is uglier than a used eyesore, I guess.

And so on.

That logic, the city of Pittsburgh allowed the dumping to continue.

By 1972, when the dumping stopped, there were 17,000,000yd of slag filling this valley.

And it's far from the only slag dump in Pittsburgh.

Others include the Browns dump in West Mifflin, which began in 1913 and stopped in the late 1960s.

At its biggest extent, it was 410 acres or 130 city blocks, and was 200ft high.

This slag dump served the Duquesne, Edgar, Thompson, and Homestead works of U.S.

steel.

In the late 1970s, U.S.

steel worked with developers to clear portions of the dump and turn it into terraces ripe for development.

Most famously, for a century, III mall century III mall opened on a reclaimed section in 1979 and would grow to be one of the largest malls in the country.

During this process, they unearthed some artifacts from the slag dumping process, including this mushroom looking thing which fell out of one of the little cars at some point.

These flying saucer shaped objects, as well as a ladle car itself.

Century III mall is currently being demolished after being abandoned since 2019.

Sometime around 1980, US steel began to dispose of slag within their plants and there was no more use for slag dumps.

The Lebanon Road dump, also in West Mifflin, located behind what used to be the continental canned factory.

This land is still owned by US steel, and the eastern part along Noble Road north of the airport, is still being remained for aggregate by private company.

Much further north in Penn Hills is the Gas Cola dump, situated on land that is still owned by US steel, and it has been the proposed site of development for at least 20 years.

The Eastlands dump in north for sales became the Eastland Mall in 1963, which then was closed in 2005 and demolished in 2007.

This area is now an Amazon distribution center along the Union Railroad corridor in West Mifflin and Duquesne.

Slag piles abound.

If you were a parents or grandparents grew up in the area in the 1950s, ask them if they ever went on a date to watch the slag being dumped.

I read a lot of stories of teenagers going to watch the show while parked in their car.

Basically, it's a drive in movie date, except instead of making out while watching some campy horror flick, you're making out while molten steel waste product tumbled down a hillside and lights up the night sky.

I was born in the wrong generation.

Mayor Tom Murphy used to jog on the path along Nine Mile Run, and one day in 1994, it occurred to him that the coal Black Hills around him didn't have to look that way.

They could be repurposed, perhaps a residential neighborhood.

As part of Mayor Murphy's efforts to reinvent Pittsburgh by redeveloping our brownfields, the city, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, and developers created a plan.

The hill that I'm standing on now used to look like the one across the valley that I've spent the majority of this video in, except here.

They tested the soil for toxins.

They added three feet of topsoil, and then they built an entire neighborhood.

While Pittsburgh began the process of remediating the stream down below, the URA and the Rubbin Off company began building the biggest residential project Pittsburgh had seen since World War two.

It's called Somerset at Frick Park, and the houses are expensive, but they're very nice.

The first two phases of this three phase project were tremendous successes, with homes selling just hours after going on the market.

By 2017, both phases were built out and occupied on the western side of the valley.

But what about phase three?

Well, I'm standing on phase three.

See, part of the big idea was that there would be an access road from Commercial Street, as well as a bridge spanning Nine Mile run behind me, but nobody could decide who was going to cover those costs, because just those roads alone, before you even built the houses in the streets and the utilities, was going to cost around $20 million.

And seriously into the developer's profit, even though this was going to be a luxury development like Somerset, phase one and two are.

So eventually, after years of going back and forth, the URA decided to cut their losses and drop the contract and they decided to do something pretty unprecedented.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're getting a solar farm.

See, one thing that the URA and City Council and pretty much everybody else agrees on is that bad air quality really holds Pittsburgh back from becoming an even greater city.

So one step in the right direction of mitigating that pollution is renewable energy.

The EPA awarded the URA a $2 million grant in May of 2024 to help clean up this 22 acre site behind me.

That $2 million grant will go towards helping to clean up this 22 acre site, and the additional 55 acres of this slag dump will be donate back to the City of Pittsburgh and be added to Frick Park.

So this fake mountain and its siblings all over the city tell the story of Pittsburgh in microcosm.

The land in valleys that was either considered too steep or too pretty to build on became a dumping ground for the waste product of our biggest industry.

Slag was progress manifest and a potent reminder that for all the good a roaring economy brings, there's plenty of bad that comes with it.

But the region wasn't content with leaving the piles to just sit there forever.

Just as Pittsburgh has risen from the ashes as a new city with a new, diverse economy, we've reemployed the land we once castaway.

Brownfields no more.

The slight dumps of Pittsburgh have been covered in light industry, commercial centers, residential neighborhoods, and now one of the first urban solar farms in the nation.

So come to Frick Park.

Climb this fake mountain and witness Pittsburgh's past, present, and future simultaneously.