I'm here in Hays Woods, which is not only the largest park in the city of Pittsburgh, but one of the largest east of the Mississippi.

Yet it only became public park last year.

How is it that over 600 acres of wooded land could stay undeveloped for so long?

I'm Noles.

I'm here to explore and explain.

If you're a math nerd like me, then you've spent plenty of time just scrolling through Google Earth.

When you scan the southeastern part of Pittsburgh, that part that sits below the Monongahela River and east of the south side, you'll immediately notice how green it is compared to the rest of the city.

And that's really saying something for a city with as much tree cover as Pittsburgh.

If you overlay the neighborhood boundaries, you'll notice that one neighborhood in particular takes up much of that green space, and that that neighborhood itsel Hays is one of three neighborhoods that hang on by a geographic thread in the southeastern corner of Pittsburgh.

Oh, no, really, they're hardly attached to the rest of the city.

I don't really know why this is the case, but these boundaries, in addition to the steep terrain, make this section of the city feel more like nearby Baldwin or West Mifflin than Pittsburgh proper.

Hays sits in the streets around hollow, squeezed between two large hills.

Houses and businesses share space with a large factory, a huge highway interchange, and two railroads.

Hays residents have no access to the river since the waterfront area's taken up by industrial uses, as well as the parking lot for sandcastle to the north, across the Glenwood Bridge is Hazelwood.

To the east is Homestead.

To the west along Carson Street is the south side, and if you travel south, no matter which road you'll take, you'll end up in west Mifflin.

Basically, Hays is just one long strip of homes down the middle of a hollow.

That doesn't make it remarkable in and of itself, since there's plenty of strips and hollows all over the region.

But when you take these neighborhood boarders into account, the development does seem a little strange.

The first settler, named John Smalls, arrived in the hollow in 1789, and he called it Six Mile Ferry because he operated a ferry from the mouth of the hollow, which is six miles upstream from the point.

This is also why Four Mile Run has its name, but I can't quite make sense of Nine Mile Run since it empties out in between the two.

Anyway, back to the story here.

James H. Hays moved to Mifflin Township in the 1820s and set up a coal mining business in 1828, where he takes coal out of the hills, surrounding Streets Run and Backs run.

His company built a narrow gauge railway of both hollows, which then connected to the old Six Mile Ferry, which they use as a tipple to export the coal.

By river.

By the 1920s, the neighborhood had a large Italian population, mostly from the Campanian village of Controne, which is said to have similar topography to Hays.

Until 1929, the area was split between two townships, Baldwin and Mifflin.

Their border was along Streets Run between 1929 and 1931.

Pittsburgh made one of its last annexations, taking over parts of both townships along with other municipalities in the area.

With this land grab, even the undeveloped land had to fall into some jurisdiction.

And Hays was the obvious choice, resulting in the strange shape of the neighborhood on the map.

Possibly the most distinct thing about Hays today is the large factory on the east side of the Harlow.

It began production in 1942 as the Hays Army Ammunition Plan, owned by the Navy and run by Homesteads Mesta Machine Works.

Originally, it produced breech blocks for five inch navy guns and became inactive after the war.

In 1951 it was reopened and produced shells, mostly 105 millimeter, for use by both the Army and the Navy during the Korean conflict.

In 1966, the Army took over the facility, and it continued producing ammo until 1970, when it was mothballed indefinitely.

When this plan was active, the population of Hays was as high as 2000 people.

Nowadays the population sits at about 350.

The population loss wasn't entirely due to the shuttering of the factory.

When you look at Hays on a map, the first thing you'll see is this enormous highway interchange near the factory and the houses.

When it was built in the late 1950s, it was planned to carry far more traffic than currently passes through it because it was meant to act as a section of a freeway running from the south side across West Mifflin.

There's some other evidence of abandoned freeway plans across the city that I plan on making an entirely separate video about.

At some point in the future.

Hays has been pretty sleepy since the 1970s, when its main base of employment left.

And then, of course, since the nearby homestead work shut down in the 1980s and the Hazelwood coke plant shut down in the 90s, jobs have moved even further away.

Places like Hays were once considered prime real estate.

You were close to your job.

You had a tight knit community, and you were buffered with forests on either side.

But now you're isolated and you have to drive to get anywhere.

And that tight knit community has been decimated by both the economic loss as well as overbuilt infrastructure.

And that whole time, from the area's rise until its slow fall.

Hays Woods have been there atop the nearby hill for the first half century or more.

The Hays family owned the woods.

James H. Hays owned about five square miles of land at the time of his death in 1876.

Slowly, the parcels were sold off and the houses did creep in along the edges.

Some acres were farmed by both the Hays family and others until the fields petered out in the 1940s.

On the Baldwin side of the border, a golf course sprung up in the 1950s and was replaced with the Breckenridge Highlands development.

In the mid 2000.

About 20 years ago, there was a pretty serious plan to turn the woods into something akin to the south side works mixed with the meadows.

Beaver County real estate developer and noted property tax developer Chuck Betters submitted plans to the city of Pittsburgh for the Pittsburgh Palisades Park, complete with a horse track, a faux main street development, and blocks and blocks of housing.

However, in 2006, a Walmart was going in on the former site of the Dick's Hospital and Kill Buck, and they were using the same blasting methods that Betters had proposed for his development.

A large landslide ensued, burying highway 65 and thousands of tons of dirt and debris.

The city soon after denied betters plan, and the hills have remained forested ever since.

From 2015 to 2023, there was a concerted effort between the Urban Redevelopment Authority and the City of Pittsburgh to return the woods to the public ownership.

Efforts are ongoing to remove invasive species and restore the forest back to previous levels of health.

I think ultimately, there's no exciting or deeply interesting reason why Hays Woods has remained undeveloped all this time.

It really comes down to, for better or worse, the dice roll of the economy and the whims of whoever owned it.

If James Hays had wanted to develop it into houses like so much of the South Hills was at the time, he could have, and we'd be none the wiser.

Hays Woods would look like Arlington or Knoxville, with its steep streets and its skinny little staircases and small houses perched on the hilltops.

Good views of downtown in the distance.

If his kids had wanted to do the same thing, they could have.

We never know the difference.

But because the Hays family cared enough, and because the people who owned it afterwards cared enough to keep it around, we still have it.

The mills down in Homestead and Hazelwood and other places have remained open for another 1020 years.

Maybe the economic pressures would have been too great.

Maybe houses would have been built here in the 80s and 90s and through all these decades of people using this as an unofficial park.

It's been based on the benevolence of the landowners at the time to let people trespass without consequence.

And if you go to a lot of other places around the state, you'll see that a lot of other landowners do care quite a bit more.

And that's why there woods aren't unofficial parks in the ways that Hays Woods has been.

So I think it's really important to remember that we live in a time where not only is Hays Woods.

So I think we really need to feel special, that we live in a time where not only is Hays Wood still here.

It's still an urban forest.

It is now an urban park.

Now, that doesn't sound right.

At the time.

Okay.

Sorry for subjecting you all to that.

I blame it on the cold.

It's currently about 25 degrees with wind chill.

I also realized in watching those back briefly that my microphone was not on like I thought it was.

So it's probably going to be quieter than the rest of the video.

I'm just going to record the rest of this section when I get home.

Where it's nice and quiet and warm.

So I'll see you then.

Basically, the economic system that we have makes permanent public enjoyment of land dependent on the whims of the landowner.

Schenley Park, only exists because Mary Shanley donated it to the city on her conditions.

Frick Park only exists because Frick put it in his will, and he didn't develop it in his lifetime, only because his son loved exploring it so much.

People have enjoyed Hays Woods as an unofficial park for decades, but only because the owners at the time were benevolent.

They didn't care too much who walked through it.

Somewhere along the way, his word stopped being said in the possessive form and started being used in the general form associated with the geography in the neighborhood.

If you driven down any rural road in Pennsylvania, you know that most landowners aren't as easy going.

It takes vigilance from all of us who appreciate nature and public land to make sure tracts of woods like this remain undeveloped, to be respectful of them so that owners may continue to be benevolent and to advocate for the end of urban sprawl and habitat fragmentation.

We are really lucky to say that we live in a time where not only is Hays almost entirely forest, it's almost entirely a city park.

Hey everybody, that went a little deeper there at the end of the video than I had originally intended it to, but that's something I'm passionate about and it's my channel, so nobody can tell me not to.

I did want to mention one thing that inspired me to make this video besides my own innate curiosity, and that is this book Near Woods, written by Kevin Patrick.

He's a professor that I had when I went to IUP.

He really goes into the effect that near woods such as Hays Woods, you know, these forests that we explore when we're children and that are always kind of there at the edge of town where you can go and and have fun and explore nature without having to go far from home.

The effect that these have on us and on communities as they grow.

I think it's a really good, interesting work of human and cultural geography, and if you're into this sort of thing, I definitely recommend you check it out.

As usual, my work cited and some interesting links are going to be down below in the description.

It means a lot to me if you check those out.

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So thanks again for watching and I'll see you next time.