Audio File
Transcript
My full name is Heaven Infinity, and I was born December 19th, 2001, and my relationship to The Hill District is I’ve been working here for about a year now. I’ve just recently graduated the University of Pittsburgh, and I got this job through the university. Yeah, I was a teacher’s assistant at the University for a class about August Wilson and learned a lot about the Hill District. So yeah, I’ve been here learning and working. Yeah, so I actually am from South Florida originally. So it’s very different than here. Hotter, first of all, palm trees… It’s different than here for sure. Do I think my neighborhood is better than this neighborhood? No, I think that they’re the same. Well, this neighborhood is actually friendlier than the neighborhood I grew up in. I see a lot more people saying hi to each other at the bus stop and a lot of people seem to know each other, and in my neighborhood, it’s kind of like people don’t stop and say hello. I’m the eldest sister. I have two little brothers, so when I was, like, by myself before they were born. I guess my childhood was just made-up of going to school, hanging out with my friends, my neighbors , like, next door. I really liked to dance in my room. I had, like, a little radio, and I would put CD’s in it and dance around in my room. That was, like, my favorite thing to do. I liked having sleepovers with my friends. I rode a bike, and I used to wash it all the time, like it was a car and it rusted. I don’t know, like those are the things I remember. I moved a couple times, but the first neighborhood I remember living in was a good neighborhood. We had a neighbor named Mr. Barry, and he would always, like, ask us to come over and hang out. So I think it was a good neighborhood. People were friendly. One of the first things I noticed was that everybody seems to know each other here, and I just thought that was cool. I felt like I was in a movie or something. Like, everyone’s, like, waving to each other on the street. I just have never experienced that, and so I thought that was cool. That was, like, one of the first things that I noticed. And then I noticed that, like, the housing is really cheap because I was looking for an apartment. So I was like, “Oh OK, maybe I- maybe I should move here. I like it here.” Some of my favorite aspects are the homes here. I take the bus from- I used to live in Oakland, and now I just moved to Bloomfield, and I take the bus up here, and whenever I’m looking at the houses and, like, specifically , like, over there on that hill and, like, Oak Hill, the houses are really cute. I don’t know, like, I’m an adult now, like, officially. And I’m, like, thinking about, like, “Ohh, like, where do I want to live?” And like, I really like the scenery of the houses here. That’s like, probably my favorite thing. And then least favorites… I would say that sometimes I see people just , like, on the side of the road, just , like, hanging out like at the bus stop, or , like, on the side of the street, and they don’t seem like they have anything to do like I’ve seen people take the bus to get to that specific corner, like, by Salem’s, and they just sit there all day, and I wish that there was more things for people in the community to do, specifically, like, elderly people. It seems like they don’t have a job to go to or they don’t have, like, I don’t know, like, a clubhouse or some-something to do. I understand that they don’t want to go, and they don’t want to sit at home all day. But I wish that they had somewhere to go that wasn’t the street corner. I would like to see the New Granada finally built so that we can move from here to there. I’m excited about the grand opening of that. I would say, well, I’m glad that Salem’s opened up so that we could have a grocery store in the Hill District because we didn’t for a long time. I would like to see the University of Pittsburgh continue to work with the Hill District and not abuse the people that live here and work with them because we live so close to the university and I know that in the past, the university just kind of, like, overlooked the people that lived close by and there was, like, an elitist mentality of, like, “If you don’t go to the university, you’re not worth anything,” and I think that we need to continue to build a relationship with the neighborhoods around us instead of break those bonds. So I would like to continue to see that happening.