Audio File
Transcript
I am Kelly Protho. I was born on the Ides of March. That’s March 15th. 1979 is the year that I was born, so 45 years old, and relationship to the Hill District… So I work in the Hill District. Right now, I’m currently the director of this beautiful community engagement center with the University of Pittsburgh. I also lived in the Hill District. I moved about 3 years ago, and I lived there for about 7 years. My mom is from the Hill District, and she is still a resident of the Hill District. I also used to work in the Hill District with my previous role, so a lot of my community engagement work started in the Hill District, and I really love the community. I grew up in Wilkinsburg for elementary school. My mom was a school teacher in Wilkinsburg High School, but I didn’t go to Wilkinsburg school except for one year, and that was at Kelly Elementary School. I remember it because I still have friends from Kelly Elementary, and we used to walk from Kelly to the high school to meet my mom after school. It just stood out to me. But we lived on a busy street. We lived right on Penn Ave. My dad built the swing set that we had, and we used to go outside and swing. We had a pear tree outside. We lived in this big old house, but it was like my happiest memories. My dad used to work overnight at the post office, and I remember, like, waking up on Christmas morning and coming downstairs, and he would be sleep on the couch because he just got off from work, but then he would wake up to, like, help us open our gifts. So my childhood was beautiful. I loved my family. Well, I love my family. So I have 4 kids. I’m married. I’ve been married for almost 18 years now. I had two kids before I got married. I actually had my first daughter when I was going into my senior year of college, so I was really, really scared, but I had a really great support system. I went to Hampton University, and so I had my daughter August 18th, and I drove back to school crying. It was very traumatic for me, but my mom was like “You have to finish school and you have to take a certain amount of credits” like you have to finish school at the school that you started with those last bit of credits, so I couldn’t transfer. So I was, like, crying, going back to school. And I finished, but I would like drive home on the weekend. My daughter’s father was in school, also in Pittsburgh, and he had her. My sister watched her during the day. My mom watched her, like it was just… everyone really supported me during that time. My family is everything. We’re like, really, really close in it. If I didn’t live here, if I was coming from somewhere else, I would say “Oh, so this is where the black people live in Pittsburgh.” If you go to other cities, there are black people everywhere, and sometimes it’s hard unless you’re going to a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh to find us. When I talked to my mom about the Hill District, it’s like very community oriented. When I moved to the Hill District, it was but then it wasn’t because I moved to Crawford Square. So a lot of the people that live in Crawford Square didn’t grow up in The Hill District. I had a neighbor who clearly was not from the Hill who would call the cops because she said we were parked too close to her driveway, and so it, like, it just had a different feeling. Also, when I first moved to the Hill District, there wasn’t as much development going on. I remember my son sitting in the kitchen, and a bullet went through our kitchen and, like, went up into our cabinets, and it was, like, just shocking to me because my son was in there, and he could have been shot just for sitting in the kitchen, eating. I didn’t really allow my kids to explore outdoors, either, because I didn’t feel like they were safe, but fast forward to today, I no longer live in that home, but my mom lives in that home, and it’s very different. There aren’t any bullets flying through the windows. Not to say that there isn’t violence going on in the Hill District, but I think that with the development that things are shifting. I think that there’s a lot of good that comes with that shift. But there are, like, people that are being displaced too. So yeah, I think it is different. So my favorite aspect is just how much history it holds. I love history and so when you start digging through just some of the great people that lived in the Hill District and just hearing stories, my grandfather lives right beside my mom and he’s in his 90s, and he has some amazing stories about people in the Hill District, about things that happened, and some of them are like crazy. But I think that the historical aspect of just the Hill District, it’s just so rich in history. I would say my least favorite is I think that there are so many leaders in the Hill District, but at times, instead of everyone sort of coming together to really create change and to create a place that is even better than it is now, I think a lot of times, when we have so many leaders, everyone wants to lead, and no one wants to follow. So I think that that would be my least favorite. I just wish that every leader in the Hill District would get on the same page, because I think that that would just catapult change in the community.