Uptown Pittsburgh

Uptown or The Bluff is a neighborhood in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to the southeast of the city's Central Business District. It is bordered in the north by the Hill District and located across the Monongahela River from South Side. The predominant area zip code is 15219.This area is home to Mercy Hospital as well as Duquesne University. It also includes a residential community that was once flourishing during the first half of the 20th century. Uptown is also the home of the Pittsburgh Fire Bureau 4 Engine and 4 Truck.HistoryThe area was known to American frontiersmen and colonists as Ayer's Hill in honor of a fortification built by the English commander Ayers in the mid-1700s. Sometime near the Revolutionary War and throughout the 19th century the area was referred to as Boyd's Hill in the expanding frontier and than industrial city. The name is said to have been given to the neighborhood after a newly arrived businessman swayed by Hugh Brackenridge, left his downtown office and hanged himself on the hill.The Uptown was first developed by James Tustin, an eccentric English émigré who built an estate in the area in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. His home featured an English taste in architecture and a fruit orchard, and was acknowledged at the time to have been "the most beautiful place in Pittsburgh," according to a 1915 article in the Pittsburgh Gazette–Times. Tustin named his estate "Soho" after his previous residence in Britain, and the name came to be generally applied to the neighborhood.