Hazelwood Greenway

An inaccessible greenway, with degraded trails and dangerous overgrowth, that’s camouflaged from the community seems like a tragic oxymoron. Sadly, the oxymoron was reality for Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood Greenway.

Hazelwood Greenway, along with 12 other greenways, was protected from development but offered no benefits to the surrounding communities due to its run-down conditions. The Greenway Stewardship program aims to improve these greenways, using Hazelwood as its pilot program.

Hazelwood Greenway is the largest among Pittsburgh’s 183 acres of greenways, but that’s where the impressive statistics end. Because of deteriorated trail conditions, overgrown vines, an ailing forest, and no proper wayfinding signs, the greenway was almost useless to Pittsburgh residents.

Trust for Public Land provided a grant to boost restoration efforts, such as clearing trails and establishing maintenance work. The Hazelwood Greenway project furthers TPL’s 10-Minute Walk® campaign, which aims to improve nearby park access for historically disenfranchised communities.

Greenways can be great assets to communities, according to Owen Franklin, Pennsylvania state director for Trust for Public Land. “Sometimes it just takes the intentional work of a host of partners to [connect people] to public space and feel ownership of it.”

“The residents of Hazelwood have put their back and hearts into this,” says Sonya Tilghman, Hazelwood Initiative executive director. She says that the pilot project springs from Hazelwood’s skill, talent, and dedication, “from our board members and neighborhood volunteers to Tiffany Taulton, our director of community initiatives, who also lives here.”

Visitors enjoy hiking, snowshoeing, environmental education, and volunteer opportunities. The greenway restoration work includes habitat restoration, planting trees to improve forest biodiversity, preventing soil erosion and landslides, and workforce development.

“We don’t have our own city nature park in Hazelwood, so the greenway is all this neighborhood has for a place to hike and be in nature,” says Taulton. “Having healthy green space is also important because we have a high rate of asthma in the community, so we need those trees to clean the air and reduce the heat in the summer.”