Fox Chapel started as a sundown town: a community that was intentionally all white. Created in 1934, the borough doesn’t have “whites only” signs posted along the roads entering the community, but it might as well. For its entire history, Fox Chapel has had a negligible Black population, and, for a long time, there were no Black homeowners.
Many Pittsburghers single out Fox Chapel, Mt. Lebanon, and Sewickley as the metropolitan area’s whitest and most historically segregated communities. In Sewickley and Mt. Lebanon, residents relied on a number of ways to exclude Black people in the 20th century, including racially restrictive deed covenants.
“The premises above described shall in no event be sold to any person not of the White or Caucasian Race,” reads one 1930 covenant for a Mt. Lebanon subdivision.
Another, filed in 1940 for homes in a Sewickley subdivision reads, “No lot or lots … nor any building thereon, shall be used or occupied, or permitted to be used or occupied, by any natural persons other than members of the White or Caucasian Race.” One exception: “The premises may be occupied in part by bona fide domestic servants of another Race employed on the premises.”
Though the deed covenants remain part of a property’s title history, ones that discriminate on the basis of race were declared unenforceable in 1948 by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Fox Chapel took a different approach. Developers there also used deeds to weed out people they deemed undesirable. Instead of categorically excluding Black people, however, deeds there specified that builders could only construct expensive single-family homes approved by an architectural review board.
After splitting from O’Hara Township, the borough’s zoning code excluded all businesses and non-residential land uses. Even today, there are no stores, no pharmacies, no banks, and no apartment buildings in the borough. O’Hara was left with less strictly regulated zoning and commercial properties that Fox Chapel’s founders deemed unsuitable.
Fox Chapel Manor, created in 1924, was the first subdivision inside the future borough’s boundaries. Its developer, Walter A. Scott (the current mayor’s grandfather), required new homes to cost at least $15,000 ($269,000 in 2024) and be reviewed by three architects, including one selected by the Pittsburgh Real Estate Board.
None of Scott’s deeds, however, contained racial restrictions. Instead, his real estate company’s ads touted the community as “restricted.” It was the genteel way of saying “whites only.”
By 1940, Fox Chapel had 1,080 residents: 967 were white, 20 were Black, and there were 93 foreign-born people living there. All of the Black Fox Chapel residents were domestic workers, identified in the census taken that year as “servants.”
A decade later, though Fox Chapel had more people —1,720 — all of its 70 Black residents were live-in maids, butlers (some of them married couples), and chauffeurs. In another example of this divide, all of the janitors, cooks, maids, and dishwashers who lived on the Shadyside Academy campus at the time were Black.
Fox Chapel’s wealthy residents realized they had a serious problem less than a decade after the borough’s founding: there was no public transportation to bring employees to private homes and country clubs, and there were no places within its boundaries for workers to live as owners or renters.
Instead of changing the policies that led to this exclusion, in 1942, five men bought a fleet of used buses and formed the Fox Chapel Transportation Company. They began shuttling workers into Fox Chapel.
“The quaintly antiquated buses daily shuttle up and down the hill to Aspinwall,” wrote Post-Gazette reporter Ed Jensen in 1956, “hauling an army of cooks, maids, nurses, gardeners and handymen and caddies for the two country clubs.”
Walter A. Scott III, the early developer’s grandson, didn’t know about the bus company when Pittsburgh City Paper interviewed him. He also doesn’t believe that Fox Chapel deliberately excluded Blacks from living there.
“I don't know that there was anything intentional going on in Fox Chapel,” Scott said. “It seemed like it was a long time before many African Americans moved into the community. But I don't know if there was anything intentional going on.
Scott also asserted that he is unaware of the many published accounts that Fox Chapel was hostile to Blacks. “Where are you hearing that information? I've not heard that,” he said.
Why has Fox Chapel had so few Black residents in its history? “It's just sort of the way things happened. I don't think anybody was trying to say, hey, you can't move here,” Scott explained.
Historians, Black Pittsburghers, and historical records say otherwise.
“In Mt. Lebanon, an overwhelmingly white suburb in the South Hills, real estate agents simply refused to show homes to Blacks and Jews,” wrote historians Joe Trotter and Jared Day in Race and Renaissance, their 2010 book on local Black history. “Such was the case in many other suburban communities, including Fox Chapel, Deer Lakes, Keystone Oaks, and Bethel Park.”
In an interview before he died Feb. 2, Community College of Allegheny County history professor Ralph Proctor described the Pittsburgh area communities with the highest barriers to Black entry. “Shadyside was horrible. Oakland was horrible,” he said. “Fox Chapel, unthinkable.”
“There's a lot of unwritten rules,” says Tom Powers, who co-wrote a 2008 history of O’Hara Township. “A seller could say, ‘I'm not excluding a Black guy, I'm excluding him for the fact that he didn't have the money’ or, you know, ‘His plan didn't pass the board’ or what have you.”
That’s precisely what Fox Chapel’s founders did. Deed covenants and the borough’s zoning code kept Fox Chapel white for most of the 20th century. Fox Chapel’s 1955 master plan underscored this by promoting development policies that only the wealthy could afford. And in Pittsburgh, when Black residents struggled to make $2,500 a year in 1945, economic and social conditions meant that wealthy and white were frequently interchangeable.
The plan’s promotion of large lot sizes (one acre was the smallest), no apartments, pricey homes, and the lack of basic infrastructure were high barriers, and Fox Chapel’s residents knew it. “Anyone daring to locate in Fox Chapel should realize to start with that he or she cannot run down to the corner store for cigarettes or sundries or ride a street car home or to the movies,” wrote Ezra Stiles, the plan’s author. “Servants and children must be transported by the family car.”
Despite a sprinkling of Black Lives Matter signs in yards mainly in Fox Chapel’s southern part, and a successful 2021 push to have Squaw Run Road and its namesake creek renamed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder the year before, Fox Chapel remains overwhelmingly white. The 2020 census reported 5,343 Fox Chapel residents; 59 people (1.1%) reported that they were Black or African American. Black residents comprise 13.5% of Allegheny County’s total population.
The borough’s demographic profile and incidents of racism reported in Fox Chapel Area schools hint at systemic unresolved issues. Taken together, the numbers and history tell a compelling story: Fox Chapel was, and in some ways remains, a sundown town.
