Mobile grocery trucks once filled the streets of Pittsburgh public housing

Between 1940 and 1955, the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh built nine public housing communities. These dense apartment complexes had approximately 8,000 units, but none of the essential infrastructure of other neighborhoods, including grocery stores. By 1951, mobile grocery stores had begun operating in the Hill District’s Allequippa Terrace and Addison Terrace and St. Clair Village off Beck’s Run Road. The mobile grocery stores that served Pittsburgh’s public housing appeared decades before the term food desert first appeared in print in the 1990s. Yet, they fulfilled an essential function that contemporary mobile groceries perform in food deserts throughout North America and Europe. The converted buses and bread trucks and the people who drove them have all but disappeared from Pittsburgh history and memories, yet the residents of public housing communities depended on them. “People knew that Joe’s bringing the bus up here at 1 o’clock,” recalls Chris Pirollo, whose father Joe operated one of the mobile markets.