Soundwalk interactive installation honors Hill District icons Frankie Mae, Charles Henry Pace

The interactive installation Soundwalk in the Hill District pays homage to the community work of Frankie Mae and Charles Henry Pace as musicians, activists and entrepreneurs from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Taking place from 2-4 p.m. Saturday in the Hill District’s Frankie Mae Pace Park, the Soundwalk celebrates the various sounds of the Hill District through curated exhibits by Duquesne University students.

“This all really began about three years ago,” said Nicole Vilkner, assistant professor of music at Duquesne University. Vilkner, along with one of her classes, created an interactive exhibit like the one that will be on display on this coming Saturday. She and her team quickly realized that giving people sound artifacts to think about history and the meaning of those sounds with a particular time was a good model. They took the idea to the Frick Pittsburgh and hosted an exhibit, Soundwalk at the Frick, which launched in spring 2023.

As the project gained notoriety from the university, Duquesne began to support it with more funding. For this installation, it took a little more groundwork getting approval from the City of Pittsburgh since they would be utilizing a public park, and input from a librarian at the University of Pittsburgh who curates the Charles and Frankie Pace Collection, a collection of artifacts used by Charles Pace to print music. It includes songbooks, photographs, negative images and more.

The production process for Vilkner and her students involved studying and thinking deeply about the Pace family and their contributions.

“The class always starts with them having the impression it will be a normal course,” Vilkner said.

There is a range of exhibit topics, some familiar and others less likely, such as Pittsburgh’s relationship with rain and the noise of Charles Henry Pace’s printer as a sound of success.

“We aimed to not leave the audience with a definitive answer,” Vilkner said. “We wanted to open the conversation so it is really about interpretation.”

Terri Baltimore, activities coordinator at Macedonia FACE Active for Life Center in the Hill District, guided Jesse Thompson, a student at Duquesne University, through his creation of the jitney exhibit.

“Sometimes people don’t get a chance to experience the community by hearing the voices of people who live and work in the neighborhood. So this is like a rare opportunity for folks to hear those voices,” Baltimore said.

Baltimore, who has worked with students and professors on projects in the past, said this one is different.

“The marriage of this project with Frankie Pace Park is just … it’s beautiful,” she said.

Baltimore said explaining the idea of the jitney to Thompson was hilarious and really cool.

“One of the things that is really interesting is that some Pittsburghers and a lot of new folks don’t know what jitneys are,” she said, adding that she explains jitneys as Uber before there was Uber.

“This whole notion of calling up someone, giving them your address or sharing your information, having them for a set fee is not a new experience in the Black community,” she said.

Baltimore, who grew up in East Liberty, has been a jitney passenger for most of her life. Jitneys served as a grapevine, a first means of hearing the news for some folks — it was a bond between the driver and residents. She said August Wilson did a lot with his play “Jitney” to help people understand the experience.

“I would get in the car, and we would ask each other about our respective days and these guys go around the neighborhood, so they see and hear a lot of information,” Baltimore said. “It was mind-boggling to get into a jitney and have somebody say ‘I was riding around the neighborhood and blah, blah, blah happened,’ and you get the scoop before anybody else does.”

Even with Uber, jitneys are still necessary today.

The jitney is such a pivotal experience in Black communities that this exhibit puts you right in the travels through the sounds and found interviews.

“I hope this transports people to a place they have never been before … to be curious and look around for themselves,” Baltimore said.

For more information, visit hilldistrictsoundwalk.com.