Lincoln Way: The strange street that was abandoned overnight
Lincoln Way, Clairton, a small city outside of Pittsburgh, USA was a bustling street that was abandoned overnight due to the ‘Beast of Lincoln Way’, a jet-black furry beast the size of a horse, that ate domestic pets and prowled the houses looking for blood, terrifying the residents of the street to immediately flee, too scared to step foot back in their homes.
Except, there’s no credible evidence for this, nor are there any newspaper clippings or testimonies from former homeowners on the street, such that it’s just another case of a fabricated tale becoming folklore and being brought into existence by how quickly it spread.
The reality is far more mundane, but perhaps it tells us something more about how communities develop and fall apart, certainly more than a fake Beast of Bodmin-style story ever can.
In reality, the rot set in over decades, not the span of a night; Lincoln Way was a ‘vibrant Black community’, but in America in the early 1900s, that didn’t always mean that people enjoyed great lives.
The community had their own church, shops and facilities, largely because of segregation, with white residents shopping for their produce and worshipping elsewhere that would not allow Black folks to share space.
Bloodshed scarred the area, not from a mythical beast, but from people who should have been the pillars of trust in the community.
In 1925, there was a horrific and brutal attack, in which the police, who were checking on a Black resident suffering from dementia, decided to deal with him in an incredibly inhuman way. The four officers put tear gas through his window, punched and kicked him, cuffed him and chucked him down the stairs and shot him in the hip, all in front of his terrified wife.
Like many small communities in America’s industrial heartlands, this community too began to fall apart. With steel production being key to the history of Pittsburgh, it’s no surprise that many of the road’s residents worked at the nearby Carnegie-Illinois Steel, but even that harmed them, with numerous fines levied for pollution, which impacted those living on the street.
The young adults would leave at the first opportunity in the search for work, and as the population aged, it often saw the men who worked in the mill die before their wives, such that when these elderly residents passed on, their homes were left abandoned, stuffed with memories of lives lived, photographs in frames, books on shelves, but the seats and beds empty.
Communities need new blood, but in Lincoln Way, it was stagnant, with the voided homes slowly decaying with no replacement to follow suit.
In 2012, the final house was vacated, which led to the street becoming rife with vandals and urban explorers, and when in 2015, a fire tore much of the street to shreds, engulfing the homes but thankfully not endangering life, it brought amateur photographers exploring the abandoned rooms, with their crumbling wallpaper and fire-damaged interiors, to craft stories around what had happened there, leading to the myth that would define the street.
At this point, the ‘Beast of Lincoln Way’ was alive and well, prowling the subconscious of the area, but when a couple of years later, the buildings were bulldozed, the smashed windows that allowed the elements in to play with the broken electronics and eerie toys were no more.
Now all that remains of Lincoln Way are the stories of the beast and the urban myth that has built up around the demise of the street.
The truth is far more boring but in many ways scarier, a cautionary tale about the demise of industrial heartland communities in a modern America that has moved on without them.
