Alexander Negley owned a farm called "Fertile Bottom" north of present-day East Liberty along the southern bank of the Allegheny River.

Alexander Negley's son Jacob married Barbara Winebiddle, built a manor house, and developed a village that he called East Liberty after the old grazing commons.

East Liberty truly began to develop as a commercial area in 1843, when Jacob's daughter Sarah Jane Negley married the ambitious lawyer Thomas Mellon.

He achieved this goal and much more: after first becoming a prosperous lawyer, he made his true fortune by marrying Sarah Jane Negley, selling or renting the land near East Liberty that she inherited, and using the proceeds to finance Pittsburgh's nascent industries.

This passenger depot served to connect East Liberty to the city; twenty-six trains transported people to and from downtown on a daily basis.

The East Liberty Station brought floods of European immigrants and African American migrants from the South, who were drawn by Pittsburgh's manufacturing and industrial jobs.

[6] East Liberty's diverse mix of Italian, Anglo-American, German, African-American, Jewish, Polish, Greek, and Irish residents stayed intact until after World War II.

East Liberty's decline was precipitated by a series of government policies relating to the underwriting of mortgages for homes commonly referred to as redlining.

The Cram Maps listed this housing stock as "obsolete," noted the "infiltration of Jews... and Negroes", and the large number of people on relief (the New Deal version of Welfare) as justification for redlining the area.

[8] The result of this redlining was two-fold; first, it made accessing conventional forms of credit for home purchases and renovations difficult; and second, it fostered segregation of low income minorities in a neighborhood that was clearly racially diverse in 1937.

These merchants feared that suburban development would harm East Liberty's status as a market center, and asked the City of Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) to take action.

These demolitions destroyed the dense, walkable commercial district and replaced much of it with unattractive parking lots and vacant properties, hastening the decline of the businesses that remained.

While the URA was remaking the street plan of East Liberty, the City of Pittsburgh's housing authority made a second set of changes to the neighborhood.

During the 1980s, the collection of small shops on Penn Circle South expanded, more than 200 businesses located in East Liberty, and more than $80 million was invested in real estate development.

[21] In addition to its moderately successful property rehabilitation efforts during the 1980s, ELDI was able to remove the failed pedestrian mall on Penn Avenue and return that thoroughfare to its traditional use as a two-way street.

Between 1996 and 2006, ELDI and the City of Pittsburgh worked to attract new “big box” retailers to East Liberty and to remove the 20-story housing projects that surrounded the neighborhood.

[24] Because these efforts involved resettling the largely African-American population of East Liberty's housing projects and attracting several high-end retailers, ELDI and the City have been criticized for acting as agents of Gentrification.

[31][32] In 2010, The New York Times published an article about the revival of East Liberty, and cited the presence of a Google office as a sign of the neighborhood's success.

[33] In 2011, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an article entitled "The trend toward shared working areas arrives" which describes the creation of The Beauty Shoppe, East Liberty's first Coworking space.

[36] In April 2014, the streets making up Penn Circle were renamed, removing a highly visible reminder of the failed urban renewal plans of the 1960s.

The publicly funded project aimed at transit-oriented development, placing residents and retail in close proximity to mass transit in order to encourage urban density and discourage automobile use.

The transit center increases accessibility to the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway that runs along the ravine where the Pennsylvania Railroad once ran.

David Tepper, a business man, owner of the NFL's Carolina Panthers and the MLS's Charlotte FC lived in East Liberty.