Friendship was therefore built as a streetcar suburb, and its houses are large, square homes with elaborate architectural embellishments designed for professional-class families in the Victorian period.

As a streetcar suburb, Friendship lacks its own business district, but its residents have access to shopping on Penn Avenue in nearby Garfield and East Liberty, on Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield, and on Walnut Street in Shadyside.

Beginning around 1960, many of these families moved to the suburbs: they were attracted by perceived opportunities outside the city, and repulsed by the construction of massive housing projects in nearby Garfield, and by a misguided urban renewal project's wholesale demolition of East Liberty.

After a zoning change in the 1950s, landlords broke the massive old Victorian houses up into multi-unit apartments, and ripped out or painted over many of their amenities in the process.

The City of Pittsburgh defines neighborhoods to be contiguous with federal census tracts, and as a result considers Friendship to abut Bloomfield at South Graham Street, at the western edge of census tract 807.

[citation needed] This western boundary includes census tract 806 and parts of tract 809, and corresponds to City of Pittsburgh zoning maps from the 1920s, but were defined by neighborhood surveys between 1990 and 1994, in which residents of Friendship, Garfield, Bloomfield, and Lawrenceville were asked to identify their own neighborhood.