Police cleared an Oakland street of hundreds of St. Patrick’s Day weekend revelers Saturday, a day after a porch roof collapse on the same street injured several people.
About 2 p.m., Pittsburgh and University of Pittsburgh police began clearing students and other young people out of the area around Semple and Bates streets.
Police revoked a previously issued permit for an event in the area because the crowd became much larger than the permit allowed, according to a Pittsburgh Public Safety news release.
Semple Street on Friday was the scene of a porch collapse that sent 16 people to hospitals and resulted in injuries to several others.
The roof that collapsed in the 300 block of Semple was accessible only from second-floor windows. About 25 people had crowded onto it before it fell about 5:30 p.m. Friday. Real estate records identified the building owner as the Robert V. Erickson Trust; its principals declined to comment Saturday.
Emily Bourne, a spokeswoman for Pittsburgh Public Safety, said the status of three people in serious condition as a result of the Friday’s roof collapse had not changed.
At 2:30 p.m., Saturday at least 25 police officers from the city and Pitt gathered at Bates Street and herded the crowd farther up Semple by moving slowly in a line across the street. The officers were followed by a street sweeper, which cleaned up empty beer cans and other trash.
Using a bullhorn and slowly walking up Semple, officers threatened the crowd with arrests if the street wasn’t cleared immediately past the intersection of Louisa Street.
By 3 p.m., police had cleared Semple from Bates to Louisa, and many in the crowd moved the party to off-campus housing on nearby McKee Place.
One man was taken to a hospital with minor injuries to his face after falling on the sidewalk, according to the public safety release. Police did not issue any citations or make any arrests.
Brandon Seizer, a Pitt senior psychology major, said people gravitated to the area all day Saturday before the police broke up the party.
“Everybody flooded in, and it just went down,” he said of the situation. “The street was just overwhelmed, and it was more than the police could handle.”
Arthur Morgan, a Pitt junior studying international relations, said the crowd was big but not unruly.
“It’s been pretty well contained,” he said of the gathering. “A lot of people were responsible, nothing more.”
Semple, lined with multiunit brick buildings where students live in off-campus apartments, has been a party scene for years, said Janice Markowitz, an Oakland resident for 50 years.
“Two, three thousand students, they go from party to party to party on that street,” she said. “Binge drinking is the enemy. You can’t just keep making laws and not enforcing them. There needs to be enforcement.”
A Post-Gazette reporter who visited the street before 8 a.m. Saturday saw young people clad in green already drinking in a building courtyard near the site of the porch collapse.
Central Oakland has a concentration of off-campus housing, where students cram together to keep down housing costs, said Andrea Boykowycz, executive director of the nonprofit Oakland Planning and Development Corp.
“It’s hard when you have a bunch of undergraduates who are the adults in the area,” Ms. Boykowycz said Saturday. “There’s no adult check, there’s no good control.”
“Students look for ways to bring their per-bed cost down,” she added. “This is why Oakland suffers from over-occupancy.”
Before the police moved in Saturday to disperse the crowd on Semple Street, the area had been flooded with hundreds of students and other young people celebrating on St. Patrick's Day weekend.
Decked out in green outfits and lugging gallon jugs of green-dyed alcohol, they jammed the street and crowded onto apartment balconies while house music pulsated through the neighborhood.
Pitt and city police patrolled Semple, which had been closed to traffic for another permitted event. Pitt police officers at the corner of Semple and Louisa said students still were occupying the house where the porch collapsed. On Friday, the city Department of Permits, Licenses, and Inspections condemned the building’s porch but deemed the residential structure itself to be sound.
Several Pitt students said they were aware of the Friday incident and knew people who were there when it occurred. Most of them declined to share their names, saying they were underage and had been drinking.
Many said videos and accounts of the collapse had swiftly circulated throughout the campus.
"I must have seen it like 10 times," said one young man, who identified himself only as a Pitt sophomore.
"I probably won't go on a roof anytime soon, but I don't think anyone's nervous," said another student.
Post-Gazette staff writer King Jemison contributed to this report.
First Published: March 15, 2025, 6:44 p.m.
Updated: March 15, 2025, 10:48 p.m.
