The formation of Freedom House
In November 1966, former Pennsylvania Governor David Lawrence collapsed at a rally. He was transported to Presbyterian-University Hospital but received no emergency medical care en route—a situation that was all too familiar to Peter Safar, the anesthesiologist in charge that day. Safar and his team administered CPR and restarted Lawrence’s heart, but the governor remained unresponsive. The lack of oxygen to his brain caused irreversible damage and left him in a coma. Lawrence’s family agreed to take him off life support 17 days later.A few months earlier, Safar’s daughter, Elizabeth, had suffered a severe asthma attack while he and his wife were out of town. She was brought to a children’s hospital, but by then, she was already comatose. As Safar, who is known for pioneering modern CPR techniques and establishing the first intensive care unit in the U.S., later wrote in his autobiography, when he finally reached Elizabeth’s bedside later that night, he “could resuscitate her heart and lungs, but not her brain.”
Elizabeth and Lawrence were both transported to hospitals without unnecessary delay, but even that wasn’t guaranteed in the 1960s. In Pittsburgh’s majority-Black Hill District, for instance, most emergency medical transportation was provided by the majority-white police department. Moon, a former resident who describes the relationship between the police and the community as “adversarial,” and he says officers “decided whether they wanted to come, how long they wanted to take to get there or whether they wanted to transport you to the emergency room.”
In the 2023 WQED documentary “Freedom House Ambulance: The First Responders,” lifelong Hill District resident Brenda Tate recalled, “Any time someone was sick, the big black wagon would come up, and they would just throw them in and leave. They used the same wagon to put dead bodies in [and] people they arrested.”
Tired of receiving inadequate responses from the police, local leaders approached Safar’s boss in 1967 to seek advice on buying an ambulance to transport sick patients to the hospital for checkups. The hospital administrator referred them to Safar, who instead proposed starting a pilot ambulance program focused on the treatment and transportation of critically ill or injured patients. In return, community members would agree to be trained as paramedics.