Pittsburgh shooting: Squirrel Hill is a Jewish enclave and Mr. Rogers' neighborhood

The deadly shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday placed Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood on high alert as officials sought to secure the area.

It also placed this Jewish enclave at the center of the nation's attention.

Squirrel Hill is the Jewish hub of Pittsburgh with more than 50 percent of Greater Pittsburgh’s Jewish community living in or around the neighborhood, said Jeff Finkelstein, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh.

"It's a high concentration of the Jewish community," he said. "It makes it very special, actually."

The Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition describes it as a once-bustling business district turned "affluent city neighborhood." The coalition boasts nearly a dozen synagogues, ranging from orthodox to conservative, as well as some Jewish religious private schools.

It was also once home to Fred Rogers, better known as Mr. Rogers and host of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. 

Mr. Rogers "chose to die at his Squirrel Hill home," the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in his obituary. People from the area like to boast of Rogers' residency, reported the Post-Gazette's Peter Smith.

"Local boosters, in between hyping such things as convenient bus lines and an array of solid private and public schools, like to point out that Squirrel Hill was the real-life Fred “Mister” Rogers’ neighborhood," he wrote.

Rogers indeed was a neighbor, including to students of nearby Carnegie Mellon University, also in Squirrel Hill.

Junlei Li, now co-director of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media, described the aura of Rogers in Squirrel Hill while he was a student at Carnegie Mellon.

"There was a lot of folklore. My classmates would tell me stories of walking home to Squirrel Hill and running into 'Mister Rogers.' He would always talk with students and was so interested in who we were," Li told the university's media relations department in March.

Some watching the events in Pittsburgh made the connection to Rogers. For the New York Times' Bari Weiss, it brought to mind one of Rogers' more famous quotes often repeated during tragic events. 

Follow Sean Rossman on Twitter: @SeanRossman