Why Patrick Dowd is on this page

Patrick Dowd (born 1968) is an American Democratic politician and historian who represented District 7 on the Pittsburgh City Council from January 2008 to 2013. The district takes in Bloomfield, East Liberty, Friendship, Garfield, Highland Park, Lawrenceville, Morningside, Polish Hill and Stanton Heights.

Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, Dowd took a B.A. from the University of Missouri before moving to Pittsburgh in 1991 to study under Fritz Ringer in the department of history at the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1999. He has taught history at Winchester Thurston School and at The Ellis School, and is married to Leslie Hammond, also a Pittsburgh history graduate and lecturer; they have six children and live in Highland Park.

His political career began in 2003 with an upset election win over incumbent Board President Darlene Harris for a four-year term on the Pittsburgh Board of Education, where he led a five-member coalition to remove Superintendent John Thompson and oversaw the recruitment of Mark Roosevelt; the accountability framework he authored remained in force after his departure. Elected to the City Council in November 2007, he was the principal architect of the city’s Proclamation to Improve Governance and of CONNECT, an intergovernmental cooperation initiative; in 2010 he led the coalition that defeated Mayor Ravenstahl’s proposed fifty-year lease of all public parking assets.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Patrick Dowd.
• Wikidata Q7146396.

Heritage notes

Family root: diaspora-likely.

The directory threads Patrick Dowd back to the Ó Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.