Apr 30 2009
It was four years ago that filmmaker Chris Ivey listened to Alethea Sims speechifying after a paintball attack on her home, East Mall. The attack was leveled by policy makers, neighborhood advocates and elected officials at a "celebration" event at which they shot paint at the ugly building and threw confetti and felt well-meaning.
After all, they were destroying a bad model of public housing, with plans to replace it so poor people could lead more attractive lives, more integrated with the greater East Liberty neighborhood.
East Mall was demolished, Alethea Sims went to a public housing apartment across Penn Circle and waited. She also organized residents and inserted her foot in the door of the room where the suits met in order to get them heard.
Today, she was in the "reserved" row of seats at a ground-breaking ceremony that brought out the same public officials and their successors, but this time, she was happy.
A new building will replace the North half of East Mall and she will be in it in about 14 months. Not only that, she was one of the neighborhood advocates who sat at the table for every planning session to make sure this development -- mixed-income rentals with retail on the sidewalk -- would address the needs of residents who never had a voice.
Chris Ivey was there today to film the event and talk to her again, continuing his documentation of East Liberty's transformation in the series "East of Liberty."
Former East Mall residents will have first dibs on East Liberty Place North -- 54 apartments, 38 of them reserved for low-income people. It's 75,000 square feet, with space for six retailers.
Ms. Sims said the East Mall residents she has heard from "are all a definite maybe" to return. She is a definite and has picked out a top-floor eastern corner. The building is four stories.
The Community Builders developer is working with the Urban Redevelopment Authority and nine financing partners. The building will be certified by the Green Building Council and cost about $13 million.
Most ground-breakings are insipid events, with a line-up of suits saying what a great day it is, how proud they are and how it wasn't just me but a whole team of people and naming elected officials so no one is miffed. But this ground-breaking, if you knew a little about what happened to bring it about, rated a little higher. It was an emotional milestone for the many people who had to pull the process through an arduous obstacle course during a financial meltdown.
As the market changed, focus and purpose changed, and everyone who was committed had to be reconsulted and repersuaded and tax credits had to be refigured and all the complicated formulae for affordable housing financing had to be tweaked and all the residents had to be assured that their interests were in the mix and then it had to be done all over again, but differently.
"Probably only a thousand people had to work very hard to make this all happen," said Rob Stephany, who was in on the oriinal planning when he worked for East Liberty Development. He is now executive director of the URA. "There were a lot of emotional times in church basements with Alethea and CORE [Concerned Residents of East Liberty] making sure we understood this is a place where people live."
Ernie Hogan, ELDI's director of housing, said ELDI is keeping its promise to the residents who were displaced from all the demolished public housing in the area. "We have 300 units back in the system, and we are planning 200 more."
After a group of dignitaries, including the mayor, pitched gold-plated shovels into some dirt and threw it into the construction site, Chris Ivey trained his camera on Alethea for an interview.
"At the paintball party, where we met," she told him, "I said I would throw confetti when someone hands me a set of keys. In 14 months, I will have my keys. I'll be going back home."
Walkabout congratulates everyone who is happy about East Liberty Place North and wants to point out that "Eastside" is missing from the name.
Apr 29 2009
By page 92 of Michael Eversmeyer's "Pittsburgh 1900-1945," I was crying. It was the Rittenhouse Hotel that sprang the leak.
I had already mourned the loss of many of the buildings that came earlier in the book -- the Allegheny City Markethouse, the Jenkins Arcade and the "new" Wabash Depot to name a few. But the Rittenhouse was new to me. Unfortunately, it was old at a time when old was awful -- the mid-60s. We have only become a little more vigilant about preserving our fine old architecture since.
This book of historic postcards, just published by Arcadia Publishing, is a record of what Pittsburgh looked like during its most dynamic years.
Mr. Eversmeyer, an architect and preservationist, wrote in his introduction that he began collecting postcards about 10 years ago when his wife, "determined that I should have a hobby, presented to me on my birthday an album and a stack of postcards." He added to the collection, focusing on the years that interest him most. Postcards became all the rage in the early 20th century. Americans mailed a billion postcards in 1913.
Because he worked for years as the city's historic planner, Mr. Eversmeyer said the buildings were all familiar to him; but the cards showing people clustered in groups, attending sporting events and pointing to the city from perches along Grandview Avenue were particularly interesting, he said, because they show the way we lived and how people used their public spaces -- "very much like we do today."
I asked him to pick one building from the bunch to describe as a particularly sad loss. He cited one in East Liberty, where his current focus is: He is writing a proposal to the state nominating the core of East Liberty as an historic district.
"A particularly damaging loss was the East End Savings and Trust Building" at the corner of Highland and Penn Avenues, he said. It was razed in 1970. A one-story branch bank sits there now. "It was so prominent. You really had a sense that you were in an important commercial district. It gave a real urban character and quality to the streetscape. One story buildings just don't do that."
This book has added another layer to my belief that preservation is a hallmark of a great society. We're a good society; we still have a wealth of buildings in which our grandparents and great-grandparents lived, did business and enjoyed themselves.
But if we had even 20 of the great buildings we sacrificed for urban renewal, Pittsburgh would be a mecca for architecture buffs worldwide. We would be beyond compare with any other city in the country except perhaps New York.
No one goes to Rome to see the new buildings, and great new buildings are celebrated because they will be historic landmarks someday, such as the Guggenheim in Barcelona and the Sydney Opera House.
On page after page of this book of postcards, descriptions of Gothics, Beaux Arts and Victorians gems precede the epitaph, "demolished in the mid-60s during urban renewal." The '60s were a great time for social change, but they wreaked havoc on the marvelous specimens of our built environment.
Most of the views offered in this book are between 1905 and the 1920s. The chapters begin with bridges and rivers, succeed to Downtown, the North Side, the South Side, the Hill, the Strip, Lawrenceville, Oakland, East Liberty and the East End. The final chapter shows people at pastime sites, including Luna Park -- a amusement park, and Forbes Field, the 1909-1970 home of the Pirates, both in Oakland; Lake Elizabeth in Allegheny Commons Park on the North Side, and McKinley Park in Mount Washington.
The book is being sold by local retailers and on the website www.arcadiapublishing.com, the site for more information about this and other books of historic Pittsburgh photos.
Apr 28 2009
Borders are funny things. In our emotional lives, they are immutable. We put up fences and fight wars to defend them. Yet they fall away so easily when we want them to.
In this city of fiercely held boundaries is a little neighborhood called Larimer. Deserted of investment for the past few decades, it is now home to Bakery Square, one of the most ambitious "lifestyle" centers the city has seen in recent years.
Yet on its Website -- www.bakery-square.com -- it is described as "Bakery Square at Eastside." Its commercial mission makes it "well-positioned to draw on the nearby, desirable and well-educated neighborhoods of the East End."
Stakeholder Craig Marcus, whose photography studio is in Larimer, penned a letter titled "Where's Larimer?" in which he scolds Walnut Capital for snubbing Larimer. "Where exactly is Eastside?" he asks.
Mosites' Whole Foods development on Centre Avenue first used "Eastside" to imply a blend of East Liberty and Shadyside. It may have been well-intentioned, but the poorer brother always feels slighted when his name is co-opted. Many in East Liberty saw "Eastside" as a mask to make East Liberty more palatable to people who lock their car doors in black neighborhoods.
Now Eastside is encroaching on Larimer, and Craig, who helped found the Larimer Green Team, wants the big players to acknowledge where they are.
He writes: "Why not take pride in investing in the neighborhood that hosts your business, by strengthening the perception of that neighborhood...? This would provide an immeasurable boost to our community..."
The Green Team is 6-months old and has 15-20 members, he said. It is one of several Larimer-based groups. Most neighborhoods have at least three non-profit entities made up largely of residents, and some are more obscure than others. That makes it a challenge for developers, who are expected to solicit neighborhood input into their plans.
According to Mr. Marcus, "the public's voice is nowhere to be found in this process."
Todd Reidbord, president of Walnut Capital, told Walkabout he can't imagine how anyone could have missed all the vetting that has been done on plans for Bakery Square.
"No project that I know of has had more publicity than this," he said. "It has been through the city, the county, the school district, the URA, city planning, PennDOT, ELDI [East Liberty Development Inc.], the Shadyside Action Coaltion" and a Larimer group confusingly named East Liberty Concerned Citizens. It is the most visible Larimer advocacy group. "Also, Councilman [Ricky] Burgess has been involved in every detail.
"I apologize if we missed someone," he said. The Green Team "is a new one on me."
He admitted Bakery Square is "technically" in Larimer "but isolated from what I would consider Larimer."
It would seem to be Larimer that remains isolated.
Facing Mellon Park -- the Shadyside side of Penn Avenue -- Bakery Square is a mammoth design that features the former Nabisco plant and includes 121,000 square feet of street-level retail.
With its Penn Avenue entrance, it has its back to Larimer. Right beside it is The Village at Eastside, home to Trader Joe's.
There's an aerial view at http://www.bakery-square.com/aerial.php that shows the relationships of all the developments using "Eastside" as a location.
"Eastside is a brand the Square is buying into," said Mr. Reidbord. Instead of identifying where Bakery Square is, he said, "I try to just say Bakery Square."
It is big enough to be its own village, although its only housing is a hotel. Office people will be moving in this fall, with retail to follow next year.
Meanwhile, "Larimer is working hard to find its rightful place on the map," Mr. Marcus writes. His group's efforts, and those of the East Liberty Concerned Citizens, have been paying-off. The neighborhood has sprouted community gardens, it has a community plan, strong advocates who include state Sen. Jim Ferlo, some small-business investment and a smattering of young homeowners.
Like Larimer and East Liberty before it, North Siders have groused for years that "North Shore" is a mask. Developers call it a brand.
Regardless of what a place is called, many neighborhoods would bow and scrape to have adjacency to the "desirable" developments Larimer, East Liberty and the North Side have.
Successful neighborhoods let their borders blend. Residents know where the lines are but they don't get up in arms over them.
Apr 27 2009
When he decided to open a store, Dan Schwarz picked Mount Washington, the neighborhood his family has lived in for four generations. He found a good fit in a former doctor's office on Merrimac Street just eight blocks from his house.
If you stop by and see the "Back in 15 minutes" sign, he's probably picking up his daughter at school.
Mount Washington boasts two new businesses, Becky's One-Stop Shop, a beauty salon on Southern Avenue, and Dan's shop, where you can buy billiards equipment and look at some old pool tables in various stages of disassembly, disrepair and distress.
In the 1980s, Dan was a cabinetmaker whom the billiard company Saunier-Wilhelm hired to do restorations. He started his own business restoring pool tables in his home and, several months ago, decided to open a store because "everybody kept asking me for parts," he said.
The logical location would seem to be Shiloh, the most intensively retail area in the neighborhood, but he chose the vacant doc's office because he can afford the rent.
You can buy cues, cue tips, a rack of balls, replacement racks, chalk, even shuffleboard powder. He will be adding darts and dart supplies. Several companies that sell new pool tables give him a commission when his customers shop from their catalogs, which he has on hand. And, for good measure, he sells a range of Steelers merchandise.
"People always ask, ‘Is this worth fixing up?'" he said. "I tell them that you pay a lot more" for inferior tables than for restoration of finely crafted tables. New tables have thinner frames, screw-in pieces instead of bolt and less of the heft pool players prize.
He has a "before" and "after" display of two table legs, one he restored, the other yet unrestored. It's shocking to realize what beauty can lie beneath neglected wood.
"My biggest advantage is that there's aren't many of me out there," he said. Few enough people restore old tables that he gets referrals from all over the country. One old table will be valued at $35,000 when he is finished restoring it, he said.
Merrimac Street is almost solely residential, but it is directly across Grandview Avenue from the top of McArdle Roadway. "I tell people, just stay straight" at the top of the roadway.
"I looked in the South Hills, but it's far from the north neighborhoods, and I could have moved to Cranberry, which is booming, but it's so far" north. "This is right in the middle of everything."
Apr 24 2009
It was a great day to take a walk. I took mine in the Hill District with Terri Baltimore and Denys Candy of Find the Rivers! and Pitt students Aleia Lopez, Jose Diaz and Jun Park.
We did the easiest of three tours engineering students devised as a class project last year. It started at Bedford Avenue and Cassatt Street, went one block north to Cliff Street and then east up Cliff to Ledlie before turning back onto Bedford.
The easy, medium and hard walks are part of a strategic plan Find the Rivers! is working on with Hill District stakeholders. Rivers! is a non-profit community-building organization focusing on green spaces as a component of the Hill's economic recovery. The plan is to connect the parks and green areas already there to new ones to form a cohesive network. Find out more aboutFind the Roivers!, its partnerships and its history by visiting www.findtherivers.net
Rivers! has benefitted from the work of students in disciplines ranging from architecture to creative writing.
It will take years to turn the Hill into the kind of green place that mainstream folks call a destination, but to some of us, it already is that destination. With its unsung yet sweeping views and growing investment opportunities, it is ripe for discovery.
On a promontory overlooking the Strip and the North Side, Cliffside Park, a kid's playground, was obscured by weeds last year. Jun Park and Jose Diaz, grad students in sociology, led a clean-up crew last fall. They cut six-foot tall weeds and have maintained the lot since. Rivers! is interested in turning the formerly-weedy lot into a garden.
Denys Candy said much of the land the group is targeting is publicly owned.
"We're excited about this year," he said. "We just put out an RFP [request for proposals] for a comprehensive design of a green print."
The neighborhood will be part of the process, as it has been since Find the Rivers! began its foray into the Hill in 2002.
An ultimate goal is to uncover miles of streams that are now buried and confined to culverts. Maybe one day it will be a destination that's good for the Hill. A colleague of mine said it will take a visionary with his fingers crossed to make that happen.
The visionaries are already here. And they have reinforcements.
Apr 22 2009
Earth Day was born 39 years ago today, when tweets came only from birds and blackberries from prickly plants.
If you can part with your gadgets long enough to join the thousands of area residents in clean-ups, tree plantings, garden weedings and other green events this week and coming weekend, you'll have something to tweet proudly about. Take your cameras, though, and post your photos in our Earth Day gallery at http://community.post-gazette.com/media/g/earthdaycleanup/default.aspx
Tomorrow at 9:30 a.m., 50 students from Weil Early Childhood Center will plant a tree and celebrate Arbor Day at the Carnegie Library branch at Centre Avenue and Kirkpatrick Street in the Hill. Activities include story time with tree-themed books, planting locally-harvested Kentucky Coffee Tree seeds, arts and crafts and songs.
On Friday, 3,500 children at 43 Pittsburgh schools will clean their campuses and Friends of the Riverfront volunteers will pick up litter on the Jail Trail.
Friends of the Pittsburgh Urban Forest, Carnegie Library staff and volunteers from PNC and Duquesne Light will visit Homewood Early Childhood Center, Faison K-8, Minadeo PreK-5, Montessori PreK-8, Manchester PreK-8, Allegheny K-5, Concord K-5, and Grandview K-5 to plant trees that Duquesne Lights has donated.
***
Saturday is the big day, when thousands of residents of more than 100 neighborhoods and municipalities in the area join other Americans for the Great American Clean-up.
Volunteers from Comcast will help North Siders stake and mulch 30 new trees from the city-county TreeVitalize program, paint park benches, weed gardens and sweep the Allegheny Commons Park's promenade on Saturday.
***
Some events have already happened.
Many neighborhoods held Earth Day clean-ups last weekend. Boris reported 25 "redd-ups" on Saturday, 11 for which he has results: More than 1,500 volunteers at 11 sites collected about 30 tons of litter. Monroeville's 680 volunteers collected 14 tons and 300 tires.
Three-hundred Duquesne University Evergreen volunteers helped residents in the Hill and Uptown collect nine tons of litter and 200 tires, and another 150 Duquesne students volunteered with residents on the South Side.
Collier's 160 volunteers collected 5.5 tons. The Nine Mile Run Watershed's 55 volunteers rid the area of about a 1/2 ton.
***
To find out how you can volunteer for clean-ups this weekend, e-mail boris.weinstein@verizon.net or call your neighborhood's community council or community development corporation for more details. You can also check your neighborhood's individual list-serve and web sites for details. (Some are listed under "Neighborhood Sites" to the left of this post.)
Happy Earth Day.
Earlier today, at the Pittsburgh Pirates' request, 25 volunteers from Renew Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Job Corps and Academy Systems and Citizens Against Litter made a clean sweep of the North Shore for Earth Day, reports Boris Weinstein, the pied piper of the regional anti-litter movement and founder of Citizens Against Litter.
"Volunteers picked up litter for a couple hours and were then guests of the Pirates for the Pirates/Marlins afternoon game," he wrote in an email. "The good thing about the North Shore clean sweep was that the North Shore, without our help, has to be one of the cleanest (if not the cleanest) places in Pittsburgh, a real credit to the Pirates, the parking lot owners/operators and the new businesses in the area."
The Hill District got a jump on Earth Day with an Earth Week schedule of events, starting April 17 with a clean-up Uptown. Coordinated by the Hill House Association, a dozen groups have teamed up for a week-long sweep that extends through Saturday.
Among several clean-ups, tours and plantings, two events today from 3 to 5 p.m., include a recycled crafts workshop for kids at the King Reading Center, 636 Herron Ave., and tour of the John Wesley AME Zion Church, 594 Herron Ave., where a geo-thermal pump has been installed.
For more information call 412.392.6479.
***
Apr 17 2009
The weather isn't the only thing about which people talk and do nothing. Enter another discussion about gun violence.
It was Thursday night at the New Hazlett Theater in Allegheny Center on the North Side but it could have been two years ago at the same place or six months ago in another place or three weeks ago somewhere else. Pick a place, pick a time and you'll find a bunch of people banging their heads against a wall over gun violence.
A spate of it or one horrific event usually prompts these panels of city, county, state and federal folks and a smattering of concerned citizens. About the only good that comes of it is that some raconteurs and cranks get a chance to perform or blow off steam.
State Rep. Jake Wheatley, 19th district, told the audience of about 40 that violence is a public health crisis, gun violence being "the "most grotesque." We all know that. It would more grotesque if the lost souls spraying AK-47 fire into cars and houses went to the firing range once in a while.
Most of the talk at the New Hazlett was about efforts to pass laws that hold gun owners responsible enough to report the loss of a gun that's subsequently used in a crime. The only one that has made it to the House floor gave the gun owner three chances to report a missing gun used in a crime, Wheatley said. That's three "oh no, where'd I put my gun?"s and three crimes. The first penalty was to have been like a speeding ticket.
It seems wildly dysfunctional not to call police the first time your gun is missing, crime or no crime, especially if you defend your right to have it like a mother bear defends her cubs.
But police say the number of guns that are stolen and pawned or sold for drugs is the major reason for the epidemic of gun violence. Lots of them are straw purchases, made by friends without records, from pawn shops. A police detective said a fair number of guns end up on the street because rich kids on heroin hocked their dad's gun.
Who in his right mind could be against responsible gun ownership? Knowing where it is and reporting it if it's gone - how is that a threat to the Second Amendment? Yet the gun lobby quashes even the soundest, sanest attempts to address this national crisis.
City Councilman Bruce Kraus said Council's ordinance requiring reporting within 24 hours, with a $500 penalty for the first offense, is one of five in the state.
"The debate is, ‘Do we have the power to do this?' and we believe we do. State law wouldn't allow a city council to regulate ownership, "but our argument is that once it is separated from its owner, it is an illegal weapon," he said. "We want to amass a coalition of municipalities that have passed legislation and go to Harrisburg and demand they pass it statewide."
A man in the audience pleaded, "Let's be Americans about this." He defended his right to not know where the heck he put his gun and in the same breath his right to own it "to protect my family, even against the government."
Rest assured that the fastest-growing chapter of our well-armed militia is shooting up cars, houses, trees, innocent kids, not so innocent kids, other bystanders and the odd street lamp while a bunch of people hold another meeting.
Apr 17 2009
If you haven't walked a mile and a half in Lemington's shoes, you haven't walked. Here's your chance.
Lemington Community Services is holding a Legacy Walk tomorrow, Saturday, April 18, to raise money to serve the neighborhood's elders, which is its prime mission.
Walkers will gather at the Cornerstone Baptist Church, 1701 Lincoln Ave. Get there by 8:30 a.m. with $20 to register. Make checks out to Lemington Community Services.
With a happy group of residents and volunteers, you will walk up Lincoln Avenue to the Kingsley Center, where a volunteer waving a big yellow, gold and green flag will offer you a bus ticket to ride back to the church. LCS's staff will wear purple lanyards to assist you, and an aid stations will be set up at Six Mount Zion Church with water and other services.
Call ahead to reserve a T-shirt: 412.362.7301.
Apr 15 2009
National Geographic offers a look at what it calls "the new suburb" with a virtual map on its web site that closely resembles the South Side Works. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/00/earthpulse/sprawl/index_flash.html
The Works incorporates housing, retail, offices, entertainment, restaurants and bars on the street grid model but with outdoor gathering places and amenities that include a river trail that connects to the Hot Metal Bridge that connects to the Eliza Furnace Trail that connects to Downtown than connects to the North Side.... you get the picture.
Connection is at the heart of New Urbanism, which spawned the oft-cited concept of "sustainability." (Argh! that word again!) But it's not jargon. Like in our bodies, connective arteries are what keep us alive. A sustainable lifestyle can be passed down to other generations. That's kind of crucial.
Subscribing to "smart growth" principles, New Urbanism champions a built environment designed to integrate uses rather than isolating them and to serve the most natural human endeavors, starting with walking and working through mass transit before settling on the automobile. That's been the antithesis of suburbanism. Is it too hopeful to add, "until now"? Maybe not.
You may be up on the widespread discussions among pundits about suburbs and their future. James Howard Kunstler, a favorite of Walkabout, has been writing about sprawl and its rapacious impact on farms, wetlands and the world climate for a long time. Only recently, with our descent into housing-forclosure hell, have others been perking up to the issue.
The Atlantic Monthly wrote in March about the meltdown of suburbia. Newspapers from Toronto to San Francisco (to Pittsburgh) followed suit. The Post-Gazette carried a piece by David Villano, a freelance writer in Miami, in the April 5 Forum section entitled, "Suburbs - Our New Slums?"
While we wish no slumhood on any part of this great land, it's about time the concept has diffused outward from the city, since everything else seems to have done. To this lover of the urban, the most blighted city neighborhood still looks more promising than the obscenities of landscaping and design known as McMansions.
When the Works first opened, it struck me as just another Waterfront -- a mall on steroids. But I've revised my opinion. The Works has filled in early gaps, and it connects to the historic street grid of the South Side. The Cheesecake Factory may be gaudy and oversized like too much of suburbia, but a lot of people can ride their bikes or walk to it.
National Geographic's model of the new suburbia does what the South Side Works' developers couldn't: It brings trolleys into the heart of it.
We used to have those.
The virtual map, which you can mouse over for descriptions, depicts a blend of the best of the city - density and a hearty pulse - with the best of the suburbs - casual, upscale-looking places. Walkabout's position is that nothing beats preservation and adaptive reuse of what's already built. But if full-blown development must be appeased, this seems to be the most intuitive and lasting.
For a stronger and more expert opinion, visit James Howard Kunstler at http://www.kunstler.com/
To read some of the "new-slum" articles, visit:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime/
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09095/960370-109.stm/
And let us know what you think.
Apr 14 2009
Greenfield has been chosen to receive a Sprout Fund mural and is holding an idea session with arists at 5:30 p.m. tomorrow, April 15, at the Heinz History Center, 1212 Smallman St., Strip District.
Connect Greenfield, the neighborhood group that applied for the mural, is calling on residents to attend.
Alison Oehler, a founder of Connect Greenfield, said ideas can also be submitted by email to info@connectgreenfield.com
The site of the mural is 563 Greenfield Ave., in the business district.
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