Aug 31 2009
I was having a Bloomfield moment this morning when a little dog sporting a red cap caught my eye.
On the corner of Liberty and Cedarville, Jean Donatelli and her 8-year-old Shih Tzu, Addie, had stopped to talk to Barbara Hirst. Rather, Jean was talking. Addie was staring at something three inches off the sidewalk with the Shih Tzu's famous ‘you-want-a-piece-of-me?' expression.
Jean lives around the corner on Friendship Avenue and was out walking her dog when she ran into Barbara, who lives in Morningside but whose doctor is in Bloomfield. How they know each other is that Jean is "the sister of a friend of mine's husband," said Barbara.
In my neighborhood moments, I wander around taking photos of buildings, alley houses, storefronts, kids playing, people talking, local signs, whatever says "Pittsburgh."
A red-capped dog is unusual, but a darkened hardware store with a "closed" sign is not. I was alerted to the closing of Bloomfield Hardware last week, though it has been a few months since that business of 80-plus years went dark.
Next door, at B&J Cleaners, Maryanne Wegert said losing the hardware store is a "great loss" for Bloomfield. "It's going to be missed. This guy would take care of people's lamps, fix their screens and even made deliveries." Just the other day, she said she saw people unload screens from their car and walk over to the door of the hardware store and make faces of despair when they saw the notice that the store had closed.
"I'm certainly going to miss it," said Andrew Ellsworth, a resident of Friendship. "That kind of store is a dying breed," he said. "People who worked there understood their products and knew their customers and were really helpful. It served a big area, from Bloomfield to the Hill to Lawrenceville and Shadyside. They helped me with various odd jobs, like what kind of blade to use, how to sweat pipes."
Neighborhood hardware stores, which have closed all over the city, "had a different flavor to them," he said. He could get a pane of glass cut at the Bloomfield Hardwarde After it closed, he said he had to search around to find a place that would cut glass.
"I made a conscious effort to support them, because they were a local institution. I feel like the place needs a eulogy."
Walkabout is trying to reach the owner, whom customers knew as Dave, to find out why he closed and other details about his business.
Aug 31 2009
It's been forever since Larryville had a 25-piece accordion band playing inside an empty swimming pool ... So isn't it about time?
Just about.
From 3 to 7 p.m. on Sept. 12 -- the 50th anniversary of the Soviet launch of Luna 2, the 35th anniversary of the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the birthdays of Maurice Chevalier and Barry White -- 18 accordion players and 30 costumed folk dancers, a West African drum and dance ensemble and, ultimately, everyone like you and me who squeezes in for a world dance party will turn Leslie Pool into a waterless wonder of whimsy.
Deb Knox, one of the accordionists, a member of the Balkan Babes and the event manager, said the Accordion Pool Party -- open to the public for $5 a person -- is just a big event to get the neighborhood to start thinking about what it can make happen more permanently at Leslie pool, which has been closed for five years.
The band has been assembled and rehearsing since July.
The pool is off 46th Street behind the Boys and Girls Club, which is on Butler Street.
Deb and Susan want to hear from you if you are an artist, designer or visionary and have ideas on how to decorate the lawn or want to serve as lifeguards helping people set up lawn chairs and helping things run smoothly. They want to hear from you if you have experience at tango, two-step, ceili or czardas.
After the party has had a chance to become a sweet memory, the neighborhood will start holding idea sessions on what to do with Leslie Pool.
This is about a neighborhood figuring out how to take a problem - a closed pool that was covered with debris, broken glass and weeds that filled 60 construction-sized trash bags -- and seek its solution by first having a blast.
There must be something in the water that one neighborhood would be so good at seeing even an empty space as half full.
In its relatively short time as a happening place, Larryville is once again making something so quirky happen that, even if you're envious that you didn't think of it first, you would never in a million years have thought of it. Like Art All Night: Yeah, let's get a big space and have everyone and his sister make something that's kind of like art and display it and hundreds of people will come when they would otherwise be sawing logs ... it will be HUGE.
Art All Night has become huge since it was first held in 1998, always moving to larger spaces.
The Accordion Pool Party, whose organizers obtained support from The Sprout Fund, the Lawrenceville Corp., Citiparks, Councilman Patrick Dowd and the Young Preservationists Association, is billed as an historic, one-time event.
But in Lawrenceville, you just never know.
Aug 28 2009
One of my phone messages this morning was from a man in Brookline. He sounded rankled, and you can imagine why: His neighborhood was not featured in yesterday's paper as troubled, beleaguered and facing the loss of yet something it values.
I'd written a story about how people in Sheraden, facing closure of their post office, are protesting tomorrow at the Corliss branch on Hillsboro Street. I quoted residents there about the conditions they have to endure, the same ones you hear about from most neighborhoods -- blighted properties, lousy landlords, trash-head tenants, potholes and weeds. Sheraden has the added cache of having had nine suspicious fires in two months.
This caller must not read "City Walkabout." If he did, he would have called me last month, outraged at my post about how much Brookline Boulevard offers its residents: a fire station, a pita factory that specializes in Midde Eastern groceries, two marvelous bakeries, a man who fixes broken shoes, complimentary doggie poop bags on sidewalk posts... I could go on but maybe Brookline has more than one whiner -- which I doubt.
The Nation has a negative streak running down through it, but to whine that your neighborhood doesn't get bad pub? Is @ a ‘burgh thing? Say it ain't so! Authentic, unpretentious, blunt and mouthy, yes, but we are not whiners. This guy must have hired Meryl Steep to help him get the accent down so he could pass.
As it turns out, Brookline is not going to lose its post office. I know, fella, this is just more bad news.
Aug 27 2009
So, I'm standing in line at my bank's branch in Lawrenceville this morning, waiting to deposit a check, and the guy in front of me sighs... again. "I been standing here 10 minutes," he says.
"TEN MINUTES?" My voice comes out way too loud, but I am incredulous. People are always exaggerating waiting times. Computers boot up in two minutes and we say it's taking forever... so anyway, he nods staunchly and repeats: "Ten minutes."
There is only one teller in a long row of vacant bays and his customer is needing something complicated. By now, five people are waiting behind me. They have all walked in at once. Two women behind me are my mother's age. They look like they got ready for something more important than going to the post office, except that older people do put themselves together to go out in public. They're reminders of how much like children most adults dress. They were tastefully made up, with their hair coiffed like Pittsburgh's legion of salt-of-the-earth elders.
One turns her attention to a young guy consulting at a desk. He looks up from his client, half stands and says to her, with deer-in-headlight eyes, "I'm not a teller."
"I KNOW," she squawks. "But where ARE they?"
He looks alarmed. "They must be on break," he says.
"Good time to take a break," says the 10-minute man, who sighs again and glares.
The young guy hurries back to a little door. Out comes a woman and they stand there, scanning the vacant row of work bays and say, "Where ARE all the tellers?"
As if on cue, a whole ‘nother woman comes in the front door and walks back to a work station and the woman who came out of the little door goes to a work station, and it's as if a plumber has just drained the bathtub. We're moving. I haven't done a thing but I feel aglow now inching forward. I am standing in line with the real power brokers.
"Good for you!" I say to the instigator behind me, and she says, through a little smile of pink lipstick, "Ya gotta say somethin' or they'll ignore you."
Aug 27 2009
By Diana Nelson Jones
Elisa Beck is the prototype of a green person. Like everyone in the sustainable movement, she wants to save the world.
Her latest project is Schwartz Market on the South Side, which her husband's grandfather started in 1938 and where the clientele and groceries couldn't be more traditional. But with a little rearranging, the shelves have made room for food that is even older school: that akin to what great-grandma used to eat, before the evils of shelf life.
Shelf life is a comfort to grocers, but shelf life depends on preservatives. One of the owners, Donna Stanton, said she worries that the organic food she has been supplying since Aug. 1 won't move fast enough. "My first order [of organic food] was $800, and my husband and I took it out of our savings," said Donna. The wholesale prices of organic and natural foods she is now ordering is double what she pays for other food.
The experiment is working so far, she said, "but I'm not sitting on a lot of product."
She ordered three jars of kimchee and all three were gone in a week. If she orders six jars, will she have six customers for it or will three go bad before the original buyers return? That's a worry.
.On a visit the other day, I found some of my favorite products, ones I have bought at Whole Foods. Most of the produce is local, organic, or both. The rest of the local, natural and organic foods are scattered and noted by neon-colored paper signs. I bought my favorite coffee, a blend of shade-grown organic coffee from Nicaragua, roasted by La Prima in the Strip, and I also bought the last box of Swedish meatball mix that Anne Rost can't find in Houston, to which she retired several years ago. When she visits family back on her native South Side, she stocks up on the mix and on fresh kielbasa at Schwartz Market. I bought the mix for its list of ingredients, which include high fructose corn syrup, calcium propionate (a preservative), MSG and hydrolyzed corn and soy proteins.
"This store is a microcosm of our culture," Elisa said.
It attracts people who have made it to an age where they think organic food is a poppycock obsession of people who have more money than sense and people who hope to make it to that age in this world of corporate non-food and are willing to pay the price.
Elisa is convinced this is one of those when-one-door-closes-another-one-opens moments for Schwartz Market, which has been struggling. Donna Stanton, one of the market's owners, is working on being convinced, bravely going where few ma-and-pa owners have gone - yet.
"This is a remarkable woman," said Elisa
"I'm trying to save my business," said Donna. "There's nothing remarkable about it."
The store began integrating its groceries on Aug. 1, when it threw a party to announce its decision to join the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture's "buy fresh buy local" campaign. (Visit www.buylocalpa.org)
"My vision is to have the organic, local and natural foods more abundant and spread out," said Elisa, "for this to be someone's primary shopping place, not just for convenience."
The market, which has been at 1317-1319 E. Carson St. since 1938, still has its original sign painter, Joe Liotta. Every day, on pieces of paper that cover the glass storefront like quilt squares, his blue lettering advertises the specials, from kielbasa made on the premises to turkey breast, from olive or pickle loaf to salad dressings and saltines. He hasn't painted any signs for Stonyfield Farms yogurt yet, but that isn't likely to go on sale.
Mr. Liotta, who was 14 when he began as a delivery boy for the Schwartz Market in Homewood, ended up as the grocery manager at the East Carson Street store before retiring. He has been painting signs since he was that 14-year-old delivery kid and said he hopes to continue painting signs advertising specials as the store makes the leap into the future.
"I am not looking for anything new," he said. "I'm 86 years old and can't change my style, but I'll do whatever I can to help them. I maintain that a freehand-painted sign is more noticeable than a manufactured sign."
Paper as opposed to plastic signs, handmade by a local guy? You can't get any more old-fashioned -- i mean cutting edge --than that.
(See a version of this report in the Aug. 27 Post-Gazette's Food section.)
Aug 26 2009
By Diana Nelson Jones
The results of ZipCar's low-car diet are in.
After being without a car for a month, 25% of Pittsburghers who took the low-car challenge in July said they plan to continue to live without a personally-owned car.
Of those who do not plan to stay car-free, 67% plan to drive less.
This info comes courtesy of Maria Martinez, a ZipCar spokesman.
For some people, the weight loss reported by 38% of the participants might be the most compelling reason to drive less. For others, it would be the savings,
Pittsburgh's participants in this nationwide event walked 128 percent more miles during their month without a personal car, increased their trips on public transit by 102% and biked 2,650 percent more. (Note: this large percentage is due to the local partnership with BikePittsburgh and Car Free Fridays.)
More than 250 people worldwide gave up their personal cars for the month, and 100 of those said they planned to stay car free.
Wow.
Most exciting to Walkabout is that 59 percent of all participants reported that being without a car also made them more aware. They recycled more, ate foods for better health and rationed lights and air conditioning.
Partipants blogged their experiences at zipcar.com/lowcardiet.
Aug 25 2009
By Diana Nelson Jones
It's that time of year when a young college student's fancy turns to thoughts of ‘Oh no! Where are my friends going to crash after a beer bash? Gotta get a couch!'
Returnees to Oakland's plethora of campi can find them cheap this weekend.
Oakland is holding its fourth annual furniture recycling sale Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. UPDATE: The location has been changed because of the rain. It is being held at the former Three RIvers Fitness Center, 3216 5th Ave. Some really nice couches are available for as little as $50.
The idea sprang from the problem of abandoned furniture at the end of every school year. Students would lug old furniture to the curb when they left in the spring and, as you can imagine, it would get gross waiting for the garbage truck.
The Oakland Planning and Development Corp. figured out that, if they could get ahold of this furniture while it was still reuseable, they could spare the neighborhood and the landfill.
Kelly Wawrzeniak, community organizer, said OPD does not offer any incentive other than the merits of recycling. The money OPDC makes allows it to hold another sale next year.
The sale is open to anyone, but OPDC targets students.
"We have lots of couches, a ton of chairs, a lot of desks, tables, some shelves, dressers, and a few lamps," Kelly said.
This year, Pitt donated some dorm dinette sets, the Carnegie Library donated some furniture from the East Liberty branch, which is getting a facelift, and a landlord who furnishes his apartments has donated some nice couches, she said.
Ratty couches and ones with ugly patterns will go for $15-20. But just remember, don't put them on the porch.
Aug 24 2009
The new Allegheny branch of the Carnegie Library is open, and boy is it open. There's enough sunlight coming through windows along the front, along one side and way up high to eliminate the need for electric lights most of the day.
Every library is a church of free enlightenment, but this one, at 1230 Federal Street in the Central Northside, is a cathedral. It was designed by the architecture firm of Loysen + Kreuthmeier.
The neighborhood has awaited this building for three-plus years and will celebrate its opening Saturday at a free event open to all from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Even though a lot of people squawked when the Carnegie's administrators announced they were leaving the beautiful, historic branch in Allegheny Center, this new site is proof that historic building aren't the only beautiful buildings. If ours are made to last -- and allowed to last -- people 150 years from now will laud them.
My favorite feature is the row of clerestory windows along the back wall of the adult reading room. These windows bring lights down from above the roof line. Windows facing Parkhurst Streetallow you to see the Sprout Fund mural, a mosaic of two cardinals.
"It's fantastic to see it done and open," said architect Karen Loysen. As a one story building of two-story height, she said, "it does attempt to fit into its context even though it is a completely different kind of building."
The 19th century Richardsonian library was closed after a lightning strike several springs ago, and it needs a great use; it is a landmark building, a relic from the Allegheny City era. Many expect, or hope, that what's left of the historic streetscape on Federal and North can be saved amid this transformation.
Carlton Stout, the branch manager, said the new branch should be filled by January; "there's still a lot coming over [from the old branch] and a lot of stuff on order," he said. He said the electric lights are designed to accommodate the natural light so that on a sunny day in winter they will come on earlier in the afternoon than they do on a sunny day in August.
The children's section is larger than any other, and it has an enviable space -- an enclosed outdoor patio with slatted wood blinds. The elephant shaped stools and owl bookends make me want to be 5 again.
I ran into two friends today, when I returned to take photos that are refusing to download, and we all marveled at our new branch and the changes that are taking place on Federal Street.
The Federal Hill townhouse project already has three occupants and a fourth home owner is closing soon. Twenty-three homes should be complete by year's end, and 19 of them are under contract. Andy Haines, a vice-president of S&A Homes, said one of the homes was sold with a soft second mortgage, the other two at market rates, the highest being $235,000.
On the corner at North Avenue, the hideous little Park View Cafe has turned into a swan. A new Crazy Mocha will open there within a few months, with huge arched windows along the side. They were only vaguely noticeable before, having been bricked over and further obscured by paint. And not to forget the businesses that are sandwiched between the library and the Crazy Mocha, including Big Sam's Memphis BBQ; Steve's and Toula's, both sandwich shops; Pasta Too, and George's Barber Shop.
The tipping point for Federal and North Avenue may be the next venture. And someday, the Garden Theater? It will take many many millons, but the progress we're seeing on Federal expands our hope for North.
Aug 20 2009
A corner of East Liberty faces a housing dilemma.
Residents near a large cleared space at Collins Avenue, Negley Run Road and East Liberty Boulevard want townhouses. East Liberty Development Inc., which owns the lots, favors an apartment building but is trying to reach a compromise with residents.
Last month, the development group asked the zoning board of adjustment to change the designation of the site from single-family attached to multi-family use because its staff believes townhouses will be a hard sell on that corner, used by "100,000 cars every day," said Ernie Hogan, deputy director of the development group. "No one is going to buy a house on that corner."
"Baloney," said Danielle Mainiero, a member of the Sheridan and Collins Neighborhood Association. "There are townhouses across the street. [The development group] spoke in front of the community and told us they were acquiring the properties for townhouses."
"We never made any promises," Mr. Hogan said. At meetings with the neighbors, he said, "we threw out development ideas: townhouses, single-family homes." The agency is "trying to work with them to figure this out," he said. "This has brought together a good group of residents."
Today, the zoning board was supposed to have heard the request for a variance so ELDI can build a three-story, 12-family dwelling with 12 parking stalls in the rear, but ELDI met with nearby residents this week to discuss compromises and the hearing was postponed until Oct. 1.
The latest proposal is a six-unit townhouse complex with eight parking spaces.
Mr. Hogan said the townhomes would be rented and that the complex would come under the management of McCormack Baron Salazar, which manages the nearby Fairfield apartment complex.
"We're not against apartments or the Fairfield," said Ms. Mainiero. "They have done wonderful things for the neighborhood. But the apartment building just wasn't a good fit for that site."
Nearby homes include duplexes and fourplexes, most of them owner-occupied, she said.
Mr. Hogan said residents approached his group several years ago asking the community development corporation to do something about that corner. "People were squatting" in buildings that were run-down; one had been foreclosed on.
The agency paid $300,000 to buy the lots and demolished an old bar and several dilapidated houses this summer.
"We were proposing a 12-unit building to fill the whole site," said Mr. Hogan. "We thought we would build larger to insulate people [nearby residents] from the traffic.
"We would not do anything that was against what the neighbors wanted."
Aug 19 2009
The deadline of the contest to rename Mount Washington's Grand View Scenic Byways Park is approaching.
The Mount Washington Community Development Corp. has asked Walkabout to help spread the word: Cast your vote before 5 p.m. Aug. 31 and/or vote for the best name at www.visitpittsburgh.com/name-that-park. Everyone who votes has the chance to win a night at Pittsburgh's Renaissance Hotel, with breakfast, and a dinner for two at the Monterey Bay Fish Grotto on Mount Washington.
Learn more about the park at http://www.mwcdc.org/projects/grandview.htm and watch the film http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E4B14D28E69134AB!.
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