Archive: Feb 2011
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Around Town: Point of Realism Interferes With Preserving Arena
Tuesday, February 08, 2011By Brian O’Neill, Pittsburgh Post-GazetteAround Town: Point of Realism Interferes With Preserving Arena
An architectural superstar of its time. And now?
The Civic Arena can still pack ’em in. It was standing-room-only last week at the Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission meeting on Ross Street, just down the hill from the vacated hockey palace.
Some very smart people made a polished and impassioned presentation that showed the 49-year-old Igloo to be an architectural superstar, an engineering marvel and the symbol of Pittsburgh’s Renaissance, rising just as the city’s skies were clearing.
What nobody offered, though, is what practical use it has now. In the past quarter-century, three multipurpose arenas of ascending size — the 5,400-seat Palumbo Center, the 12,500-seat Petersen Events Center and the 19,000-seat Consol Energy Center — have been built within two miles of the place.
This city needs another arena like it needs a hole in the Hill.
To be fair, it wasn’t the job of preservationists this day to offer a practical new use for the empty building. The question was whether the Civic Arena should be designated a historic structure.
But if the commission votes next month to grant historic designation (preliminary approval last month is no guarantee), that would prevent the city-county Sports & Exhibition Authority from demolishing the arena. That would muck up the Penguins’ development plans for the 28-acre site, and the most prominent Hill District leaders don’t want those plans blocked. Residents have been waiting 50 years to get their neighborhood back.
Both preservationists and those who want to see office buildings, stores and about 1,200 new homes built at the site agree on one thing: The way the Hill District was treated when the arena site was cleared in the 1950s was a civic crime. About 1,300 buildings, 400 businesses and 8,000 lower Hill residents got the heave-ho. Promises of better housing were never kept, and the highway ditches and largest park-for-pay lot in Western Pennsylvania are the neighborhood amputation scars.
Rob Pfaffmann, the Downtown architect who has spearheaded the Reuse the Igloo campaign, suggests that keeping the building can help future generations remember that painful history. He quoted the native son who did the most to celebrate the neighborhood, the late playwright August Wilson, who said, “My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.”
Mr. Pfaffmann even broke out a Rick Sebak video on the arena. (The video player, like the Igloo’s acoustics, went awry shortly.) But neither Mr. Pfaffmann nor the city’s premier architectural storyteller, Franklin Toker, could persuade Hill leaders that this mammoth steel assemblage would be anything but a humongous kink in plans to reknit the neighborhood into Downtown.
City Councilman Dan Lavelle said the commission’s mission statement also speaks to the preservation of neighborhoods. He hoped it would pay attention to community residents rather than those with fond memories of coming to the lower Hill “to listen to the Beach Boys at the expense of those who lived there.”
This “case study of urban renewal gone wrong,” which isolated and divided the Hill, is “not the sort of history we wish to preserve,” Mr. Lavelle said. Preserving it, he said, would be like flying Confederate flags on state buildings in the South.
Paying $50,000 a month to maintain it, or tens of millions of dollars to modify it for a new use, would not be a smart move for a strapped city, he concluded.
What do you do with a spare arena? Modification plans all seem a bit like getting a bear to ride a bicycle. It can be done, but that’s not really what either bears or bicycles are for.
What about saving part of it? TV actor David Conrad, in a videotaped presentation, said he understood why neighborhood residents want the arena erased, but saving a piece could “transform an insult into pride.” Preservation of a remnant would be akin to the iconic murals of saints, he said, which often show the martyred figures holding the very weapons that killed them.
Sala Udin, who formerly held the council seat in the Hill, didn’t think the neighborhood would oppose a “remnant that stayed as some kind of icon.” But full preservation would block development plans.
Penguins President David Morehouse said preserving a remnant, as was done with the Forbes Field outfield wall, is possible, but “you can’t have half of a dome in the middle of your development.”
The Hill’s comeback has to be the primary goal. That started more than 20 years with the hugely successful Crawford Square townhouse development just east of the arena. With gasoline prices soaring, building another 1,200 new homes in the heart of the region is about the best news a shrinking city could get.
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Picketing Planned to Save Historic Mercersburg House
Saturday, February 05, 2011By Len Barcousky, Pittsburgh Post-GazetteWhen the British government failed to protect their homes and farms, residents of Pennsylvania’s Conococheague Valley gathered in 1765 at a house in what is now Mercersburg to organize themselves into a militia.
That historic house may be demolished to make room for a volunteer fire company’s expansion, and some 21st century residents plan to gather this weekend to oppose that plan.
“It will be a peaceful protest,” said Tim McCown, a spokesman for the Committee to Save the Justice William Smith House. “We want the fire board to see that the community is behind saving the house.”
Participants will gather at 8 a.m. today, Sunday and Monday in front of the property on Mercersburg’s Main Street. They will hand out fliers describing the building’s history and will outline efforts to rescue or relocate it.
The house and land on which it stands belong to the MMP&W Fire Co., which acquired them in August 2009. The initials in its name stand for the Franklin County communities it serves: Mercersburg, Montgomery, Peters and Warren. They are about 150 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
The site is next to the fire company’s aging garage and headquarters. Fire officials have said they were interested in only the land. Plans to demolish the building, however, have been on hold since a Chambersburg physician came forward with a plan to relocate the house to a vacant lot across the street. That property had been occupied by a gas station. Dr. Paul Orange has said he was willing to cover the costs of moving the building if it will save it from demolition.
Dr. Orange placed $10,000 in an escrow account as a show of good faith while sporadic talks have continued with the firefighters and the demolition firm. The parties, however, have been unable to come to an agreement.
The relocation plan has support from Mercersburg Mayor James Zeger and some members of borough council. Dr. Orange said he was hoping to enlist their aid in setting up another meeting with the firefighters.
Supporters of the house are worried, however, by signs of activity around the Smith house that they fear are preparations to start the demolition. A chain-link fence was put up Thursday.
A spokesman for the fire company did not return calls seeking comment.
William Smith was an 18th-century businessman and local magistrate. His home, originally a one-story stone cottage, has been altered and renovated extensively in the 250 years since it was built.
His house was the meeting place for mostly Scotch-Irish settlers who armed and organized themselves into militia units. Their purpose was to protect themselves from raids by Native Americans who opposed white settlement in the region.
William Smith’s brother-in-law, James Smith, took armed resistance one step further. Among the settlers’ complaints was that Philadelphia merchants were sending arms and ammunition to Fort Pitt, knowing that some of those weapons would be sold to hostile Native American warriors.
Eight years before Bostonians dressed up like Indians to throw British tea into Boston Harbor, James Smith led disguised settlers in a raid on pack trains heading west. Smith’s “Black Boys” confiscated and destroyed supplies they thought might aid their Indian foes.
When the British sent troops to nearby Fort Loudon to protect the traders, the soldiers found themselves surrounded and besieged by angry frontiersmen.
Those actions, years before the Boston Tea Party, were the first shots of the American Revolution, Mr. McCown said. The activities of the frontier militia also laid the groundwork for the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — the right to bear arms, he said.
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The New Granada Theater is Granted National Historic Register Status!
February 5, 2011
New Granada Theater
Congratulations to the Hill Community Development Corporation, the steward of the New Granada Theater historic preservation project. With the assistance of the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, the New Granada Theater was granted National Historic Register Status by the National Parks Service on January 7, 2011!
Having been stabilized with the assistance of the State of Pennsylvania and The Heinz Endowments, we look forward to the long, fundraising road ahead to renovate this historic institution as a multi-use, sustainable facility that pays tribute to its former uses, including that of a theater, office space, skating rink and even a car show room!
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Real Estate Notes
By Sam Spatter, FOR THE PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, February 6, 2011
• An $215,000 agreement with Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation to provide design and construction management for Downtown buildings has been approved by the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Services may include facade renovations, core and shell and life safety improvements, and elevator renovations or installations. The goal is to stimulate occupancy on upper floors in buildings that often have a tenant only on the first floor. Examples are the ISDA property at Forbes and Wood streets and Kashi jewelers, 253 Fifth Ave. -
A Place Where Image is Everything
Staff Blogs by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Wednesday, February 02, 2011 11:26 AMWritten by Diana Nelson Jones
Bruce Klein - Photo Antiquities Museum
You know how some projects are so compelling that you can start them at 8 p.m. and not realize the time? Suddenly it’s 2 a.m. — but time had ceased to exist.
That happens to me when I immerse myself in old journals or boxes and files of historic documents and photos. It could have happened this morning at the Photo Antiquities Museum, 531 E. Ohio St. in Deutschtown except that I have an Historic Review Commission meeting to cover at 12.30.
Bruce Klein (that’s Bruce in the camera room) founded the museum 17 years ago in a huge Victorian building that his collection has outgrown. The storefront had been his photo exchange shop. He had some daguerreotypes about which customers kept asking, “What are those?”
He decided to exhibit them. That first case grew to two, then three. He systematically has collected and filled what had been an otherwise empty three story building.
Exibits include a replica of a late 1800s photo studio with natural skylight, a room of photos from Allegheny City (today’s North Side), a room of cameras shoulder to shoulder in cases and on shelves and a case of lantern slides — handpainted glass panels projected by a carbon arc lantern projector.
People used to go to great halls to see them projected as large as movie slides. I could look at those slides all day. They are all little works of art, and Bruce has a magnifier sheet so you can see them enlarged. He said he has tens of thousands and changes 200 of them every month, so if you’ve seen them in the past, you will see different ones now..
He had hoped to expand the museum when he bought the Allegheny Social Hall, which was built in 1900 in Spring Garden, nine years ago. He put a new roof on the building but has not gotten the funding he needs to restore it into a museum the size of which would allow him to show those lantern slides on the big screen.
The “snow” exhibit — Pittsburgh in White — opened yesterday and runs through March. Its images are of the 1950 and 2010 snowfalls, the two deepest this city has had.
A daguerreotype show runs through March 15.
If you go, plan to spend a couple of hours. Don’t miss the permanent “Shantytown” exhibition, deeply moving images of men in Depression-era shanties in the Strip.
The museum is highlighting a different camera in its camera room every month through the year. The camera on the pedestal in February is an Ansco portrait camera from 1930. In the photo above, Bruce is flanked by two of them, one in a cherry cabinet.
On a horrible day of snow, wind, rain or whatever, the museum is a refuge to help you forget the weather and the time.
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A Place Where Image is Everything
Staff Blogs by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Wednesday, February 02, 2011 11:26 AMWritten by Diana Nelson Jones
Bruce Klein - Photo Antiquities Museum
You know how some projects are so compelling that you can start them at 8 p.m. and not realize the time? Suddenly it’s 2 a.m. — but time had ceased to exist.
That happens to me when I immerse myself in old journals or boxes and files of historic documents and photos. It could have happened this morning at the Photo Antiquities Museum, 531 E. Ohio St. in Deutschtown except that I have an Historic Review Commission meeting to cover at 12.30.
Bruce Klein (that’s Bruce in the camera room) founded the museum 17 years ago in a huge Victorian building that his collection has outgrown. The storefront had been his photo exchange shop. He had some daguerreotypes about which customers kept asking, “What are those?”
He decided to exhibit them. That first case grew to two, then three. He systematically has collected and filled what had been an otherwise empty three story building.
Exibits include a replica of a late 1800s photo studio with natural skylight, a room of photos from Allegheny City (today’s North Side), a room of cameras shoulder to shoulder in cases and on shelves and a case of lantern slides — handpainted glass panels projected by a carbon arc lantern projector.
People used to go to great halls to see them projected as large as movie slides. I could look at those slides all day. They are all little works of art, and Bruce has a magnifier sheet so you can see them enlarged. He said he has tens of thousands and changes 200 of them every month, so if you’ve seen them in the past, you will see different ones now..
He had hoped to expand the museum when he bought the Allegheny Social Hall, which was built in 1900 in Spring Garden, nine years ago. He put a new roof on the building but has not gotten the funding he needs to restore it into a museum the size of which would allow him to show those lantern slides on the big screen.
The “snow” exhibit — Pittsburgh in White — opened yesterday and runs through March. Its images are of the 1950 and 2010 snowfalls, the two deepest this city has had.
A daguerreotype show runs through March 15.
If you go, plan to spend a couple of hours. Don’t miss the permanent “Shantytown” exhibition, deeply moving images of men in Depression-era shanties in the Strip.
The museum is highlighting a different camera in its camera room every month through the year. The camera on the pedestal in February is an Ansco portrait camera from 1930. In the photo above, Bruce is flanked by two of them, one in a cherry cabinet.
On a horrible day of snow, wind, rain or whatever, the museum is a refuge to help you forget the weather and the time.
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Civic Arena a ‘Symbol of Genocide’
By Bill Vidonic
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, February 3, 2011Former City Councilman Sala Udin was among the 8,000 residents and businesses in the lower Hill District who were displaced in the 1950s for construction of the Civic Arena.
On Wednesday, he urged Pittsburgh’s Historic Review Commission to reject a push to grant the arena protection under the city’s historic structure preservation law.
“This is more a symbol of genocide than a historic icon,” Udin said. “Demolish the arena and let the promise begin.”
During more than four hours of testimony, preservationists said that the arena’s distinct domed shape, its engineering and its place in the fabric of Pittsburgh’s history should spare it from a wrecking ball.
The city-county Sports and Exhibition Authority, which owns the building, and city Planning Commission have voted to demolish the building. The SEA had hoped to start in April, but the nomination for historic status has delayed that.
“There’s nothing like it anywhere else,” said Eloise McDonald of the Hill District, one of the people who nominated the structure in November. “That’s what makes it historical.”
Franklin Toker, a University of Pittsburgh art and architecture professor, said development and construction of the arena in the 1950s and ’60s coincided with “the most exhilarating, most creative and most ambitious moment this city has ever known: the Pittsburgh Renaissance.”
“It is the branding image for Pittsburgh, right under our noses,” Toker said.
A 2007 agreement between the Sports and Exhibition Authority and the Pittsburgh Penguins gave the sports franchise development rights for the 28-acre site.
Various representatives outlined a long-term redevelopment plan — one in which the arena is leveled — to make way for residential, retail and commercial development, creating thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue.
City Councilman R. Daniel Lavelle, who represents the Hill District, said there’s no redevelopment plan for the arena itself.
“The hard truth is that the Civic Arena remains a symbol of failed public policy and a continual deterrence to economic viablility for the Hill District community. Historic designation and preservation, for many reasons, is not the correct decision. On the contrary, what might be more appropriate at this time is an apology for the historic injustices that were heaped upon the Hill District when it was torn asunder nearly a half-century ago.”
The city rejected historic status for the structure in 2002. The Historic Review Commission could make a recommendation next month; the city’s Planning Commission and City Council still must consider the request, a process that likely will stretch into summer.
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Demolition of Iron City Ice House OK’d
Thursday, February 03, 2011Pittsburgh Post-GazetteThe Historic Review Commission Wednesday approved demolition of the original ice house at the Iron City Brewing Co. in Lawrenceville, one of a collection of buildings on the site that has the city’s protection of historic status.
The one-story building, which sits behind the original brewhouse, is dilapidated. Brewery CEO Tim Hickman said he would not consider an estimated $750,000 it would take to restore it.
Acting commission chair Ernie Hogan said that the Pittsburgh Historical and Museum Commission and a preservation planner advised the commission that if the building is properly documented it can be demolished without jeopardizing the rest of the site’s potential for placement on the National Register of Historic Places or the tax credits that would go with its redevelopment.
Preservationists argued against any demolition at the brewery site before completion of a master plan.
The commission also approved demolition of an unused garage in Deutschtown, to be replaced by a new Duquesne Light valve station, with pipes and conductors beneath it. The original plan to build the station in Allegheny Commons Park was abandoned after strong neighborhood outcry.
