Category Archive: City Living
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House by house, North Side renovations go on
Saturday, November 10, 2001
By Bette McDevitt
Pittsburgh Post GazetteRehabbing one house can ruin your life, or your marriage,” says Nick Kyriazi, chairman of the Housing Committee for East Allegheny Community Council.
Now try doing 15, while also building five new homes, and you get an idea of how stressful life can be for Kyriazi and other members of this North Side neighborhood group.
It’s a major undertaking, even for a group accustomed to renovations. In 1993, the council did four new houses, in 1996, seven houses, both new and renovated, and in 1998, four renovations.
This $3.4 million project has been hectic but satisfying, Kyriazi said as he walked the streets of a neighborhood that runs from East Street to Cedar Avenue, and from Dunloe Street, at the foot of Fineview, to Pressley Street.
The 20 new or restored houses are on Cedar, James, Middle, Tripoli, Suismon and Pressley streets. Some are tall and skinny, some short and wide, some with turrets, some twins and one triplet. All but the new houses are about 80 percent finished and two are sold, including the centerpiece of the project, 810 Cedar Ave.
The grand dame of the 20 sits across from the East Allegheny Commons. The community council purchased the house four or five years ago, when it had a gaping hole in its roof and other evidence of neglect.
“People called this one ‘the graffiti house.’ An absentee doctor owned it, and neighbors were constantly painting out the graffiti,” said Ernie Hogan, associate director of the North Side Leadership Conference, the project manager for this development and others in nine North Side neighborhoods.
The inside and outside of the home cried out for major restoration. But a few people, including city Councilwoman Barbara Burns and Mark Masterson, a former employee of the North Side Leadership Conference, saw it as a chance to do even more, to make it a showcase of new technology and environmentally friendly construction techniques and materials known as “green building.”
“We are using recycled products, and the house was refurbished with steel rather than wood studs,” Hogan said. “We are using environmentally safe paints and the kitchen floor is made of recycled tires.”
The group got some help from the Green Building Alliance and Conservation Consultants on the South Side. Dietrich Industries provided the steel framing.
But the real groundbreaker here is the heating and cooling system. Geo Environmental Drilling Co. has gone 300 feet below the ground, seeking water at a constant 55 degrees. The water will be sent through coils to heat and cool the house.
“It’s a heat pump, which I have in my house, except that you use water for heat and cooling instead of outside air,” Kyriazi explained. “You draw the heat out of the water, and transfer it to the air to heat the house. To cool, you reverse the cycle.”
The group originally intended to install the system in several houses, as well as the James Street Tavern and the Old Towne Laundromat. But by the time the package was in place, one of the largest grants had expired, and they were able to afford the system for only one house.
The house, which is nearly finished, is also getting a state-of-the-art electrical system, controlled by a computer and equipped for high-speed Internet, multimedia entertainment and other current technologies. Sargent Electric donated some of the services and supplies.
“You will be able to turn on and off any lights from a phone,” said Hogan. “The house has incorporated everything that would have been grand about this house, and high technology, too.”
The Cedar Avenue home sold for slightly more than its $300,000 price tag because of a few extras the buyer wanted. Most of the homes are priced between $120,000 and $150,000, though one with only the exterior restored is selling for $53,000.
Over the next few months, environmental and educational groups will be allowed to tour 810 Cedar. Before the owner moves in, the community council also hopes to hold an open house to show off its many features to the public. In addition to gee-whiz technology, it is a fine example of a modified restoration.
“Plumbing, heating and wiring are easy. It’s the restoration that’s difficult — all the woodwork, the mantels, the balusters on the staircases,” said Kyriazi.
Architect Yoko Tai had one big advantage — the house’s twin next door. Martha Pasula’s house, whose interior is in the original state, served as a mirror for restorers. Tai duplicated some of the twin’s features in the blueprints, and Kyriazi and other volunteers helped to match balusters, doors and mantels from the cache of items they have been collecting from demolished houses for 25 years. Team Construction is the general contractor.
Sam Cammarata, a retired brick layer who lives in the neighborhood and regularly visited the houses being restored, was particularly taken with the work of master carpenter Jim Graczik.
“That guy is an artist,” he said.
Graczik’s handiwork is evident in the newel posts and spindles of the staircases at 810 Cedar.
The house’s old slate mantels were in as many as 20 pieces and had to be reassembled. They are painted to look like marble and have gold incising as decoration. Kyriazi thinks the slate pieces may have been dipped, like an Easter egg, in a solution with color floating on the top.
“When I look at these, I think they are too intricate to have been painted by hand,” he said.
It is the kind of question he ponders as he visits houses built in the same period on tours around the city, the country, and recently, a trip to Spain.
“You observe and learn, and soon you begin to speak Victorian,” he said.
The house’s first floor has been opened up to create a large living room with a dining area. A powder room has been added and the kitchen overlooks a shared courtyard and a renovated four-room apartment above a garage.
On the second floor is a master bedroom, a bath with a Jacuzzi, a laundry room and a dressing room or study. The third floor has three bedrooms and a full bath.
Funding for the project came from grants, donated labor and loans. Money came from the Urban Redevelopment Authority, Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, Buhl Foundation, the Community Design Center, Allegheny County, North Side Bank, National City Bank, and National City’s Community Development Project.
For Kyriazi and others on the council, the project’s greatest success is creating more single-family, owner-occupied residences.
“We want properly restored, well-maintained houses, not absentee landlords, multifamily dwellings or remuddled, derelict buildings,” he said.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Competition draws out ideas for public spaces
Tuesday, October 09, 2001
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic
Little by little, piece by piece, the sides of Lawrenceville’s Doughboy Square have fallen away.
The demolition of historic but deteriorated commercial buildings in recent years has left the square — really a triangle — looking and feeling like little more than the tired and uneventful coming together of Butler Street and Penn Avenue, the neighborhood’s two main thoroughfares.
The 1902 beaux arts former Pennsylvania National Bank building within the crotch of the Y — capably restored in the early 1990s by its owner/occupant, the architectural firm Charles L. Desmone and Associates — and the Doughboy himself give the square character and a sense of place, but they cannot handle the whole job by themselves. Urban public spaces are defined by their perimeter walls, and big chunks of Doughboy Square’s walls have gone missing.
Architects Christine Brill and Jonathan Kline, who live just up the street, would like to change that.
“We want it to be a place of celebration,” said Brill, who with Kline entered Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation’s recent competition for the design of public spaces and squares, open to architects, landscape architects, planners and artists under the age of 35. They were invited to come up with ideas for making eight historic public spaces in the city more attractive and more usable.
The eight spaces ranged from large public plazas, such as Market Square, Downtown, and the sunken plaza at Allegheny Center on the North Side, to tiny Lyndhurst Green in Point Breeze and the area formed by the convergence of three streets in Troy Hill.
Although 24 individuals or teams initially expressed interest, in the end PHLF received only seven entries — a disappointingly tiny fraction of the young designers working here. The seven ideas, detailed in models and presentations boards, are on view through Oct. 21 at the Mattress Factory, 500 Sampsonia Way, Manchester.
The Brill/Kline entry for Doughboy Square, which didn’t win a prize, nevertheless was the most ambitious, professional, detailed and carefully thought out scheme. It is, as they put it, “an attempt to set the stage for Doughboy Square to be filled with life again.”
Two years ago, the 20-something architects bought a house on Penn Avenue, a little more than two blocks up from the square. Brill passes through the square every morning on her walk Downtown, where she works at Pfaffmann + Associates.
“Aside from the bank building, it’s the least memorable space in the walk,” Brill said. “There’s so much potential that’s unrealized.”
The Brill/Kline plan calls for wider, brick sidewalks around the Doughboy and elsewhere along the square, which would accommodate new trees and seating for outdoor cafes.
For infill buildings, Kline and Brill wrote urban design guidelines regulating height, massing, use and parking in a manner consistent with the existing neighborhood. But the guidelines don’t dictate style, inviting a variety of architectural expression.
The plan also shifts the focus of the square to the west, creating new public space and a new monument, at the corner of Penn Avenue and 34th Street, which serves as a terminus to Butler Street. Part observation tower and part Victorian folly, the 60-foot steel-and-copper monument celebrates Lawrenceville’s industrial heritage, with winding interior stairs providing close-up views of a collage of salvaged architectural fragments. Kline and Brill see it not as dwarfing and dominating the Doughboy but as having a dialogue with it.
Relocated traffic lights ensure that vehicles stop before they enter the square, to create a safer pedestrian zone and to signify arrival.
But Kline and Brill, who are among the co-founders of the activist group Ground Zero, didn’t stop there. They see the square’s redevelopment as a catalyst for broader neighborhood revitalization, with streetscape improvements on 33rd and 35th streets, a new street connecting 33rd and 35th streets and a new riverfront park. They also would transform the railroad trestle above 33rd Street into a gateway, with a linear light sculpture leading to the river.
There are, to be sure, other worthy entries, including that of the $5,000 first-place winner, architect Nathan Hart of Oakland, who rightly recognized that Oakland Square needs only to be tweaked, not overhauled. Hart believes improvements there would encourage home-ownership on the square and keep it from suffering the absentee-landlord fate of other parts of Oakland.
The square — a tree-filled rectangle surrounded by middle-class houses off Dawson Street — gets a modest tree-thinning, new curbs and new planting beds, but is otherwise unchanged. Enhancements include an arbor gateway leading to a terraced garden at the east end of the square, stepping down the hillside into Panther Hollow.
Hart proposes an assisted living facility and child-care center for the west end of the square, as well as solutions for pedestrian and vehicular issues. And Hart, too, extends his reach beyond the square, suggesting locations for a community deli, elementary school and supermarket, in the hope of attracting more families to his neighborhood.
The $2,000, second-place award went to Nick Tobier and Rebekah Modra, who came up with the competition’s most poetic and fanciful, if not the most practical, solution — a balloon launch area for Troy Hill’s main intersection.
The $1,000, third-place prize was presented to a team comprising artist Carin Mincemoyer and four staff members of the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum — Thad Bobula, Keny Marshall, Laura Shaffalo and Chris Seifert — for turning Allegheny Center’s plaza into a naturalistic pond.
In the spring, PHLF will launch another public space competition for young designers, one that will allow them to generate ideas for “orphaned public spaces.”
“They’re the leftover spaces, perhaps full of weeds or trash, where there’s been a building or a highway put in, and nobody wanted this space,” said Barry Hannegan, PHLF’s director of historic design programs. “They’re negative elements that do nothing to improve the image of the city, where an intelligent design intervention would immeasurably enhance the city’s appearance.”
There’s a $10,000 purse that will be awarded any way the jury sees fit, so it’s possible a single entry could claim the entire prize — a strong incentive that should encourage more designers to take the challenge.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Expert would oversee Downtown redevelopment plan
Thursday, September 27, 2001
By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
A group of Pittsburghers traveled to Philadelphia recently to look for a quarterback. But Kordell Stewart doesn’t have to worry.
The group was Mayor Tom Murphy’s Plan C Task Force, which is trying to revitalize the Fifth and Forbes avenues area of Downtown.
They weren’t seeking a football player with a strong arm. They need an urban redevelopment expert to oversee efforts to bring additional stores, entertainment and housing to the drab Downtown commercial corridor.
“We’re looking for professional advice to guide us from someone who knows what they’re doing, someone who can synthesize our thinking and make sure we’re all headed in the same direction,” said Tom Cox, Murphy’s executive secretary and a member of the task force.
Since it was formed last year, the 13-member group has been surprisingly unified on what Fifth and Forbes needs to become vibrant — intriguing shops, unusual restaurants or taverns, music clubs and housing.
The Plan C group interviewed several development professionals while in Philadelphia and is expected to discuss the quarterback position at a meeting this morning.
But Cox indicated the group is focusing on two people — Donald Hunter of Annapolis, Md., and Midge McCauley of King of Prussia in suburban Philadelphia.
“Everybody feels those two are strong,” Cox said.
Hunter, with 32 years of experience in the economics of urban centers, founded his present firm, Hunter Interests Inc. of Annapolis, in 1986.
The company specializes in Downtown and waterfront projects, said office manager Jean Clarke. It has done work on shops at the 30th Street train station in Philadelphia, the Inner Harbor waterfront in Baltimore and in Buffalo and Albany, N.Y., Tucson, Ariz., Seattle and other cities.
McCauley is director of Downtown Works, a year-old division of a 50-year-old shopping mall developer called Kravco Co., which owns the sprawling King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia.
In a phone interview, she said Downtown Pittsburgh had some important things going for it — major department stores and large crowds during the day — but obviously needs more stores and other attractions to keep people Downtown after 6 p.m.
“There are good stores currently [along Fifth and Forbes] and there are stores that are not so good,” she said. “Our goal would be to create a mix of stores that includes a good mix of local retailers and regional and national retailers.”
The “greatest challenge,” as she sees it, is to bring in “good, smaller specialty stores that would complement your wonderful array of department stores. Specialty stores are a key ingredient of any shopping experience.”
Adding attractive housing to increase the number of permanent Downtown residents is another key to revitalization.
“Pittsburgh has a great architectural stock of buildings, and where they can be developed into residential [uses], they should be,” McCauley said.
Once the Fifth and Forbes boss is on board, Cox said, another key issue will be how to go about buying privately owned property in the area. Two approaches will be considered — using a city agency, such as the Urban Redevelopment Authority, or letting private companies or developers acquire it.
A challenge facing any large city’s downtown, McCauley said, is “multiplicity of ownership,” because the more owners there are, the harder it can be to get everybody supporting the same plan.
In the past, the URA has assembled large sites for redevelopment. But some private companies already own key buildings in the Fifth-Forbes area that are likely to become part of the renewal project.
PNC Bank, whose director of corporate real estate, Gary Saulson, sits on the task force, owns the buildings in the block on the northern side of Fifth between Wood and Market streets.
“It’s PNC’s intention to cooperate with the city in their plan, assuming it’s acceptable to PNC,” Saulson said.
Another major real estate firm represented on the task force, Oxford Development Co., owns a large office building at 441 Smithfield St., on the edge of the Fifth-Forbes renewal area.
“There is a need for control of some of the properties, a need to assemble a critical mass of properties as they become available [for sale],” said task force member Cathy McCollom, an official of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Morning Glory’s owners work to bring Victorian look to inn’s garden
Saturday, June 09, 2001
By Virginia Peden
Pittsburgh Post GazetteFive years ago, when Dave and Nancy Eshelman bought their South Side bed & breakfast, the Morning Glory Inn, they wanted it to be as authentically Victorian as possible. So it seemed perfectly proper that the garden be Victorian, too.
About two years ago, they turned to Barry Hannegan, director for historic design programs for the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation.
“For a total historical image, the garden is as important as the house,” he said. “I suggested plant materials for a garden compatible with that house and courtyard. In early days, the yard would have been used for hanging laundry, chicken coops and to store coal and wood.”
Today, the inn’s yard is more likely to be the scene of weddings, parties and alfresco breakfasts. Two years of work have created the beginnings of a true Victorian garden, and Nancy, who is learning as she goes along, is determined to keep it that way.
For example, her trailing geranium has plain leaves because the variegated types were developed too late for Victorian use.
“I pulled out the evergreens,” she said. “The working class on the South Side at that time would not have been able to afford them. The man who built this house in 1862, John G. Fisher, was a brick maker.”
On Thursday, Hannegan will lead a free informal garden seminar beginning at 2 p.m. in the courtyard of the inn on Sarah Street. He will discuss techniques and plants compatible with a Victorian garden, using Nancy’s “work in progress” as an example.
Nancy, 58, teaches a family and consumer science class at Sto-Rox High School and tends the garden on Saturdays. On Thursday, she will talk a little about her handiwork; she calls gardening her therapy.
“It’s almost a woodland Victorian garden because of the shade,” she said.
A pussy willow and a silver maple tree that reach nearly out of sight catch the sun in their tops, forcing Nancy to use almost entirely shade plants. There’s solid green boxwood, honeysuckle, sweet pea, white bleeding heart, goat’s beard, hosta, jack-in-the pulpit, liriope, ferns and oak leaf hydrangea. A pale green bamboo bush bends into an arc.
Hannegan’s advice didn’t require the removal of many plants in the existing garden. Most had been popular for more than a century.
“This ground cover, pachysandra, was called ‘poor man’s ivy,’ and that’s Boston ivy climbing up the wall next door. It dies in the winter and then comes back,” Nancy said.
“The bay magnolias have interesting branches with different shapes and don’t lose their leaves until spring. And this Carolina silver bell gets little white bell-shaped blossoms.
“I’m learning a lot,” she said.
Greg Yochum, a horticulturist with History & Landmarks, also offered the Eshelmans some advice. Hannegan said creating a garden that is compatible with a Victorian home is often a question of what not to do.
“Avoid impatiens at all costs. They have been around for only 30 years. And Bradford pear trees are very much of the late 20th century,” he said.
Other flowering ornamentals, such as crabapples or hawthorns, or a lilac pruned as a tree, are much more appropriate, Hannegan said. He said the inn’s garden is not an attempt at an exact re-creation of a Victorian garden. It fits the house and Nancy’s own requirements, which included a variety of strong fragrances and something blooming from February through late November. She also wanted all new flowers to be white, for a moonlight effect.
“When the white flowering redbud blossomed in spring, it looked like Christmas lights at night,” she said.
The Eshelmans made few structural changes in the garden. Dave, 58, relaid the courtyard’s red bricks in a herringbone pattern, in a more formal shape. Spotlights are tucked around the edges of the courtyard, and candles are used for evening functions.
Like earlier residents, Nancy cooks with herbs from her garden — lemon verbena, mint, flat-leaved parsley, lemon balm, rosemary and basil. She lines cake pans with scented geranium leaves and uses herbs in egg and mushroom dishes for guests.
The garden is a bit between blooms right now. A French silk lilac bush near the front entrance has finished blooming, as have the violets, daffodils and lilies of the valley nestling in a niche. Only one pale peach “wonderfully fragrant” rosebush is in full bloom.
English ivy greens the ground and a neighboring wall, where snow peas are sowed. Two window boxes, made of wrought iron to match the fence, are lavish with pansies, English ivy and clematis. History & Landmarks publishes a brochure on Victorian flower boxes, in which plants can be changed with the seasons.
In July, the inn’s namesake, morning glories, will wind through the front fence, and red rambler roses will one day twine around a graceful iron trellis. Nancy is planting moonflowers, evening primroses and nicotiana for fragrance. She’s also tending planters holding hydrangeas from the garden of her mother, Thelma Harris, in Sheraden.
Soon, she hopes to add a water feature, but not an elaborate Victorian fountain. She and Hannegan have discussed a stone water trough with a gentle burble.
“The sound is important to me,” she said. “I want it to be soft, subtle, sort of ‘I wonder where that’s coming from?'”
Virginia Peden is a free-lance writer
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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New looks for old steel sites
Tuesday, May 01, 2001
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette architecture critic
By coincidence, two day-long charrettes will be held Saturday to help plan for the future of two struggling neighborhoods, both shaped by the steel industry’s rise and fall.
The closing of the LTV coke plant in Hazelwood, said Pittsburgh city planner Maureen Hogan, “was a real opportunity to think through new uses for the site, and also look at Hazelwood in general and figure out what kind of neighborhood it should it be, how we should position it, how to revitalize it and what resources should be directed to it. We want to take the neighborhood through a planning process to see what would be appropriate to the [LTV] site.”
Several buyers are interested in the 180-acre site, and the planning process will help the community articulate to buyers its goals for the site and the neighborhood.
This “strategic visioning process” will identify Hazelwood’s role in the region’s economy and establish guidelines for appropriate land uses and infrastructure improvements. It will focus on Hazelwood in the context of the region, the city and the surrounding neighborhoods — with an eye to strengthening connections to Oakland and the Pittsburgh Technology Center. It also will explore options for the redevelopment of Junction Hollow, to create more opportunities for both Oakland and Hazelwood.
The charrette will be facilitated by The Saratoga Associates, an architecture and planning firm from Saratoga Springs, N.Y. It will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (with registration at 8:30 a.m.) at Carnegie Mellon Research Institute, 700 Technology Drive, Pittsburgh Technology Center, followed by a neighborhood reception and celebration from 4 to 5 p.m.
For information, call: Hazelwood Initiative at 412-421-7234 or Wanda Wilson, city Planning Department, at 412-255-2223.
Meanwhile, in Homestead, local architects will lead a charrette that follows up on a recently completed comprehensive plan for Eighth Avenue, the town’s historic main street.
“The idea is to look at [making] connections and sparking ideas in the community for the next place they might go,” said Anne Swager, director of the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Institute of Architects, one of the charrette’s three sponsors.
“We’re going to look at connections to the residential districts, to the Waterfront development and to the river, to the proposed Steel Valley Heritage Park, to the historic churches and the ethnic community,” Swager said. The charrette also will examine how to better link Eighth Avenue with its neighboring, parallel streets in the National Register Historic District.
The charrette will be held in the Moose Building, 112 E. Eighth Ave., from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., with the public invited to hear the results at 4 p.m.
On Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Carnegie Library of Homestead, Duquesne University professor Bob Gleeson will launch the charrette with a talk about Homestead’s history and its impact on the town’s economic future. Gleeson heads Duquesne’s Institute for Economic Transformation.
For information, call the AIA at 412-471-9548.
Touring Beech and beyond
“Take a Walk on the North Side” is the title of a new walking tour of Allegheny West’s Beech Avenue. One of the city’s most architecturally intact and historically significant streets, Beech Avenue was home to the infant Gertrude Stein, to Mary Roberts Rinehart (who lived at 954 Beech when she published “The Circular Staircase” in 1908), and to many prominent 19th-century industrialists and businessmen and their families.
The tour, to be led by staff members from Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, also includes Calvary United Methodist and Emmanuel Episcopal churches. It will be given Saturday from 10 to 11 a.m. and continue year-round on the same day and time (except the second weekend of December). The tour costs $3 per person and begins and ends at Calvary United Methodist Church (Allegheny Avenue entrance). Large groups are asked to register in advance, but individuals can just show up.
The walking tour brochure also includes self-guided tours of Millionaires’ Row along Ridge Avenue and Brighton Road, the upper-middle-class houses of Lincoln and Galveston avenues, and nods to the Mexican War Streets and Manchester neighborhoods and North Side attractions.
The brochure is available upon request from two of its sponsors — the Landmarks Foundation at 412-471-5808, Ext. 516; and the Office of Cultural Tourism at 412-281-7711 or 800-359-0758. The Allegheny City Society and the Alcoa Foundation are also supporting the tour.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Competition aims to improve city’s historic public spaces
Thursday, February 22, 2001
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation will stage a juried competition this fall, inviting young designers to come up with ideas for making eight historic public spaces in the city more attractive and more usable.
The eight spaces range from large public plazas, such as Market Square, Downtown, and the sunken plaza at Allegheny Center on the North Side, to tiny Lyndhurst Green in Point Breeze and the area formed by the convergence of three streets in Troy Hill.
“We’ve got all of these wonderful nodes in the city, and they’re often taken for granted or unrecognized, and when they are recognized, often not treated very intelligently or effectively in terms of design,” said Barry Hannegan, Landmarks’ director of historic design programs.
“The competition will draw, we hope, everybody’s attention to the visual richness that the older portions of the city have and also point out that it could be richer still.”
Hannegan said the competition was intended “to encourage people not only to recognize and hold on to things with historic significance, but also to make them continue as viable elements of the city.”
While there are no plans to implement any of the proposals, Hannegan said that “if something really sensational came along that everybody thought Pittsburgh should have, then we’d see how that could be accomplished.”
The competition is open to architects, landscape architects, planners and artists under the age of 35.
Hannegan limited it to young designers because they “don’t often have an opportunity, a forum or a platform where they can get up and strut their stuff. And I have the strong impression there’s an extreme diversity in the young design community here, and I’d like to find out if my assumption is right.
“I was cautioned by a friend who teaches at an architecture school in Boston that we didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for, and I hope that means some off-the-map or over-the-top proposals.”
The eight sites are:
Market Square, Downtown.
Doughboy Square, junction of Butler Street and Penn Avenue, Lawrenceville.
Oakland Square, Dawson Street, Oakland.
The former Ober Park, Allegheny Center (now the center’s sunken plaza).
Lyndhurst Green, Beechwood Boulevard and Reynolds Street, Point Breeze.
Convergence of Lowrie, Ely and Froman streets, Troy Hill.
Morrow Triangle Park, Baum Boulevard, Bloomfield.
Intersection of Mahon and Kirkpatrick streets with Centre Avenue, Hill District.
“A number of these spaces are largely negative and we think could be enhanced in keeping with the existing historic neighborhood,,” Hannegan said.The sites were chosen because of their well-defined character.
“Almost all of them involve an interesting arrangement of street patterns,” he said. “They all are, or have the potential of being, focal points in the city’s structure. They’re all places where the pulse should increase and the adrenaline should flow about being there.”
Landmarks is offering three prizes, of $5,000, $2,000 and $1,000, for first-, second- and third-place designs.
A letter of intention to enter the competition must be received by Landmarks by May 1. Submissions must be delivered to the Mattress Factory, where the jurying will occur, on Sept. 8. Materials submitted with entries will be selected for inclusion in an exhibition at the Mattress Factory in September.
Th competition will be launched during Landmarks’ sixth annual Old House Fair, which will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at Victoria Hall, 201 S. Winebiddle St., Bloomfield. Landmarks also is mailing invitations to compete to about 1,000 individuals and firms in Pittsburgh.
City Planning Director Susan Golomb will serve on the competition’s advisory panel, along with two Landmarks officials, Arthur Ziegler, its president, and Phil Hallen, its chairman. Hannegan will serve as one of five jurors.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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South Side church converting to condos
Wednesday, February 14, 2001
By Jan Ackerman, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
While retaining its historic character, one of the South Side’s most beloved old Catholic churches and its rectory will be converted into high-end, residential condominiums.
St. Michael Church on Pius Street on the South Side Slopes, was closed in 1992 as part of a reorganization by the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. At that time, the diocese “desanctified” the church, removing the altar and other religious items from inside.
“The interior is completely gutted,” said Jennifer McCarthy, an architect with Hanson Design Group Ltd., the South Side firm that is designing the proposed condominiums for Thomas Tripoli, a South Side developer.
She said some residents have stopped by to see what is going on at the old church and expressed concern that the church they attended for so many years was being measured and studied for possible renovation.
McCarthy said most of the stained glass was removed from the church five or six years ago. “The altar was ripped out. Anything that had a cross or any sort of religious symbol is gone.”
Yesterday, Pittsburgh City Council gave its final approval to a resolution giving historic designation to the church and rectory. Mayor Tom Murphy now has to sign off on that resolution.
With the historic designation, the two buildings officially come under the purview of the city’s Historic Review Commission, which already has approved plans for renovating them.
Tripoli, who plans to live in one of the condominiums, is proposing to convert the buildings into about 25 condominiums, ranging in area from 1,000 to 2,000 or 3,000 square feet. He said the units will be priced from $150,000 to $250,000.
McCarthy said the first phase of the project will be renovation of the rectory. Once one of the largest in the city, it was the first home in the United States for the Passionist order of priests who staffed the parish from 1853 to 1973.
She said the church renovation will be more involved since new floors and an elevator will be added. She said window sills will be lowered on the Pius Street side of the church to allow more light to get inside. On the side of the church that faces Downtown, she said, “we are going to lower the window sills, put in French doors and small wrought iron terraces.”
The church, which was constructed in a German Romanesque style, has a basilica with a prominent center tower and a clerestory. It was designed by Pittsburgh architect Charles S. Bartberger, who later designed the Passionists’ St. Paul of the Cross Monastery on Monastery Avenue on the South Side.
Walter Kidney, architectural historian for Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, nominated the St. Michael buildings for the historic designation. Neighborhood groups, including the South Side Slopes Neighborhood Association, favor the designation.
“The building has been part of the social fabric of the South Side Slopes for almost 150 years,” wrote Edward F. Jacob, president of the neighborhood association.
Built between 1858 and 1860, St. Michael Church became Pittsburgh’s first Catholic church south of the Monongahela River and the third church built for a German congregation.
Two St. Michael parish traditions have been retained, even though the church is closed.
One is the presentation of “Veronica’s Veil,” the passion play written by a priest from St. Michael in 1913 that has been staged every year since during Lent. “Veronica’s Veil” is now performed in the auditorium at 18th and Pius streets, a building that used to be part of the St. Michael parochial school.
The second is Cholera Day, the feast day of St. Roch, patron saint of plagues, who was credited with sparing parishioners from the cholera attack of 1849. That traditional day began at St. Michael, but was moved to Prince of Peace, the reorganized parish.
In the fall, the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese objected to historic designation for the church and rectory, saying it would prolong the diocese’s efforts to sell the buildings. Last week, Tripoli closed the real estate deal on the buildings before City Council held the final hearing on that designation.
The sale price has not yet been recorded in the Allegheny County recorder of deeds office. The property has a market value of $350,000, according to county records.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Rebuilding needs input, not secrecy
Wednesday, October 06, 1999
By Sally Kalson
Pittsburgh Post GazetteThere’s never been any question that something must be done about Pittsburgh’s Forbes-Fifth corridor, a grim expanse with too many indications of a center-city in decline.
But now we’re seeing what happens when the plan for “something” is hatched in secret, by a few people, with no input from those most directly affected, and without consulting any of the myriad local experts who could have helped shape the project and build community support.
Without that kind of participation, Mayor Murphy’s newly unveiled plan for Market Place at Fifth and Forbes feels like it’s being done more TO us than WITH us. And that’s a shame.
I, for one, would love to get behind a major Downtown revitalization project. But as it stands, this one gives me the willies.
It feels out of balance, both too much and not enough — too much demolition, not enough preservation; too much commercial development, not enough residential (none, actually); too much emphasis on national chains, not enough on retaining homegrown business; too much telling how it’s GOING to be, not enough conferring on how it OUGHT to be.
The plan has its merits, to be sure. Of the $480.5 million package, about 89 percent will come from the private developer, Urban Retail Properties of Chicago, and the prospective tenants. The buildings are to be in scale with Downtown’s current proportions, and all the stores are to have street entrances instead of inward-facing, mall-type corridors.
But — and this is a very big but — the plan calls for the city to acquire 64 buildings and demolish 62 of them. Only 10 facades are to be saved and incorporated into the new designs.
That’s not revitalization; it’s clear-cutting. And even if the new buildings that take their place are nicely designed, will there be anything distinct about them? Anything that says Pittsburgh, as opposed to Cleveland, Denver, Atlanta or Fort Worth?
How many structures that are worth saving could have been kept in the picture if Murphy and his point man on the project, Deputy Mayor Tom Cox, had invited Pittsburgh History and Landmarks and Preservation Pittsburgh into the process, instead of holding them off?
Having been excluded, they’re now working on alternative plans of their own. How much time, energy and expense could have been saved if they’d all worked together from the get-go?
And how many Downtown business owners could have been won over, fired up or, at the very least, assuaged if the mayor’s office had found a way to include them? Now they’re angry as hornets, vowing to dig in and hold out, threatening lawsuits.
It was all so predictable, and so unnecessary. Sure, some opposition is inevitable in a project of this scale. All the more reason to accept the help of potential allies when it’s offered instead of shutting them out.
Arthur Ziegler of Pittsburgh History and Landmarks summed it up, saying he was “most disappointed that the city has ignored all those people and organizations that want to help. There was an opportunity here to encourage terrific local community energy and commitment through broad participation.”
This, I think, is one of the most unfortunate characteristics of Murphy’s tenure. I believe he loves this city and cares deeply about its future. If only he could recognize that other people do, too.
Sally Kalson’s e-mail is:skalson@post-gazette.com