Category Archive: Downtown Development
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Fifth & Forbes battle recalled
10/02/2001
Downtown planners from across the United States and Canada got an overview Monday of the four-year battle in Pittsburgh known as Market Place at Fifth & Forbes.
“We learned that there is something even further beyond polarization. I don’t think you would have seen the four of us in the same room together two years ago,” said Cathy McCollum of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
McCollum was joined on the panel by Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership Executive Director Harry Finnigan, Downtown retailer Patty Maloney and City Planning Director Susan Golomb.
The panel members spoke about the Fifth and Forbes plan to 60 attendees of the International Downtown Association’s annual conference at the Pittsburgh Hilton and Towers. The association’s 47th annual conference addresses strategies and issues for making Downtown areas better and stronger.
Fifth and Forbes, and the subsequent Plan C Task Force, were presented as a case study in massive downtown revitalization projects.
The task force was formed in November to look at new strategies for redeveloping Pittsburgh’s retail core after the collapse of Mayor Tom Murphy’s hotly debated, $480.5 million Market Place at Fifth & Forbes proposal. The proposal raised hackles over government subsidies, eminent domain and the demolition of historic buildings.
The task force plans to name a private developer later this year as managing partner of a new redevelopment strategy.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. © Tribune Review
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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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Preservationists see window of opportunity
Tuesday, August 28, 2001
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic
On a beautiful, blue sky Saturday morning, when Pittsburghers are out golfing, gardening, goofing off and otherwise enjoying the day, architect Terry Necciai and crew are holed up on the dark, grimy second floor of a Downtown building, wrestling with some crusty old windows.
Standing on a ladder overlooking Liberty Avenue, Necciai is trying to rig one of the rope and pulley systems that help open and close the century-old, double-hung windows.
“Nothing got through the pulley hole,” Necciai says to Daniel Steinitz, one of four volunteers from the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz business school, who’s deftly straddling an open staircase next to the windows. “The second rope won’t even go through.”
It looks like hard, hazardous work.
“It’s easy craftsmanship,” Necciai said. “It’s really basic.”
To make a point, this is how Necciai has been spending his Saturdays for the better part of the past two months. The point is this: With a little money, paint and elbow grease, you can make a big difference.
A former Main Street program manager in Charleroi and Somerset who championed that incremental, preservation-minded approach for Downtown in the recent Fifth/Forbes debate, Necciai is joined most Saturdays by Sandy Brown and a changing handful of others. Brown is president, Necciai vice president, of Preservation Pittsburgh, and this is one of the group’s volunteer projects.
About 18 volunteers — most of them people in their 20s — have worked with Necciai and Brown. Together, they have removed seven window sashes from their frames, scraped the multicolored paint from the wood, stripped the paint that covered the glass and rehung the sashes in their frames.
It would have been easier to replace the glass than to strip it, but the volunteers value the irregular appearance and imperfections of 19th-century “wavy glass.”
They also value the satisfaction that comes from actually doing something, as opposed to merely talking about doing something.
“We put on gloves and old clothes and a couple of hours go by and we have some fun chatting,” Brown said. “You’re not just sitting around in a meeting.”
Built in the late 19th century, the building spans Liberty Avenue and Market Street and is situated on one of those little triangles of land formed by the intersection of Downtown’s two grids. It’s owned by the family of George Harris, who runs the florist shop next door, and occupied by Jim Calato’s City Deli.
Sometime in the 1970s, the building’s second floor became an advertising sign for the flower shop. That’s when the windows — glass and all — were painted over, then later painted over again in white.
In reviving historic structures, “I think what’s best for the small buildings is to do things, in many cases, that are less expensive than what you would expect because it does less damage to the building,” Necciai said. “I was trying to find a building to show the principle that it’s not necessarily more expensive” to rejuvenate the original architecture than to remodel it.
Why this building? For one thing, the improvement would be obvious and dramatic, yielding a big bang for the buck.
For another, “It’s all traditional materials” — wood and glass. “It’s only two stories tall and manageable. The facade is 80 percent glass and almost all the wood is reachable from inside the building.”
Each of the 11 window panes that have been stripped, scraped and sanded took about eight hours. Next, the volunteers will finish replacing the ropes in three windows and paint all of the windows’ exteriors.
“We’ve got a nice, three-value olive green going toward ochre,” Brown said. “We’re picking up some of the detail in deep red.”
What the volunteers can’t paint, professional sign painters should be able to reach, if new City Deli signs are commissioned.
At a table in front of the building, drawings show how the building would look with a storefront and signs more in character with its historic upper floor. Harris is considering that. He’s paid for all the supplies so far (about $400 worth), and he’s thrilled with the work — and the workers.
“I’m very much impressed with their zeal and desire,” he said. “They are really sacrificing themselves, believing that improvements can be made and renovations brought about in ways other than mass destruction. It’s really an extension of what we professed all through the battle of Fifth and Forbes. And they’re doing it with smiles on their faces. It’s a real delight to me.”
For Necciai, part of the value of this project “is giving young, committed people a small piece of the action pie, getting them into the buildings and showing them how repairable they are.”
Nina Thomson, a Pitt architectural studies student who met Necciai when she wrote to him in February 2000, asking how she could help save buildings in the Fifth-Forbes corridor, did the drawings when she worked for him last summer. This summer, she’s devoted three Saturdays to the project and said she’s “learned a lot about how the old kind of windows work. I wish there were more things going on like that.”
Certainly there’s no lack of historic buildings along Fifth and Forbes that could use such TLC. And while more and more of them have empty storefronts, some snail-pace progress is being made on the Plan C front, as about eight members of the committee — including representatives of the mayor’s office and its former chief opponent, Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation — make plans to meet with potential developers in Philadelphia next month. (They’ll also be interviewing other local and out-of-town developers, of course.) Committee members — some of them volunteers — are paying their own ways.
Resurrecting Fifth and Forbes, like reviving the City Deli building, is proving to be slow, but democratic, work.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Plan C draws some interest as developers line up for Downtown redo
Saturday, July 28, 2001
By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Eight developers — three local and five from out of town — have expressed interest in doing some or all of the retail-residential-entertainment makeover of the rundown Fifth and Forbes area of Downtown.
The names of the development firms were released yesterday by Mayor Tom Murphy’s Plan C Task Force, which he named last December after dropping his previous, controversial plan for a $521 million redevelopment of Fifth and Forbes by Urban Retail Properties of Chicago.
The Fifth and Forbes task force is close to recommending a revitalization plan to be implemented in the important retail corridor. The 13-member group has held several months of public hearings and has received resumes and qualifications from interested developers.
“We are delighted by the strong interest we have received both locally and nationally” in the Fifth and Forbes redevelopment, said city Planning Director Susan Golomb.
Such interest, she said, shows that the task force is preparing “a solid, exciting plan that private firms believe will be profitable for them and successful for the city.”
Local firms that want to take part are:
Lincoln Property Co., whose office is in Bethel Park, is willing to develop housing as part of the renewal plan. Lincoln has done several housing developments in the Pittsburgh area, including upscale apartments on the North Shore just over the Ninth Street Bridge.
No Wall Productions, headed by Eve Picker of Friendship, who has converted several older Downtown buildings into condominiums or loft-style housing.
Serket, a design studio based in Carnegie, which is interested in retail and entertainment development in the Fifth-Forbes corridor.
The five out-of-town developers who want to take part in the work include:
Continental Real Estate, with its partner, Nationwide Realty Investors, both of Columbus, Ohio, which is doing the massive Waterfront retail/housing project in Homestead, West Homestead and Munhall and the housing portion of the South Side Works redevelopment.
Downtown Works, a division of the Kravco Co., based in King of Prussia, near Philadelphia. Kravco has done the $250 million redevelopment of the sprawling King of Prussia Mall, which includes sought-after retailers such as Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. Getting a Nordstrom store was a key part of Murphy’s plan that died late last year.
Kramont Realty Trust of Plymouth Meeting, Pa., is interested only in the retail leasing portion of the overall plan. It has done retail redevelopment projects in Chester, Pa., as well as north Philadelphia and Atlantic City, N.J.
Hunter Interests, an urban economics, finance and real estate development firm from Annapolis, Md.
The Palladium Co., a company based in New York City that does mixed-use, retail/office/residential projects.
Arthur Ziegler, president of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation and a member of the Plan C task force, said the group will review the previous work of each firm and then visit sites in cities where renewal projects have been completed.
“We want to see if what they’ve done previously fits into our new vision of what the Fifth and Forbes area needs to be,” he said.
The on-site research is scheduled to be finished by mid-September. Golomb said a short list of development-manager firms would then be interviewed, with a firm or firms chosen by the end of September.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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2 Lawrence buildings start falling
Convention center, paint factory demolition begin
Tuesday, June 12, 2001
By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
It was a bad day for Pittsburgh buildings named Lawrence.
Demolition began yesterday on the original David L. Lawrence Convention Center — a youngster only 20 years old — as it was slammed by a machine called a Komatsu Excavator nicknamed “Bad Boy.”
Most of that building at Penn Avenue and 10th Street will be demolished by conventional methods, although a small implosion will be used this summer to take down a section of the roof.
The building, which opened in 1981, had only 131,000 square feet of exhibit space, which is considered tiny by today’s convention center standards. Demolition is to be completed by mid-August so that phase two of construction of the new convention center can proceed. The first phase of the new building is well under way on the western side of 10th Street.
Tom Kennedy, project manager for the Sports & Exhibition Authority, said the old convention center had to be razed “because the design wasn’t compatible” with the new $328 million center, which was designed by architect Rafael Vinoly of New York City.
Six events planned for the latter half of 2001 had to be moved to other venues in the area or rescheduled because the old convention center is being demolished. The first phase of the new, larger building will open in January in time for public events such as the annual boat and auto shows.
While the convention center was being razed Downtown, demolition cranes were also whacking into a brick wall at the 99-year-old Lawrence Paint Co. building on the south side of the Ohio River. It’s just west of Station Square and faces the Point fountain across the river.
That industrial structure was built in 1902 and has been closed for more than 30 years. Much of the roof has withered away over the years, allowing rain and bird droppings to get inside and damage the interior. Demolition is expected to take 60 to 90 days.
Some historic preservationists had looked at the building in recent years as a possible site for high-end apartments or condominiums, but the extensive interior damage and the narrow site — squeezed in between railroad tracks and Carson Street, a state road — made reuse of the structure prohibitively expensive.
A master plan for the entire 50-acre Station Square site, which had been done in 1992 by Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation when it owned the property, called for the preservation and renovation of Lawrence Paint.
But after the prime riverfront property was sold in 1994 to Forest City Enterprises of Cleveland and Tennessee-based Promus hotels and casinos, approval was obtained from the city to demolish the old paint building.
Forest City later bought out Promus, but Promus still holds an option on the land until 2007 in case Pennsylvania should legalize floating or land-based casinos.
At least until the option held by Promus expires, the Lawrence Paint building will be replaced by a small park with industrial artifacts.
“We regret that the master plan, which PHLF submitted to the city in 1992 and which required preservation of Lawrence Paint, is not being followed,” said History & Landmarks spokeswoman .
Even after the property was sold by Landmarks in 1994, “we assumed the approved master plan would be followed,” she said.
She acknowledged that Forest City, in the late 1990s, went to the city planning commission to obtain approval to demolish the building, saying it had become too damaged to be renovated.
McCollom said History & Landmarks “will work with Forest City on a commemorative industrial display” to go where the building has long stood. The display will include some artifacts from the building, she said.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Fifth and Forbes ready for another go-around
3,000 Downtown merchants, property owners invited to offer revitalization input tomorrow
Wednesday, April 25, 2001
By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Three thousand Downtown property owners and merchants have been invited to a meeting tomorrow to discuss solutions to a bitter, two-year dispute over how to revitalize the rundown commercial core along Fifth and Forbes avenues.
The 11-member Plan C Task Force — named by Mayor Tom Murphy in December after he abandoned a $522 million renewal plan called Market Place at Fifth and Forbes — will hold a hearing from 2 to 4 p.m. to collect ideas on what Downtown needs, particularly what it needs to stay alive after 5 p.m.
Hundreds of people are expected to attend the hearing at the Italian Sons and Daughters of America building at Forbes Avenue and Wood Street. That is ground zero in the long-running dispute between Murphy and his critics in the historic preservation and business communities.
“We have to come up with a clear vision for Fifth and Forbes,” said task force member Harry Finnigan, director of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership. “We have to come up with rules that will provide direction for revitalization and let private-sector investors be part of it. If we don’t do that, we will have failed miserably.”
Despite angry words exchanged last year by Murphy and his opponents, “we all agree on a number of things the area needs. We all want to create a vibrant, colorful Downtown core,” said marketing director of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, which fought Murphy’s Market Place plan.
McCollom said points of agreement include:
All stores in the target area, bounded roughly by Fifth and Forbes avenues, Smithfield Street and Market Square, need to have a unified plan for signs, advertising, marketing and hours of operation.
The city won’t use its eminent domain power to condemn and take over privately owned buildings.
Buildings and shops along Fifth and Forbes must have their windows and facades beautified, using both private funds and city loans or grants.
The mix of stores should include national, regional and local businesses.
Additional parking and housing are crucial.
But major points of disagreement remain. One is the exact formula of national vs. local stores in the final retail mix.Under Murphy’s abandoned plan, national stores, such as Tiffany’s jewelers and the House of Blues music club, were given preference, angering local business owners.
Another unsettled issue, McCollom said, is who will take the lead in quarterbacking the renewal plan.
It could be Murphy or the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority — which Murphy controls — or Finnigan’s 7-year-old Downtown Partnership or a year-old group of building owners called the Golden Triangle Community Development Group, which fought Murphy’s previous plan.
A second hearing will be held May 10.
In recent weeks the Plan C Task Force has held informal talks with some developers.
One was Frank Kass, chairman of Continental Real Estate Cos. of Columbus, Ohio, whose firm is doing the massive Waterfront retail-entertainment project in Homestead and the housing component of the South Side Works on East Carson Street.
Kass said Pittsburgh’s central core has a lot going for it, but needs more parking and permanent housing.
He suggested that the city “immediately begin buying up any piece of property that is underutilized and is for sale.” Even if the city knew what it wanted to add to Downtown, it currently doesn’t control enough property to make it happen.
He also suggested the use of government-sponsored facade grants to help owners spruce up the outsides of their buildings, and a technique called reverse taxation, in which an underused building or vacant land is more heavily taxed to encourage development while taxes decrease for buildings that are fully used.
The Plan C Task Force is also looking at the possible use of historic tax credits, which could reduce taxes for owners of historic buildings who make improvements.
Last year, Murphy angered historic preservationists by proposing the demolition of more than 60 buildings along Fifth and Forbes, many nearly 100 years old.
The task force has also interviewed Wayne Snyder, head of a firm called Kravco, near Philadelphia.
The 50-year-old company is primarily known for developing regional shopping malls but recently established a new division called Downtown Works, which focuses on urban redevelopment.
“Downtown Pittsburgh’s complement of department stores is a testimony to the general strength of Downtown,” he said.
“The next thing is to put residential [units] there and better entertainment and funkier, more diverse restaurants,” he said.
Local developer Craig Cozza of Mount Washington has also met with the Plan C group.
He is working with the Golden Triangle Community Development Group to use the first two floors of the old G.C. Murphy building for a 40,000-square-foot music club and a farmers market.
The music club would be run in connection with Rich Engler of SFX Entertainment, a nationally known concert promoter.
Cozza said Engler, formerly of DiCesare Engler, a Pittsburgh concert promoter, knows the local entertainment scene, while SFX could bring in national acts.
“There would be different kinds of music on each night — a jazz night, a blues night, a family entertainment night,” Cozza said.
“There would be something for everyone.”
Also, farmers from a nine-county area would have a place in the building to sell their wares.
In warm weather the farmers market would move out into Market Square, Cozza said.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Panel sets sights on revitalization of Point State Park
New vision to focus on history, recreation at Pittsburgh’s signature park
Saturday, March 31, 2001
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Almost 27 years after the dedication of Point State Park, civic leaders and park stakeholders are coming together to create a new vision for the green triangle of land shaped by the confluence of Pittsburgh’s rivers.
About 30 members of the Point State Park revitalization committee — a group so new it doesn’t yet have an official name — met yesterday for the first time to talk about how the park might become more friendly to active recreation and more mindful of its history.
The committee is a joint project of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development — the 57-year-old public policy group that created the park — and the Pittsburgh Riverlife Task Force, formed in 1999 to shape a bold vision for the city’s waterfront.
Conceived as a quiet oasis, the state-owned, city-maintained park has been criticized in recent years for being too quiet — for permitting walking and jogging but outlawing activities like bicycle-riding and in-line skating. At other times, the “quiet oasis” becomes a sea of bodies, and the city’s front lawn gets more use, and more wear and tear, than its designers anticipated, with large festival and fireworks crowds quickly turning its grass to dirt or mud.
And while a newly expanded Fort Pitt Museum will reopen in the park in June, some believe the park hasn’t made the most of its colonial military history, especially in light of the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War in 2004.
With no comprehensive plan for the park, ideas tumbled into the vacuum.
Last summer, Mayor Tom Murphy suggested rebuilding Fort Duquesne as an attraction — a possibility that’s being investigated by the Fort Duquesne Commission, led by former county Commissioner Bob Cranmer.
In the fall, the Riverlife Task Force’s consulting landscape architect, Hargreaves Associates, suggested establishing a gateway to the park and a new, more direct entrance, with a pedestrian bridge over the sunken wall of Fort Pitt.
And just this week, a group called the Point State Park Garden Committee revealed it has been working for seven years to create a Peace Garden in the park — and has secured the state and local approvals to do it.
For now, though, all those ideas are on hold while the revitalization committee comes up with an overarching plan.
“There are several wonderful projects that have been proposed but they should be considered in the light of a comprehensive vision for the park that we can all buy into,” said committee Chairman Jim Broadhurst, an Allegheny Conference member and chairman of Eat ‘n Park Restaurants.
Broadhurst said the park effort dovetails with the conference’s mission to improve the quality of life in Western Pennsylvania and with its recently completed long-range plan to enhance the area’s amenities.
Commissioning a planning and programming study for Point State Park was one of the Riverlife Task Force’s recommendations last fall.
Both the Fort Duquesne and Peace Garden groups are represented on the committee, which also includes local history museums, foundations, city and state government and others.
“I think we have an extraordinary opportunity right now” to make the park the centerpiece of the new development along the riverfront, Mayor Murphy told the group.
“It should become a real statement for this region.”
But what kind of statement?
Citing the “long-standing disagreement on the use of the park,” Murphy told the committee members they first have to determine a philosophy of use.
“Is it going to be a dynamic park or a passive park?”
Barry Hannegan, director of historic design programs for Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, was invited to brief the group on the history of the park’s design. Landscape architect Ralph Griswold, the park’s designer, envisioned it as “the calm eye in the center of the city,” Hannegan said, and used only plants that would have been there in colonial times.
“We should keep in mind that we’re working with an extraordinary continuum of history and affection.”
Broadhurst said the committee will look at ways to better interpret the park’s history, increase recreational opportunities and visitor amenities, develop design standards and create a management system. It also will determine whether the park should continue to host large community gatherings.
But the committee won’t be working alone.
Like the Riverlife Task Force’s plan for the riverfronts, the Point State Park plan will be shaped through a public participation process.
“We’ll either do a [design] charrette or a community brainstorming, and on a fairly aggressive timeline,” said Riverlife Task Force Director Davitt Woodwell.
In the next few months, the committee will create a schedule, budget and a request for qualifications from firms interested in studying the park’s existing uses and future possibilities. The firm also would direct the public process and shape the final plan, to be completed by summer 2002.
Although the entire cost of the plan is not yet known, John Oliver, secretary of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, has pledged $50,000 to develop it, with the committee working to raise more from local foundations.
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