Category Archive: Neighborhood Development
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Brighter days ahead for Wilkinsburg
By Bill Zlatos
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, April 17, 2008Following a blueprint he used to help create Station Square and improve the North Side, philanthropist Dick Scaife pledged $500,000 Wednesday to restore old homes and revitalize Wilkinsburg.”We hope to show that Wilkinsburg is a good place to live, attractive to a variety of people,” said Arthur Ziegler, president of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. “And we want to demonstrate that there are properties available, and they can be beautifully restored and make very good homes.”Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation will get the money from the Allegheny Foundation, officials from both organizations said.
The gift is Allegheny Foundation’s biggest grant in recent memory, said Executive Director Matthew Groll. The Downtown-based foundation is chaired by Scaife, owner of the Tribune-Review.
The Allegheny Foundation helped finance restoration of Station Square, the Mexican War Streets and Manchester, Groll said, and Scaife was inspired during a drive through Wilkinsburg several months ago to continue restoration efforts there.”People see a little spark happening down the street,” Groll said. “Hopefully, the enthusiasm spreads and the community as a whole will rise up to meet the new enthusiasm.”
About two years ago, Ziegler’s group started a program to restore four houses in Wilkinsburg’s Hamnett Place neighborhood. The Sarah Scaife Foundation and Allegheny County each granted $500,000 to pay for that project.
History & Landmarks acquires the homes, oversees renovation and offers the homes for sale. The Hamnett Place houses have been sold. Renovations are under way and should be finished in six to eight weeks.
Walter and Rachel Lamory of Regent Square bought a turreted duplex on Jeanette Street for $95,000, one of the four buildings renovated.
“I know the perceived drawbacks of the area, said Rachel Lamory, 24, who attended nearby St. James School. “But I always saw the potential there. When I heard we had a chance to save these beautiful old homes I always admired, I felt we had to be part of it.”
Jack Schmitt and his wife Erin Cunningham paid $70,000 for a Queen Anne-style house that received $195,000 worth of renovations during the project’s first phase. The house has a scalloped dormer and gingerbread trim on the front porch.
“We spent a lot of time driving around, paying attention to the neighborhood,” he said. “We didn’t feel any hesitation whatsoever.”
The couple plans to buy the lot behind their home and the house next to it. They would raze the adjacent house and plant a vegetable garden. They want to set up a food stand and sell their food with a neighbor.
State Sen. Jim Ferlo, D-Highland Park, praised Scaife’s gift as a boost to the community’s morale.
“It’s exciting when you see this kind of financial commitment,” Ferlo said. “It builds credibility for the economic restructuring and activities within Wilkinsburg that are aimed at revitalizing the core of the community.”
Bill Zlatos can be reached at bzlatos@tribweb.com or 412-320-7828.
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Allegheny Foundation grants $100,000 to Carnegie library
By Bill Zlatos
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, March 30, 2008A $100,000 gift from the Allegheny Foundation will help restore the 107-year-old Andrew Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall as the linchpin of economic development in Carnegie, officials said.
It increases money the library has raised to more than $5 million toward a goal of $8.6 million.The money is among grants to organizations that the Allegheny Foundation announced Friday to improve the arts, human services, education and economic development in Pennsylvania.
“We’re bringing people from all over to Carnegie,” said Maggie Forbes, executive director of the library and music hall. “They eat here. They buy gas here. They park on Main Street. They get to know the town.”
Forbes said the transformation of the building symbolizes that of the town. Carnegie was struck by a flood in 2004 and a fire a year later that destroyed three century-old buildings on Main Street.
“If we can do it, anybody can do it,” she said. “We were down and out for the count, and we’re working miracles here.”The foundation gave $100,000 to Gilda’s Club, a nonprofit in the Strip District that offers lectures, workshops, support groups and social events for 500 members touched by cancer.
“We are an organization that receives no kind of reimbursement,” said Carol Lennon, executive director of the club. “These kinds of gifts enable us to continue to offer free programs at Gilda’s Club for all members.”
Another beneficiary of the foundation’s generosity is the Extra Mile Education Foundation Inc. It received $250,000 for scholarships at four schools — Holy Rosary in Homewood, St. Agnes in Oakland, St. Benedict the Moor in the Hill District and St. James in Wilkinsburg. The program targets students who are black and nonCatholic.
“This program helps kids succeed in school and in life,” said Ambrose Murray, executive director of Extra Mile. “It gives them a sense of values. It gives them a sense of themselves.”
The Downtown-based foundation, chaired by Richard M. Scaife, owner of the Tribune-Review, also made grants to these organizations:
• $250,000 to the Westmoreland County Historical Society for construction of the History Education Center at Hanna’s Town, the first seat of Westmoreland County.
• $250,000 to Imani Christian Academy, an East Hills school that serves 180 students in grades K-12;
• $150,000 to Manchester Bidwell Corp. for its daily operations and a coordinator of volunteers and alumni;
• $100,000 to The Pittsburgh Project in the North Side for a warehouse that will help provide free home repairs for senior citizens and people with disabilities;
• $100,000 for operation of Hill House Association, a provider of health, human services and education in the Hill District;
• $100,000 to Brandywine Conservancy in Chadds Ford to buy unprotected land within the Meetinghouse Road Corridor of the Brandywine Battlefield National Historic Landmark;
• $75,000 to the Salvation Army for proper management and controls to better serve residents of 28 counties;
• $50,000 to Family Guidance in Sewickley for a mentoring program;
• $50,000 to Family House in Shadyside, to provide living arrangements for families of patients awaiting medical care at local hospitals;
• $50,000 to the Ligonier Valley Rail Road Association to restore the interior of Darlington Station;
• $25,000 to Goodwill Industries of Pittsburgh in the South Side to help people with special needs overcome employment barriers; and
• $25,000 to Ligonier Hose Company No. 1 for a fire truck.
Grants were made to these organizations located outside Pennsylvania:
• $250,000 to the Archdiocese of Washington, Washington, D.C., to improve urban Catholic education in the nation’s capital.
• $100,000 to Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity, Harrisburg, N.C., to offer cash incentives to women addicted to drugs or alcohol to obtain long-term or permanent birth control.
• $50,000 to Remote Area Medical Service, Knoxville, Tenn., to help provide health, vision and dental care and veterinary services to people living in remote areas of the United States.
Bill Zlatos can be reached at bzlatos@tribweb.com or 412-320-7828.
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$500,000 rehab revives Edgewood’s landmark rail depot
By Melanie Donahoo
FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Port Authority of Allegheny County will lease the turn-of-the-century Edgewood Train Station to the borough of Edgewood for the nominal fee of $1 per year.
Nearly $500,000 in renovations have been made to the architectural landmark, as part of a cooperation agreement between the borough and the transit agency, authority spokesman David Whipkey said.
The station, which sits along the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway Extension, got a new roof, water and sewer lines, electrical services, exterior lighting and doors. The woodwork was rehabilitated. Port Authority began the work in November 2006 with money from a federal grant, Whipkey said.
The borough plans to rent the station once all renovations are complete. The building still needs rest rooms, insulation and aesthetic repairs to the interior, said borough Manager Kurt Ferguson.
“This is just a small piece of a much larger project that’s going to develop that whole corridor,” Ferguson said. “So I think it’s an important step in making the rest of those things happen.”
The borough plans to update the Edgewood Avenue corridor and improve its infrastructure and connection to Swissvale. Edgewood is working with Port Authority to find additional money to complete the 1,500-square foot train station. One possibility is offering the tenants a reduced rent in exchange for making the final repairs.
“We will put together an outline for a request-for-proposal and examine what possibilities exist,” Ferguson said. “There are certain limitations with the building that would probably make it more conducive to some sort of office use than it would a retail space.”
Built in 1903 and designed by noted architect Frank Furness, the train station was declared a landmark by the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation in 1998. The station once was a stop for trains on the old Penn Central Railroad main line and is believed to be the last existing building in Allegheny County designed by Furness.
Considered the founder of the Philadelphia school of architecture, Furness designed more than 400 buildings during his career, including many railway stations for the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio railroads.
Because the money is not yet in hand, there is no time frame for completion of the station’s renovations, Ferguson said.
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Vacant North Side church may find new life
By Jim Ritchie
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, March 25, 2008The North Side church nearly sold to a Manhattan developer and twice threatened with demolition has another chance at salvation.Talks began this month over whether the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh would sell the vacant St. Nicholas Church to a Croatian group that wants to preserve the 108-year-old building. It housed the first Croatian ethnic parish in the United States.Diocesan officials “encouraged” the Croatian American Cultural and Economic Alliance, based in Scott, to submit a proposal to buy the building with the intent of making it a museum and not to revive it as a church, according to the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, which spoke with the diocese on the matter.
The building along Route 28 closed in December 2004 and the parish was merged with a sister parish, also called St. Nicholas, in Millvale.
The diocese raised concerns that the space would be rented for special events where alcohol could be served, the foundation said.Former parishioners are hopeful they will buy the building but realize it would not return as a functioning part of the diocese.
“The church itself, as a Catholic Church, is not going to come back,” said Robert Sladack, a former parishioner from Reserve.
Selling to the Croatian group was not the first choice of the diocese. It chose not to accept the group’s initial offer in 2005 of $250,000. It then negotiated with a Manhattan developer, the Follieri Group.
Follieri proposed redeveloping it and several other vacant Catholic buildings in the region. Negotiations fell apart in the fall after an unrelated legal battle involving Follieri publicly unfolded.
The Rev. Ron Lengwin, spokesman for the diocese, referred questions to the Rev. Larry Smith, pastor of the St. Nicholas parish. Smith did not return messages seeking comment.
Messages seeking comment from Marion Vujevich, who represents the Croatian group, were not returned. Vujevich, of Mt. Lebanon, is one of five honorary consuls for Croatia based in the United States, making him a top-ranking representative recognized by the Embassy of the Republic of Croatia to the United States.
Pittsburgh has a strong Croatian presence. The Croatian Fraternal Union in Monroeville is the largest Croatian organization outside of Croatia.
St. Nicholas’ recent history has been controversial.
PennDOT initially called for the building to be razed or moved when it designed the reconstruction of East Ohio Street. Outcry from parishioners and historic preservation groups caused PennDOT to modify its plans, ultimately sparing the building.
The building faced a similar threat in 1920 when the city decided to widen East Ohio Street and called on building owners to relocate or move their buildings. The parish opted to move the church, by lifting it on jacks, about 20 feet back to accommodate the road, according to the diocese.
Jim Ritchie can be reached at jritchie@tribweb.com or 412-320-7933.
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LCCC Invests in Rippey Street
Eugene Matta
PHLF News
March 7, 2008LCCC, a subsidiary of PHLF, provided a $135,000 loan to East Liberty Development Incorporated (ELDI) to renovate two Queen Anne Style houses, located in the 5800 block of Rippey Street, into eight two bedroom, market-rate condominium units.
These historically significant houses were originally built in 1892 by entrepreneur William T. Chaffey. Work is underway on the project.
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RiverWalk makes old new again
By Ron DaParma
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, March 12, 2008Having one of the nation’s leading advocacy groups for environmentally friendly “green building” as a new tenant means a lot to Mark Stephen Bibro.
He’s general manager of RiverWalk Corporate Centre, a massive, 102-year-old complex on Pittsburgh’s South Side — for years known as the Terminal Buildings.
The Green Building Alliance is scheduled to open its headquarters there at the end of this month, putting a deeper stamp on the transformation of the nearly 1-million-square-foot complex, once said to be the largest warehouse between New York and Chicago.
“People walk in — particularly those who have not been here for a long time — and expect to see an old warehouse, but when they open the door, their first comment generally is, ‘Wow,’ ” said Bibro.
Since he took over day-to-day management duties about seven years ago, the tenant roster has swelled from about 25 to more than 90, bringing occupancy to 75 percent.
That includes many non-warehouse-type tenants, such as the Green Building Alliance, which intends to make its offices a showcase for recycled materials and other sustainable products.“It really has a lot of important features for us,” said Jeaneen A. Zappa, deputy director of the Alliance. “It’s a historic building and it allows us to show that green building can be done in an existing space and not just a new building, which is a common misconception.”
“We have high-tech, low-tech and no-tech,” said Bibro, whose late father was one of a group of tenants and friends of local businessman Dan Lackner that bought the complex in 1963. The building, designed by architect Charles Bickle, opened in 1906 as a state-of-the-art warehouse, modeled after the Cupples Station in St. Louis.
Although the Lackner family’s Paper Products Co., a distributor, is still the largest tenant, with 170,000 square feet, the complex is populated by a diverse mix of companies.
“We have 14 other nonprofits, four commercial printers, four architects, a sculptor and yoga and martial arts studios,” Bibro said.
In addition, there are companies such as high-tech artificial lung device manufacturer A-Lung Technologies Inc., and a group of other creative types such as Steelcoast, a creative agency that provides marketing and communications services to its clients.
“We wanted raw warehouse space, and this was exactly what we were looking for,” said Scott Bowlin, principal and creative designer for the firm, which has a staff of 11 in its 2,500-square-foot space.
“We wanted a distinctive look, and we were able to create that here,” he said of Steelcoast’s office, whose decorative touches include a nonworking gasoline pump and old-fashioned telephone booth.
“This is 1 million square feet, so you can have a sculptor on the same floor as A-Lung, and on the same floor with an architect,” said Bibro. “We also just brought in a paint studio. You can put those all in the same building, and they don’t contradict. They really complement one another.”
Efforts to transform the complex took two different tracks, according to Bibro.
First, a multimillion-dollar renovation upgraded mechanical systems and fire alarm equipment and addressed accessibility issues that weren’t dealt with 100 years ago, he said.
Next came an effort to change image.
“Our image used to be as a good location, but also a truck terminal, dirty, with storage and materials, and trucks going in and out all the time,” he said. “So even though the building was cleaned, and the windows were new, and we no longer had trailer trucks moving in and out, it took people actually coming here for events to say this place is great.”
One initiative that helped was to invite nonprofit groups to hold their monthly board meetings there, and that started the word spreading, he said.
Then, organizations such as the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America and the Visiting Nurses Foundation took advantage of Bibro’s offer for free use of a vacant 60,000-square-foot space on the top (sixth) floor to stage fundraising and other larger events.
That brought thousands of people into the building who had never seen it before, he said.
“SteelCoast is an example of a company that came to an event just because they wanted to support a charity, and they told me a few months later that their goal was to eventually move into our building,” Bibro said.
“Now the building hums 24/7 because all these young techies and other people here work that way,” he said. “You come here at 2 o’clock in the morning and there are always 10 companies working on a project or something like that.”
Ron DaParma can be reached at rdaparma@tribweb.com or 412-320-7907
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Door to History: New owners of old Union Trust Building hope to find use for bank vault
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
By Sally Kalson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
When the Union Trust Building opened Downtown in 1923, its safe deposit vault in the basement was reported to be the largest and strongest in the world — 80 feet long, 45 feet wide, 8 2/3 feet high, with walls 20 inches thick.
Now, 85 years and several bank mergers and sales later, the vault is still an impressive, if musty, catacomb that harkens back to another era. With its rows of burnished bronze cubbies, clanking gates and massive circular 55-ton door, it could easily be imagined as the set of an old bank heist movie starring James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson.
There’s almost nothing left there to steal now. Citizens Bank, which took over the vault from Mellon Bank after buying the latter’s consumer and small business operation in 2001, began notifying depositors several months ago to empty their lock boxes because it was vacating the premises.
Only about 1,800 of 12,000 boxes were in use at that point. Most have been cleared out by their owners, although some unclaimed boxes remain. On March 21, the vault will officially close; any leftovers will be drilled and moved to the Citizens branch across the street for safekeeping while the bank looks for their owners.
Citizens Bank president Ralph Papa, who was with Mellon for many years before the sale, said there was no need to keep the Union Trust vault in operation.
“We have more than 90 branches around the area, and the vast majority have safe deposit boxes,” he said. “There are lots of places for people to move the contents.”
Still, the closing of the storied vault sounds like the end of an era. But the Union Trust Building’s new owners say they are well aware of the basement’s historic nature.
“We’re looking at a number of uses,” said Rick Barreca, CEO of the Mika Realty Group of Los Angeles, which last month paid $24.1 million for the 11-story property.
“Our hope is that we can work with another financial institution in the future that might make use of the vault,” Mr. Barreca said. “It’s really a work of art, a unique facility that I think is irreplaceable. We have a large commitment to the building, and the vault is one of the benefits of owning it.” …..
That’s a sensible attitude, because it’s hard to see how the structure could be removed without tremendous cost and disruption. Mika is considering excavating under the building for a parking garage, but Mr. Barreca said “there’s plenty of room for that without touching the vault.”
Sparse history
Much has been written about the Union Trust Building from the ground up. The edifice is considered by many to be Downtown’s most spectacular, with its ornate Flemish Gothic exterior, 10-story rotunda, circular skylight and the twin “chapels” on the roof that actually house elevator machinery. It takes up the entire city block bounded by Fifth and Oliver avenues, Grant Street and William Penn Place. The design is credited to F.J. Osterling, but was probably conceptualized by Pierre A. Liesch, who worked for Osterling briefly, according to the late historian James D. Van Trump. In 1973, the building was recognized as a historic landmark.
But when it comes to the underground portion, there’s very little on the historical record. However, one article from the Pittsburgh Sun newspaper, dated Nov. 21, 1932, contained a descriptive bonanza.
“Great Vault Is World’s Largest” was the Sun headline that introduced the facility to the public. The report included illustrations of the vault opening and its interior and noted that the total weight of the doors and equipment was 5 million pounds.
The report described the vaults as “great fire, burglar, flood and mob proof strongholds,” built of “a double tier of interlocked heavy steel beams, surrounded by and imbedded in solid concrete, lined with the hardest and toughest armor plate.
“Every inch is guarded by electric alarms, and every protective device developed by human genius and skill has been installed to make absolutely safe the possessions deposited in it.
“The material is finished in solid bronze, and the boxes are 26 inches deep and are made of open hearth steel, the doors being one-half inch thick. The portable boxes are aluminum and were made by the Aluminum Company of America.”
The article went on to recommend the “impregnable trunk vault” as the ideal repository for silverware, heirlooms, valuable books and other bulky possessions.
All the more noteworthy is the fact that the vaults were retrofitted, because the building was not designed as a bank. It opened in 1917 as the Union Arcade, built by Henry Clay Frick on land he purchased from the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. At the time, it claimed to be the largest arcade in the world, with 240 shops on the first four floors and 760 office suites on the upper levels.
Six years later, the Union Trust Co. took over more than two acres of floor space, put its name on the edifice and its vault under it. The retrofitting was done by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, successor of D. H. Burnham & Co., architects of the Frick and Oliver buildings.
The newspaper described the vaults as occupying two levels — nearly 28,000 square feet on the safe deposit floor, and some 20,000 square feet on “the silver vault floor” for paintings, bullion and other heavy possessions.
That left the folks at Citizens scratching their heads, because the vault as it exists today has only one floor. “Nobody seems to know about that second floor,” said spokeswoman Angela Wagner.
The vault is changed in other ways as well. The open central area depicted in the Sun’s 1923 illustration is now crammed full of deposit boxes that were forklifted over from Mellon Bank’s Smithfield Street location after that building was sold in 1999 and made into a Lord & Taylor department store that closed five years later.
It’s hard to say for sure if the vault anteroom floor is original. The surface comes up higher than the bottom of the vault door, so the floor must be dropped by means of a long pole and lever to clear the way for swinging the enormous door open or closed. That may be depicted by the curved line in the illustration, but it’s difficult to tell.
The Union Trust Co. merged with Mellon Bank in 1946 to form Mellon National Bank & Trust Co. The building was rechristened Two Mellon Bank Center in the 1990s, but most Pittsburghers never stopped calling it the Union Trust Building.
Mellon — now Bank of New York Mellon — left the premises in 2006, and the structure is virtually empty except for Larrimor’s on the street-level corner of Grant and Fifth. Mika Realty hopes the high-end men’s clothier will remain, and CB Richard Ellis is charged with attracting new retail and office tenants.
As for the vault, it’s not going anywhere.
Sally Kalson can be reached at skalson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1610.
First published on March 12, 2008 at 12:00 am
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Owners’ fear: Razing houses will bring down theirs too
Monday, March 10, 2008
By Diana Nelson Jones,
Pittsburgh Post-GazetteThe estate of her dead neighbor owns the condemned vacant row house beside Cynthia Powell’s home on Chateau Street. Its facade is strenuously bowing and trying to persuade hers to come with it.
No contractor has been willing to touch the offending building, and Ms. Powell says she can’t afford the loan she needs to stabilize her house against it. So her house has been condemned, too.
This has been a three-year spiral for Ms. Powell, whose Manchester neighborhood has many pending dates with the wrecking ball. Of the 25 demolitions the city has asked the Historic Review Commission to approve since October 2006, 21 have been in that neighborhood. It’s the only entire neighborhood to have city historic designation, but that status is in danger; less and less density would eventually alter the boundary.
“Once you lose too many, then you have to question: What’s the value of an historic district?” said Tom Hardy, executive director of the Manchester Citizens Corp. The nonprofit development group counted 103 vacant properties — about 20 percent of the neighborhood — in a 2005 inventory and recommended 100 be renovated, he said. Some have been razed, either for safety reasons or because the properties were not feasible fixes, and more are slated for demolition.
“The challenge is,” said Mr. Hardy, “which ones will you be successful at turning around considering realistic market forces?”
Manchester’s story today is a tale of two neighborhoods: the one that tour buses drive through slowly so people can admire the Victorian architecture, and the other of dumb, hollow hulks, their balconies and porches sagging, the definition of their brickwork vague, as if they are literally fading away.
The dual identity coexists side by side in places, and that’s an untenable situation for Ms. Powell, whose house is a party-wall domino trying to remain standing. For Duane Hill, the decrepitude adjacent to his home on Sheffield Street is outrunning his efforts to renovate.
The Historic Review Commission provides oversight for changes to properties in the city’s 12 historic districts and advocates for the life of those properties. It almost never hears opposition to demolition applications, but last week, Ms. Powell and Mr. Hill showed up to fight.
Dan Cipriani, acting chief of the Bureau of Building Inspections, said that, of the 200 buildings the city razes each year, almost all go down without a champion. The owners either want them down or they belong to people who can’t be found or are dead.
Mr. Hill lives beside a property he had been trying to shore up when the city condemned it.
“I was working on it when one wall started to bow,” he told the commission. “I have a contractor who is going to take on the job. If I could get you some information to show you we are going to fix it, could you please not tear it down? We’re going to start working on it soon, as soon as the weather breaks.”
“We’re glad to hear that,” said the commission’s chairman, Michael Stern, referring to any plan to redeem a building. “Usually, we’re up here just voting on demolitions.”
Commissioners denied the city its demolition of Mr. Hill’s property but with a stipulation — that a building permit be in place within two months.
For Ms. Powell, the outlook isn’t as rosy.
“We were trying to tear down 1904 to help her out, so she could fix her wall,” Russ Blaich, the Bureau of Building Inspection’s demolitions inspector, told the commission. “But the contractor who got the bid was afraid the bricks would blow.”
Mr. Cipriani said the building beside Ms. Powell’s was approved for demolition last year, but the demolition contractor “found that anything he would do would have an adverse effect on Ms. Powell’s house.”
“I moved out,” Ms. Powell told the commission. “I pay my taxes like anyone else, and I am not behind on my water bill. I want to keep my house.”
“Russ thinks there’s a public safety hazard,” said Mr. Stern.
“Rock and a hard place,” Mr. Blaich said sympathetically.
“I’m not going to tear my house down,” Ms. Powell said.
“I know they have a limited budget,” said Mr. Stern, “but maybe we could try to talk to Manchester Citizens Corp. and maybe [Pittsburgh] History & Landmarks [Foundation] to see if they could help. What about if we’d ask them to consider funding or working with you on this?”
“Whatever it takes,” said Ms. Powell.
Katherine Molnar, the city’s preservation planner, said she will talk to Manchester Citizens and the foundation but is “unaware of the various options and possibilities that might assist Ms. Powell.”
“Ms. Powell did indicate a willingness to repair her own building if the neighboring structure was shored up first. I feel hopeful that these two structures will persevere,” Ms. Molnar said.
Mr. Cipriani said the lamentable fact is that a delay of demolition usually just means further debilitation. In most cases, he said, “any of this should have been done 10 years ago.”
Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.
First published on March 10, 2008 at 12:00 am