Category Archive: Neighborhood Development
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Point Breeze: Council delays vote on Walgreens Proposal
By staff and wire reports
Thursday, September 14, 2006Pittsburgh City Council delayed a preliminary vote Wednesday on a controversial plan to build a Walgreens drug store in Point Breeze.
More than a dozen residents who live near the proposed site at the corner of Penn and South Braddock avenues implored council members to vote against changing a sliver of residentially zoned land to commercially zoned land.
The change would allow Walgreens developers to build a drive-through window lane where three Victorian homes currently stand. Developers have agreements to buy the homes, which would be demolished.
The matter will go before City Council again for a vote Sept. 27.
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Shedding light on darker days
By Kim Lyons
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, July 17, 2006Sitting at JP’s Cafe on East Carson Street, author and historian Stuart Boehmig paints a picture of the South Side as it was 100 years ago.
“If you sat here in 1906, you would have heard four or five different languages and seen easily that many styles of dress,” Boehmig says, gesturing toward the SouthSide Works. “But the air was so filthy and polluted from the steel mill, you could barely see the sun.”
Photos from Boehmig’s book, “Pittsburgh’s South Side” show smokestacks from the fiery steel mill that dominated the end of East Carson Street, near the Hot Metal Bridge. Its modern-day occupant is SouthSide Works.
During the course of his research, Boehmig found no photographs of mansions or large houses on the South Side. “Virtually all the buildings were the same,” he said. “It was an even playing field, and everyone was equal.”
Anyone who made any money, Boehmig said, moved away.
The first immigrants arrived on the South Side near the turn of the 19th century. They were from Eastern Europe, followed by Irish, Scots and English, Boehmig says. The first of the neighborhood’s industries was glass, then came the J & L steel mill.
“The noise of the blast furnaces was like a rocket taking off,” Boehmig said. “It completely dominated the street. I remember it as a kid. It was unbelievable.”
Eileen Zaidel, 80, has lived on the South Side most of her life and remembers the steel mill — and the noise. Her husband, Stanley, is the son of Polish immigrants, but most of her family was born in Pittsburgh, Zaidel added.
The Zaidels live on 15th Street, right near the high-end South Side Lofts. “They’re very nice,” she says.
But the changes to the South Side haven’t all been good, Zaidel said.
“It’s so, so different now,” she said. “There’s a new generation, of course, and I think they’re spoiling it a little bit — too many bars.”
Steel was an industry that most believed would thrive well into the future, so its rapid decline in the 1970s and ’80s hit the South Side hard, Boehmig said.
He finds it very unusual that a neighborhood that lost its industry did not become a desolate wasteland, as it could have, but retained its vitality.
“It speaks to the values of the people that lived here — they literally built America,” he says. “They respected hard work and worked hard for what they got. I think that attitude still exists here.”
Traces of the South Side’s first residents remain: Sarah, Sidney, Muriel, Josephine and Jane streets are named for relatives of founder John Ormsby.
Cathy McCollom, of the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, says one big reason the South Side stayed mostly blue collar was its basic housing stock.
“While the mill was open, workers needed to live nearby,” she said. “When the Flats became too crowded, the inclines made it possible for people to live up on the Slopes. But it was almost all workers.”
But as the steel industry began its downward spiral, the South Side was not considered a particularly desirable place to live, Boehmig and McCollom agreed.
People who lived there stayed after the steel mill closed, Boehmig said. But wealthy people weren’t clamoring to move in and build bigger houses on the South Side. That left the neighborhood’s architecture intact, McCollom said.
“Sometimes, poverty can be a friend of preservation,” she said.
Leaving the Victorian, Italianate, Romanesque and other structures intact gave new developers a foundation on which to build.
One particularly successful renovation, Boehmig says, was Nakama Japanese Steak House at 1611 E. Carson St. The American Renaissance-style building was constructed around 1900. According to Pittsburgh History and Landmarks, the building housed the Lorch Brothers Store, which was destroyed by fire in April 1901.
The four-story building retains much of its original appearance, and the Pittsburgh City Historic Review Commission gave the owners a preservation award in 2005.
A $3 million project is under way on the upper floors of the building, which is planned as a boutique hotel. It’s slated to open in 2007.
Fat Head’s restaurant at 1805-07 E. Carson is another modern-day business in an historic location. German immigrant and “Squire of the South Side” John Henry Sorg constructed the building in 1874. He lived in its upper stories and ran his insurance and real estate business from the storefront.
The restaurant has been in the building since 1992, and its renovation retains many of the Italianate features of the original structure, according to Pittsburgh History and Landmarks.
E. Carson Street boasts the longest contiguous stretch of Victorian buildings in the country, McCollom said. “And for all the changes, the South Side has never lost its neighborhood feel.”
South Side noteworthy
1758: Pittsburgh is founded and named for British Prime Minister William Pitt
1763: King George III gives Major John Ormsby 3,000 acres of land, which later become the South Side.
1811: Ormsby’s son-in-law, Nathaniel Bedford, lays out Birmingham, now the South Side Flats.
1872: The Flats become part of the City of Pittsburgh
1854: Benjamin Franklin Jones and James Laughlin open the American Iron Works, which later becomes J&L Steel. By the 1940s the plant covers 100 acres.
1909: The South Side Branch of the Carnegie Library opens, and 10,000 people visit during the first week.
1968: LTV buys J&L Steel, which still employs 8,000 people.
1986: The LTV plant closes.
Source: Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation
Kim Lyons can be reached at klyons@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7922.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review © Pittsburgh Tribune Review
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Drive-through proposal prompts turnout
By Richard Byrne Reilly
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, June 29, 2006Opponents of a proposed Walgreens drive-through in Point Breeze blasted developers and urged City Council to reject a request to alter zoning laws that would permit three 100-year-old homes to be demolished for the project.
“We want to see viable, creative development in our neighborhood, not a condescending lesson about what is good or bad for it,” said Bill Anthes, who recently moved to Pittsburgh with his wife to pursue a doctoral degree at Carnegie Mellon University.Protesters packed a meeting Wednesday at the City-County Building, Downtown, waving fluorescent red and green placards that said, “Don’t Re-Zone Park Place.” Resident Joan Rabinowitz handed out freshly baked cookies bearing the same slogan.
Park Place residents said rezoning the site at Penn and South Braddock avenues would drive down property values and hurt the character of the neighborhood, where many homes are 100 years old. Paradise Development Group wants to demolish three houses for a two-lane drive-through developers say will alleviate traffic congestion.
City planners voted to allow the rezoning. Council will decide next week whether to approve it, said Council President Luke Ravenstahl.
Brandon Miles, a project manager in Pittsburgh for the Tampa, Fla.-based Paradise Development Group, said he has tried to accommodate Park Place residents’ concerns and has worked to meet city code requirements for the project. Paradise has signed letters of intent with the three families to sell the homes that would be razed, Miles said.
“We’ve worked to protect the welfare and integrity of the neighborhood,” Miles said.
Asked what might happen if council rejects the rezoning, Miles said he was “reserving judgment until a decision is made.”
Arnold Horovitz, a land-use attorney representing the Greater Park Place Neighborhood Group, said residents don’t necessarily oppose a Walgreens in the neighborhood, just the drive-through.
The demolition, he said, would be “out of character with the neighborhood.”
Arch Pelley, an urban planner who attended the hearing, said the issue comes down to compromise.
“The question is, ‘What is the best way to develop this site?’ ” he said.
Richard Byrne Reilly can be reached at rreilly@tribweb.com or (412) 380-5625.
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Store plan draws ire
By Richard Byrne Reilly
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, June 27, 2006Angered by a developer and the city’s planning process, people fighting a proposed drive-through for a Walgreens drug store in Point Breeze plan to attend a special City Council meeting Wednesday.
Their opposition centers on the fact that the two-lane, 24-hour drive-through for the Penn Avenue store would eliminate three Victorian homes in the neighborhood’s Park Place section.“Number one, the drive-through is not necessary. And two, we fear the loss of the residential properties will be a serious detriment to the neighborhood,” said John Mayberry, president of the Greater Park Place Neighborhood Association.
Council will hold a public hearing at 1:30 p.m. and will vote next month whether to approve zoning that would allow the store to be built. The Planning Commission has recommended the rezoning.
Opponents also are riled about planning commissioner Todd E. Reidbord’s role in the process.
Reidbord is president of Walnut Capital, a Shadyside investment company that previously developed a property that had Walgreens as its anchor tenant, raising concerns about conflict of interest, said Arnold Horovitz, an attorney representing Mayberry’s civic group. Reidbord did not disclose his previous affiliation with the drug-store chain when the Planning Commission considered the plan, and he shouted down and cut short residents when they tried to voice their opposition, said Horovitz and others who attended the meeting. Reidbord voted to recommend rezoning April 4, when the commission backed the move 7-1.
“Our real problem was his attitude at the previous meeting when he tried to stop opponents from speaking,” Horovitz said. “It was an aggressive effort to control the meeting because opponents couldn’t make their case.”
Reidbord did not return calls for comment.
City Planning Director Patrick Ford deemed the concerns regarding Reidbord valid.
“The community is correct. (Reidbord) should have recused himself and disclosed the conflict,” Ford said, referring to Reidbord’s company.
Ford said the conflict-of-interest issue would be discussed at Wednesday’s hearing and that “a number of residents” complained about Reidbord’s behavior in the meeting.
City planning staffers recommended approving the zoning change to the Planning Commission, Ford said.
Park Place resident Jim Hart said the integrity of the neighborhood would be affected if the three antique homes are torn down.
“We have to take a stand now, before it’s too late,” Hart said.
Richard Byrne Reilly can be reached at rreilly@tribweb.com or (412) 380-5625.
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South Side wins national preservation award
By Diana Nelson Jones,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Monday, June 19, 2006The South Side has received one of three national awards for transforming its economy while preserving its history.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation recognized the neighborhood, along with Dubuque, Iowa, and Roslindale Village, Mass., with an Urban Pioneer award at a recent Main Street conference in New Orleans.
All three winners were among the first seven Main Street designees when the program was established in 1985. About two decades earlier, the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation had begun agitating for historic restoration for the South Side.
“We began to educate residents on the importance of what was under their aluminum siding and InsulBric,” said Cathy McCollom, chief programs officer with Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. “We held a lot of meetings and went door to door.”
Architect John Martine bought a building on Carson Street in 1974, one year after establishing his practice in Oakland, and lived above his office, across from the Birmingham Bridge. The South Side wasn’t languishing then. The chamber of commerce membership included Jones & Laughlin and U.S. Steel.
“But people were not flocking to the South Side, and it was an area people didn’t see as an investment,” said Mr. Martine. It had traditional merchants — a five-and-dime, clothing and appliance stores, bakeries — but by the late ’70s, artists and antiques shops started to appear, “to some extent what is happening in Lawrenceville today,” he said.
“Storefronts had undergone lots of remuddling,” he said, “with some very unsympathetic things done to the ground-floor facades” — garish signs, small windows. The chamber established a committee to campaign for facade restorations and the city authorized paying Mr. Martine $50 a building for historic renderings for merchants.
“We did get a number of people to fix up their storefronts at their own cost,” he said. In fact, merchants spent a collective $200,000, with which the chamber leveraged a matching grant from the city for streetscape improvements. The Birmingham mural at 12th Street, a mid-block parklet across from the post office and brick handicap ramps resulted, from 10th to 24th streets.
Mr. Martine then produced a booklet, “Streetfront and Storefront: A Planning Guide for East Carson Street,” a design and marketing tool, he said, “to get people to invest.”
New residents began teaming with longtime residents to form the Birmingham Union, which lasted about six years, “long enough to get things going.”
South Side Local Development Co. was established in 1982 to counteract the increasing number of vacant buildings in the twilight of steel and two years later won Carson Street a place on the National Register of Historic Places. The Main Street designation came the next year.
(Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626. )
Copyright © PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Wilmerding group sees chance for renewal
By Jack Markowitz
FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, May 24, 2006It’s an old company town with at least half the population gone from the glory days. But the headquarters of the company’s great founder still stands, and as the saying goes, “they don’t build ’em like that anymore.”
The question is, can a new era of civic vitality spring up around what townsfolk call “the Castle?”
That is the situation of Wilmerding, a green-hilled Turtle Creek valley community of 2,200 in eastern Allegheny County. George Westinghouse, inventor and businessman extraordinaire, employed thousands in the town making railroad brakes from the late 1800s. People can still visit the office he used until 1913, with its solid wooden desk and high bay windows.
Wilmerding Renewed Inc. is betting modern professionals will want to be his neighbor, one century removed.
Wilmerding Renewed is a nonprofit corporation of six people who, with no paid staff, are buying the Castle for $750,000 and aiming to raise $4 million over the next two years to put it on a self-sustaining economic basis. They also want to recycle a nearby school for public events, more offices and a private or charter academy. And farther out, to bring new life to rows of historic “company town” houses.
John Gagetta, chairman of Wilmerding Renewed and an energy consultant, says the town was lucky to escape the bulldozers of “redevelopment.” He expects the Castle purchase to close June 30. “We gave ourselves a smaller window than most nonprofits — only eight months — to get this done, and we’re starting with debt,” he said.
Some 75 percent of the building’s 50,000 square feet is being marketed by Aegis Realty Partners Inc. at $14 a year per square foot, including utilities and parking overlooking the town’s central park. The rate easily beats Downtown Pittsburgh. But the ornate onetime home of Westinghouse Air Brake Co. has stone and brick walls six feet thick. Fiber-optic cable can’t get in there, says Joe Tosi, of Aegis. But computers and phones work fine.
The best prospects, Tosi said, are professional offices of 200 to 2,000 square feet that might enjoy free use of elegant 1890s conference rooms. A dozen tenants already are aboard from previous management. Also up and running is a George Westinghouse Memorial Museum rich in artifacts and memories.
The current owner is APICS, acronym for an industrial training foundation in the Washington, D.C., area, whose space needs are shrinking. APICS bought the Castle for $10, a gift from the old Wabco after a merger. It was obviously regarded as a white elephant.
But in this era of blah architecture, castles can live again, says Arthur P. Ziegler Jr., president of Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation. A steel mill is hard to recycle, he said, but an office building “as impressive as this, on an impressive site, has a very good chance.”
Jack Markowitz can be reached at jmarkowitz@tribweb.com
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New eminent domain law will help renewal effort
By Ron DaParma
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, May 21, 2006Urban renewal efforts have been good and bad, but Arthur P. Ziegler Jr. of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation believes there’s now hope for more of the good because the state has adopted a law governing the taking of private property for renewal.
Ziegler, president of the South Side-based preservationist organization, applauded when the Legislature passed and Gov. Ed Rendell this month signed two companion bills designed to clarify the state’s eminent domain law.
“We would like to see people protected from use of eminent domain,” said Ziegler. “We have seen it used or threatened frequently here, and some of the results have been negative.”
As examples, he points to efforts in the 1950s and 1960s that he calls some of the “worst cases of urban renewal we have seen.”
Those include efforts to revitalize the city’s Lower Hill District (the area near Mellon Arena), the development of Allegheny Center on the North Side, and the “Circle” in East Liberty — a project that diverted most vehicular traffic from the main Penn Avenue business district.
“And of course, the threat of it was used by the administration (of Mayor Tom Murphy) in various instances, including when he was developing plans for the Fifth-Forbes business district,” Ziegler said.
“This bill protects the rights of property owners above all other interests,” said Rendell. “Eminent domain should be used in a community’s best interests, not the specialized interests of a few.”
One section of the legislation amends the state’s eminent domain code by prohibiting, with some exceptions, an agency’s ability to take private property in order to use it for private enterprise.
It provides standards that single, blighted properties must meet before being taken by eminent domain. It also extends the criteria to include properties that are unmarketable, pose environmentally hazardous conditions, or have multiple instances of blight. Multiple properties can be taken by eminent domain if they also meet geographic conditions related to a blighted area.
The new law also says no political subdivision can use eminent domain authority against land in another municipality without the approval of the other political subdivision. It also outlines land condemnation procedures.
Real estate notes:
Permits were issued for 291 multifamily housing units in the first quarter of 2006 in the seven-county Pittsburgh area, more than double the 124 issued for the same period last year, the U.S. Census Bureau said. There also were 1,097 permits issued for single-family houses compared to 903 for the same period last year.
New office tenants in the Omni William Penn, Downtown, are the law firms of Phelan Hallinan & Schmieg, and O’Brien, Rulis, Bochicchio & Sosso, along with the investment management firm of Cookson, Peirce & Co. Inc., said Jim Jarrett, vice president, GVA Oxford, whose firm handled the leases.
Recent financing arranged by Daniel P. Puntil and Jeffrey W. Keating of LaureateCapital’s Pittsburgh office include $9.8 million for Leetsdale Industrial Park and $5.4 million for One Alexander Center, Harmar.
Electronic recording of mortgages and mortgage assignments is available at the Allegheny County Recorder of Deeds office. The system, through a secure network, allows documents to be received in the Recorder’s office, recorded and electronically returned to the submitter within minutes. Normal fees are paid by the submitter, either electronically or by mail or personal presentation. Plans call for electronic recording of mortgage satisfactions and, eventually, deeds. The system is also available in Westmoreland, Philadelphia, Chester and Lancaster counties.
Next Level Purchasing Inc. has moved its headquarters into 1315 Coraopolis Heights Road, Moon Township.
School Facility Development Inc., whose offices are at 24 S. 18th St., South Side, has purchased an office building at 1631 Monroeville Ave., Turtle Creek, for $1.55 million from Errol S. and Linda Abdulla, according to a deed filed with the Allegheny County Recorder of Deeds.
David Stoehr of Stoehr Development Inc. wants the state to provide $2.5 million in grants to clean up the 17-acre Fort Bridge property in Canonsburg, where he wants to develop the $23 million Fort Pitt Industrial Park. Stoehr wants to demolish 400,000 square feet of heavy industrial facilities by the end of 2006 and put up six buildings. The project has received a $130,000 state planning grant. Stoehr developed Meadow Lands Industrial Park, also in Washington County.
Gannett Fleming’s Youghiogheny Reservoir Alternate Steel Bridge won the Association for Bridge Construction and Design, Susquehanna Chapter Award in the Outstanding New Multi-Span Bridge category. Located in Fayette and Somerset counties, the bridge features spans exceeding 230 feet.
The second House to Home Fireplace & Pool Shoppe in the region has opened at 100 McClure Rd., Monroeville, said owner Walter Sedlock, who opened the first in Jeannette.
Sam Spatter contributed to this report.
Ron DaParma can be reached at rdaparma@tribweb.com or 412-320-7907. -
Can Strip District’s historic produce terminal start fresh?
By Amy McConnell Schaarsmith,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, May 04, 2006Poke your head into one of the open bays in the Strip District’s Pennsylvania Railroad Fruit Auction Building sometime during your lunch hour. You’re likely to feel as if you’ve stepped back into the days when the produce terminal, all five city blocks of it, was still the heart of the city’s shipping center.
Last week, dusty sunlight streamed down, cathedral-like, from the building’s high windows onto bag after 50-pound bag of sweet onions, their earthy scent rising and mingling with the odor of damp cement and the diesel smell of tractor-trailers. Wooden pallets lay stacked along the wall next to boxes of lettuce, broccoli, limes, strawberries, beans and cantaloupes.
The floor was calm in the daylight; all the action, all the loading and haggling and money-making, happened hours ago, between midnight and 7 a.m., much as it always has.
What has changed, dramatically changed, is the scale of activity at the terminal. Where 40 families once sold wholesale produce out of the terminal building in the late 1940s, just five now remain in business, and the local farmers who once sold fruit and vegetables to the public in front of the terminal’s loading docks on Smallman Street have disappeared.
“The families drifted away,” said Billy Carson, a manager for Coosemans Produce who has sold wholesale fruit and vegetables at the terminal since 1948. “The demand for us no longer existed in the same way.”
Now the grand old auction house and produce terminal may have reached an even more dire point in its 80-year history, as a local community group and a developer seek to overhaul — and in the developer’s case, partially demolish — a building owned by the city’s publicly supported Urban Redevelopment Authority and therefore by you and me, the taxpayers.
The Buncher Co., which owns a about 12 acres between the terminal and the riverfront that it would like to develop, has been discussing plans to extend at least one cross street — possibly 18th Street — through the building and back to its property, cutting the long building into sections, according to Buncher’s general counsel, Joseph Jackovic. The company’s riverfront property is accessible only by 16th and 21st streets, on either end of the produce terminal.
“It’s an issue we think the city ought to address because it is a barrier to development,” Jackovic said. “They always talk about connecting the neighborhoods to the riverfront — that’s one of the barriers to connecting them.”The URA’s executive director, Jerry Dettore, said no decision has been made on whether to cut a street — or streets — through the building, but that something needs to be done to make the Buncher property more accessible.“The question here is how you open the area behind the terminal so more development can occur — do you have to extend the streets and separate the building?” Dettore said. “Maybe a new building that’s more technologically advanced can be built on the Buncher property for [the produce wholesalers].”
Such talk, though, has the building’s tenants buzzing — and none too happy about the prospect of Buncher and the URA partially demolishing a building that, although it lacks official designation as a historic site, is nevertheless a local landmark.
“If it’s a landmark and you cut it into pieces, how is that a landmark anymore?” said Del Lansing, owner of Triangle Homebrewing Supply.
The building’s shape — and in particular its length — is what makes it marvellous and unique, said Arthur Ziegler, president of the nonprofit Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.“That building is impressive because of its continuous sweep along Smallman Street,” Mr. Ziegler said. “It’s really a marvelous building, and I can’t think of another building in the city like that — it helps define the Strip.”
Meanwhile, the community group, Neighbors in the Strip, has a vision of remaking a 25,000-square-foot, vacant portion of the warehouse into a smaller version of the country’s successful historic markets, such as West Side Market in Cleveland, Findley Market in Cincinnati and Pike Place Market in Seattle.
Their proposed market, which would include about 50 vendors (who have yet to be recruited), would open Thursday through Sunday and would combine stalls for produce, pottery, wood carvings, metalwork, African textiles, prepared food and other goods with a stage for live entertainment.
Architectural drawings of the proposed marketplace (and photographs of Reading Terminal in Philadelphia, a potential model) in the group’s promotional materials show a mall-like penchant for scrubbed and painted surfaces, glass display cases and faux-historic signs.
The group, which announced its plan in July, has yet to raise any private donations, however. For now, it is using a $150,000 state grant to pay for reworking its original feasibility study, which was based on creating a much larger market — a proposal that’s not feasible in a building with just 25,000 square feet lying vacant.
In the original study released last year, the community group would have rented the space from the URA and then re-rented it to the vendors. And although “those numbers are pretty much out the window,” according to the group’s economic development director, Cindy Cassell, the original numbers projected the 50 vendors paying the community group $400,000 a year in rent by the third year of operation.
That’s $8,000 a year in rent per vendor — a hefty sum for your average local farmer. Even if those original numbers are “out the window,” as Ms. Cassell says, the fact that they were ever proposed raises serious questions about whether the group will be able to recruit farmers, who can rent space at six city farmer’s markets each week between mid-May and mid-November — when they actually have something to sell — for a grand total of $1,000.
Neighbors in the Strip hasn’t taken a position on whether streets should be extended through the building. But the group does support adding more housing to the Strip District, Ms. Cassell said.
“We’re not sure what the plans are for that,” she said, referring to the Buncher property between the terminal and the riverfront. “But having residential development in the Strip District just seems good for everybody. Wouldn’t it be nice to show there’s a riverfront there?”
Maybe so. But to the extent that Buncher gains from breaking up the terminal, the public loses.
Although it lacks official historic designation, the produce terminal nevertheless was central to the city’s history for decades, and that deserves respect. Its vast expanse is a crucial part of its appeal, along with its forklifts and its tractor-trailers and its sacks of bulk onions and its pallets of watermelons.
They combine to create the sense that you have stepped into a warehouse, not a shopping mall, that somehow you have stepped into a piece of the past that developed without a feasibility study, a piece of Pittsburgh that is slipping inexorably away from us.
A new market could be wonderful, giving shoppers the locally grown fruit and vegetables that aren’t so easy to find in the rest of the Strip District, where a lot of produce is shipped in from California and Florida and often looks no better — and sometimes much worse — than what you’d find in any Giant Eagle.
Under the right management, a marketplace in the terminal building could provide an inexpensive entry point into the retail market for local farmers, both old and new, for cheese makers, beekeepers, bakers, chocolatiers, coffee roasters, butchers, pickle- and sauerkraut makers, wine makers, flower sellers and scores of other businesses that need refrigeration, want to operate year-round and would rather put a solid roof over their heads than set up a leaky tent at seasonal markets.
Such a market could draw more people to the Strip during the week, when many shops are in a lull. And it could attract more business to the few retail businesses that now operate in the building.
Sam Patti, who owns La Prima Coffee Roasters in the terminal, said he would like a retail market, but only if it’s done right.
“I’m all for change, I’m all for growth, but still keeping intact the integrity [of the terminal],” Mr. Patti said. “This building is a wonderful asset, so what do we do with it? That’s why we have to control this and make sure it doesn’t make it another Station Square.”
To remain true to the original spirit of the building, a few things need to happen. First, this unique, irreplaceable part of the city’s history should be officially designated as a historic landmark and protected from demolition .
And if Neighbors in the Strip is serious about organizing a retail market, the group needs to leave the building its gritty dignity, understanding that its roughneck warehouse feel is a big part of what makes it an exciting place to visit. The group’s members should restrain their urge to emasculate that atmosphere by plastering, painting, paving and gilding the building into submission.
To keep the building’s local touch, vendors should be required to grow, raise or make the products they sell, from locally grown fruits and vegetables to pasture-raised meat, homemade cheese and home-baked pies.
That requirement would set sellers apart from most shops in the Strip District, creating an additional draw and keeping them from competing directly with the established stores on Smallman and Penn. To prevent an invasion of knick-knacks, any crafts should also be locally produced and of high quality.
Neighbors in the Strip would have to pay for improvements such as handicap accessibility and an upgraded sewer system to accommodate the hordes of shoppers that hopefully will arrive, but cosmetic “improvements” should be kept to a minimum. That way, the group could pass through the relatively low rent available from the URA at about $3.50 a square foot.
And instead of imposing their vision, the group should let the vendors add their own individual personalities to the market. Give them a chance to work together to make the improvements they think are necessary, that they believe will appeal to customers and ultimately help them make more money.
Most of all, give the marketplace and its business owners a chance to evolve on their own, naturally becoming as unique, as colorful and as irreplaceable as the building in which they are located.
(Food editor Amy McConnell Schaarsmith can be reached at aschaarsmith@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1760. )
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette