Category Archive: News Wire Services
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Strength Inc. restoring buildings, the homeless
By Ann Belser,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, March 22, 2007Donald Henson is moving out of temporary housing into a permanent residence.
The move to an efficiency apartment is a big step up from the homeless shelter in which he spent time in 2005 after losing his apartment.
Mr. Henson, 53, is not the only one in the equation to have hit bottom. The Wilkinsburg building into which he is moving was once dilapidated and in need of help.
Strength Inc., which runs human services programs in the borough, can be credited with helping both. The four-story building on Wood Street officially opened March 14 with a ribbon-cutting by officials from Strength Inc., Allegheny County and Wilkinsburg, as well as the bankers who financed the project and the contractors who did the work.
Strength Inc. provided temporary housing for Mr. Henson after he left a shelter on the North Side in 2005. While he was there, he watched as, across the street, the agency renovated the Generations Building, cleaning and pointing the stone block on the early 20th-century building and creating 15 efficiency apartments on the top three floors. The ground floor will be used for offices and businesses.
Mr. Henson’s slide into homelessness goes back to 1996, when he was working at Shuman Juvenile Detention Center while acting as a professional wrestler on the side. In the ring, he was Mohammed Abdullah from Sudan.
During a match, instead of jumping from the ropes into the ring, he fell backward onto a concrete floor. His injuries left him unable to work and he lost his apartment.
He moved into Strength Inc.’s bridge housing program as part of the organization’s life management program. There he learned budgeting and life skills, like how to interview for a job.
The agency also worked with him on managing his health problems. He said in addition to injuries to his hip and back, he suffers from heart problems.
And so, while he was rebuilding his life with Strength Inc., the agency was renovating the building that will be his home.
The Rev. Marcus Harvey, giving a tour to Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato last week, showed how the agency used $4.2 million to renovate the building. Allegheny County provided $1.2 million and the rest was raised through private financing and historic tax credits from the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency.
The marble staircases have been restored. Each of the top three floors has a laundry room. Each of the apartments has a table with two chairs, a galley kitchen along one wall, a bedroom area that is not separated with a door from the rest of the apartment and a bathroom equipped with grab bars to help residents in and out of the bathtub.
In addition to the apartments, each floor also has large storage closets for each of the residents.
“This has been a big project,” Mr. Harvey said. “We do programs. We don’t do buildings.”
But for years he has worked to rehabilitate the buildings on all four corners of the intersection of Wood and Franklin streets. This one will be occupied by men and women who are agency clients, but it will be managed by ACTION-Housing Inc.
Arthur Ziegler Jr., president of the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, said the building was built between 1900 and 1910.
“You’re looking at a historic block in an historic neighborhood,” he said to the crowd that had assembled for the ribbon-cutting. “You can see here the reservoir of architecture that can be used to rejuvenate Wilkinsburg.”
Mr. Henson said he likes living in Wilkinsburg, just two blocks from a Save-A-Lot grocery store that opened last month. His rent will be paid with 30 percent of his income from Social Security disability. The rest will be paid through the federal Section 8 program.
Ethel Crystian-Nunley, deputy director of Strength Inc., said she had her hands full working on the building from financing to construction meetings and now with renting the units.
“I’m glad it’s over,” she said. “It’s finished and it looks beautiful.”
(Ann Belser can be reached at abelser@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1699. )
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Monessen targeting ‘blueprint’ program for business district
By Stacy Wolford
VALLEY INDEPENDENT
Wednesday, March 21, 2007MONESSEN – City council will apply for a grant as part of an effort to participate in a downtown revitalization program.
Councilwoman Mary Jo Smith prepared a grant request for $22,500 for the “Blueprint for Pennsylvania Downtowns.” The program is provided through the Pennsylvania League of Cities and Municipalities and HyettPalma, which will conduct the study.
Smith presented the proposal to council during a Monday night work session.
The “Blueprint” program is designed to provide hands-on help to city officials and community leaders interested in energizing their downtowns.
HyettPalma will start by creating a working partnership with the city by forming a process committee. The end result will be a “downtown blueprint” that provides a comprehensive strategy to reinvent the downtown economy.
Smith said the city will apply for the $22,500 grant through the state Department of Community and Economic Development. If it receives the grant, the money will be used to offset the $45,000 cost to participate in the “blueprint” program.
Smith said the program will benefit everyone in the city, not just the downtown area.
“We need a starting point and we have to have a goal to get to,” Smith said. “All of us are working and we can’t put an eight-hour day into this.
“But this is their line of expertise and they can bring a fresh new outlook into town,” she added with reference to HyettPalma.
Smith said Uniontown, Franklin Township and St. Mary’s have all participated in the “downtown blueprint” program.
Mayor Anthony Petaccia approved the grant request and said he felt the program would be beneficial for the city.
Council will meet tonight at 7 for its public meeting.
Stacy Wolford can be reached at swolford@tribweb.com or (724) 684-2640.
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Religious objects removed from historic St. Nicholas Church
By Ann Rodgers,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Tuesday, March 20, 2007A crew has removed religious objects from the interior of St. Nicholas Church, North Side, a landmark building on Route 28 caught in 15 years of wrangling between the parish that no longer uses it, former parishioners who want to save it, the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
On Friday the altar, statues and other religious objects were removed, and religious murals were painted over in preparation for a pending sale to the New York-based redeveloper of church properties, The Follieri Group.
Although that deal has not yet closed, a decision was made to remove the objects now because there had been a break-in at the unused rectory, said the Rev. Ronald Lengwin, spokesman for the diocese.
“We feel that it is necessary to prepare the building for sale and to safeguard those items. We met with the new pastor down there recently and determined what should be removed,” he said.
The action was devastating to Susan Petrick, secretary of the Preserve Croatian Heritage Foundation, which had unsuccessfully tried to arrange the building’s purchase as a shrine.
Although church authorities had told her that religious objects would be removed, “I didn’t think they were going to take it down to an empty shell,” she said.
The church sits on a death trap stretch of Route 28 that PennDOT has long wanted to widen. In 1994 the parish merged with another Croatian parish in nearby Millvale, also named St. Nicholas. While leaders of the merged parish and the diocese wanted to sell to PennDOT, people from the North Side church had it declared a historic landmark to protect its exterior. PennDOT developed a plan to widen Route 28 with the church intact. The parish continued to use the building until 2004, when a broken boiler led to its closure.
The Follieri Group is run by Catholics who specialize in renovating churches for purposes that are acceptable to the church, including affordable housing. Father Lengwin said the group has not indicated how it intends to use the St. Nicholas property.
However, canon law requires that all religious objects be removed from churches that are being put to secular use. The diocese has been aggressive about that since a church was sold intact in the 1990s for what is now The Church Brew Works in Lawrenceville.
“We’ve learned from that experience, and are very vigilant,” said the Rev. Lawrence DiNardo, director of the diocesan Department for Canon and Civil Law Services.
The altar must always be removed. If a non-Catholic group plans to use it as a church, many of the items can be left if the buyer plans to use them. But if the building will be used for secular purposes, every religious object must go, he said.
“We would take out the candlesticks and the tabernacle, statues, vestments, chalices, anything that would have been used for sacred purposes. If there are any murals that we can’t take down, they would be painted over. Basically we are selling them a building that has no religious things in it,” he said.
It will be up to St. Nicholas parish to decide what to do with the religious items, Father Lengwin said.
“We redistribute them to parishes that need them. The parish itself will determine which of those items they want to incorporate in their [Millvale] building,” he said.
Some ethnic parishes have sent items from closed churches overseas to parishes in their motherland that are still struggling to emerge from rebuilding after communism. “But that has not been decided yet. It will be up to the parish,” he said.
(Ann Rodgers can be reached at arodgers@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1416. )
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Saving Brownsville: Is its history key to future?
By Robin Acton
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, March 18, 2007Hamburgers and hot dogs sizzle on the grill at Fiddle’s Confectionery, where 15 counter stools fill as the lunch crowd arrives on a brisk afternoon.
Waitresses serve steaming cups of coffee with the $3.79 pizza burger special. Dozens of customers, including Warren Galiffa, of Bethel Park, and his 100-year-old aunt, Rose Hughes, dine in booths where generations of Brownsville’s sweethearts carved their initials on the tabletops.“It’s a throwback in time,” Galiffa said. “It reminds you of the way things used to be.”
The “way things used to be” is a frequent topic in this bleak Monongahela River valley town that has bled population and businesses for decades.
Tara Hospital, the former Brownsville General Hospital, closed last year. Police and borough workers were laid off in December. In January, when a longtime lender, National City Bank, denied a $75,000 tax anticipation loan, council members begged the electric company not to shut off the town’s street lights.
“There ain’t nothing here,” said Levi Gnus, a lifelong resident. “We don’t even have a grocery store downtown.”
What’s happening in this Fayette County community is not unique. Experts say it is an example of a downward spiral common to small municipalities.
“It’s an unhappy situation, but it’s replicated all over the valley,” said Robert Strauss, a professor of economics and public policy in the Heinz School of Public Policy & Management at Carnegie Mellon University.
Like many southwestern Pennsylvania communities, Brownsville already was in decline when it suffered crippling job losses from the demise of the region’s steel mills and coal mines in the 1970s and 1980s. Families moved, college students never returned and failing businesses closed until the main thoroughfare, Market Street, became a desolate stretch of shuttered storefronts and empty lots.
In 1960, Brownsville had 6,055 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2005, death and migration cut the population to 2,690.
Between 1960 and 2005, the same thing happened all over the region. Pittsburgh’s population went from 604,332 to 316,718, while McKeesport’s dropped from 45,489 to 22,701 and New Castle’s fell from 44,790 to 25,030.
“We train people very well and then they leave,” said Albert Luloff, a professor of agricultural economics and rural sociology at Penn State University. “You can’t stop that unless we create jobs.”
Luloff and Strauss also blame Pennsylvania’s “fractured government system” for creating hundreds of municipalities with dwindling tax bases, no industry and limited means to provide services.
“It makes any effort by any community almost impossible as they’re trying to attract industries while competing with each other,” Luloff said. “They’re working at each other’s throats.”
Civil war
Brownsville’s leaders agree that something must be done, but they are at odds over a solution.
Mayor Lewis Hosler said there is a power struggle between preservationists who want to bank on Brownsville’s rich history and people who favor projects such as a proposed velodrome for Olympic-style bicycle races.
“There’s people who don’t want to see change,” Hosler said. “They want to preserve the old buildings, and a lot of them aren’t even historical.”
Leading the preservationists is former mayor Norma Ryan, a volunteer with the nonprofit Brownsville Area Revitalization Corp., who believes the town’s history is critical to its future.
Located off Route 40, the National Road, Brownsville was the first meeting site for the Whiskey Rebellion, boasts the nation’s first cast-iron bridge and is where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had a boat built for their westward exploration.
“I think people have faith that the town will come back,” Ryan said.
Records show the organization received several million dollars in state, federal and foundation grants and matching funds since 1989 that were spent on property acquisition and renovation, cultural ventures and educational purposes.
Restoration of Market Street’s Flatiron building, Frank L. Melega Art Museum and Flatiron Heritage Center is perhaps its main achievement. A store that sells clothing for historical re-enactments and a flower shop opened in its renovated buildings.
“We are slowly acquiring and renovating buildings to get the town back on track,” Executive Director Alison McConnell said. “If you have the ability to see beyond the blight, you can see the potential.”
Councilman John Hosler, the mayor’s brother, disagrees.
“Nobody’s coming here. Why should they? You can’t go downtown to buy a dress or a pair of shoes or food. You need a hub store, not a store that sells flowers or relics,” he said.
Critics contend the organization has little to show for its efforts and claim it undermines viable projects while advancing its agenda of property acquisition.
“BARC doesn’t belong in the real estate business,” said Ray Koffler, owner of Tru-Copy Printing Service.
Luloff doubts that selling history will revitalize Brownsville. He said dozens of small museums and groups are trying to do the same thing.
“These places barely survive,” he said.
Property disputes
Plans for the community have been a point of controversy for decades. Central to the dispute are Monroeville developers Ernest and Marilyn Liggett, owners of Manor Investments.
Since 1992, they’ve pumped millions into some 100 blighted properties purchased on the assumption that “mass creates opportunity,” Ernest Liggett said. Although Brownsville’s access to highways, the railroad and the river made it ideal for development, problems obtaining permits and opposition from some circles blocked their plans for riverboat gambling, an Indian casino or a retail strip mall.
Some blame the Liggetts — who fell behind on taxes and have been fined for code violations as their properties further deteriorated — for all that is wrong with Brownsville. Others say it was in trouble long before they arrived.
“It’s not these people,” said hardware store owner Pat Ballon. “All they bought was the empty buildings.”
Future plans
Ballon, Koffler, the Liggetts and others support the velodrome proposed by CB Richard Ellis, a real estate brokerage and management firm in Pittsburgh.
“I’d like to see Brownsville become to Olympic cycling what Williamsport is to Little League Baseball,” said Liggett, who envisions his properties filled with retail, hotel and office space.
Supporters are shocked that others in town question its chances for success.
“It doesn’t make sense to me why they’re not beating the cymbals, saying it’s Mardi Gras time,” Ballon said.
Frank Ricco, president of the Greater Brownsville Chamber of Commerce, said the Brownsville Free Public Library, the post office and American Legion Post 295 could be relocated from the Snowden Square area to a new civic complex to accommodate the velodrome, which would be owned by a public authority.
“There’s no question in my mind this could be the thing to save Brownsville,” he said.
Lead architect Jeff Slusarick, a principal of the Astorino firm in Pittsburgh, said CB Richard Ellis and Astorino consultants are developing plans for a project feasibility study.
Slusarick, whose firm designed Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, called the velodrome “a unique opportunity.” The 1980 Brownsville Area High School graduate has wanted to do something to help his hometown for years.
That’s the way it should be, according to Luloff at Penn State.
“When people care about each other and the place that they live, the community is alive and well. When they stop, it falls apart,” Luloff said. “If they really are interested in the best thing for the community, they’ll realize a community isn’t buildings and a community isn’t history. A community is people.”
Robin Acton can be reached at racton@tribweb.com or 724-830-6295.
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Woodland Hills school closing OK’d
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, March 15, 2007Before a standing-room only crowd last night, the Woodland Hills school board voted to begin the process of closing East Junior High School in Turtle Creek.
The vote was 6-1, with board member Robert Tomasic dissenting.
Under the plan, the 280 students at East Junior would attend school with the district’s other middle school students, at a location yet to be determined, at the start of the 2008-09 school year.
A hearing on the closing will take place in May. A final vote will be taken within three months after the hearing.
“It has to be done,” said board President Cynthia Lowery of the school closing. “We cannot afford to keep partially filled buildings open. The closing would save us $900,000 yearly in our operating budget.”
Superintendent Roslynne Wilson favors closing East, saying it “makes sense educationally and financially.”
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Moving pupils first step to closing school in Woodland Hills
By M. Ferguson Tinsley,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, March 15, 2007Last night, the Woodland Hills school board was to decide whether to start the controversial process of closing East Junior High School.
In conjunction with that, they were beginning to think about remodeling West Junior in Swissvale and transferring up to 350 seventh- and eighth-graders from East to West by the 2008-2009 school year.
At an agenda meeting on March 7, Superintendent Roslynne Wilson said the closing would consolidate staff and administration and would ensure educational consistency. Further, joining the schools would foster a healthier sense of competition, which heretofore the small population at East has not known.
She also said the district would save $986,151.
Under the plan, about 750 pupils would attend West in 2008-09, according to state enrollment projections. West, about 126,500 square feet in dimension, was built in 1978. In the past, the school has housed more than 900 pupils.
Still, the new setup would require extensive renovations, especially to the cafeteria and other classrooms, she said. “It’s going to cost at least $5 million.”
The new configuration would keep seventh-graders on lower floors and eighth-graders on the upper, Dr. Wilson said. The only time seventh-graders would go upstairs would be to visit the library, she added.
Board members William Driscoll and Robert J. Tomasic had concerns about the plan.
Dr. Driscoll said he did not want to see each classroom stuffed with up to 28 pupils.
“I would like to know how many sections we’ll need,” he emphasized. “I did divide by 25,” Dr. Wilson replied.
Mr. Tomasic said he would not vote for any move unless West is equipped with video cameras throughout.
A West pupil who attended the agenda meeting said the school is already bursting at the seams.
“Right now we are standing outside for 15 to 20 minutes … in the morning … to go through the metal detectors,” said Amanda Stumme, 13, of Wilkins. “The halls are packed. It’s really hard to get from class to class. People are bumping into each other and people are fighting because they’re mad at each other about it.”
At the end of the discussion, Bob Mock, a Turtle Creek resident who has vociferously opposed closing East, asked the board: “What are you going to do with the closed building?” Mr. Mock is an alumnus of the old Turtle Creek High School, which became East Junior High.
State law requires the district to hold a public hearing at least three months before deciding to close the school. A notice of the hearing must be advertised 15 days before the hearing is held. The vote last night was a small first step in the process.
In other business, the board:
heard David Johnston, the pupil services director, present information on the Student Assistance Program.
The SAP is administered by the state Department of Education’s Division of Student and Safe School Services to assist school staff in identifying drug use or emotional and mental health troubles affecting student performance, according to the state Web site, www.pde.state.pa.us.
Mr. Johnson said 177 high school students were referred to SAP this school year.
By March 2, unacceptable behavior sparked 60 percent of referrals; 31 percent resulted from poor academics. Drug and alcohol abuse spawned 17 referrals. Ninety percent of the referrals were staff-initiated, 1 percent parent-sought.
unanimously voted to adopt a resolution asking voters in the May primary if they favor the “district imposing an additional 0.7 percent earned income tax.”
The increase would take the tax from 0.5 percent to 1.2 percent, which would fund a minimum homestead/farmstead exclusion of $405 for those who qualify.
Board Member Randy Lott was absent.
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Turtle Creek may lose junior high
By Daveen Rae Kurutz
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, March 15, 2007Two months after rejecting a consolidation plan that would have closed three schools, the Woodland Hills School Board Wednesday night took steps to close East Junior High School in Turtle Creek.
The board cited declining enrollment and a deteriorating building for the move, which is expected to save the district about $748,000.“The process will result in establishing the Woodland Hills Middle School for all seventh- and eighth-grade students in the district for the 2008-2009 school year,” according to the motion that was approved by a 6-1 vote. Robert Tomasic cast the lone dissenting vote. Dr. Randy Lott and Fred Kuhn were absent.
Public hearings will be scheduled on the proposal. A final vote could come in August.
“It’s not a done deal when you begin a process. We want to get the facts. If I don’t like it, I am not going to vote for it,” said board vice president Marilyn Messina.
If the school is closed, the nearly 290 seventh- and eighth-graders at East Junior High School would attend West Junior High School in Swissvale. Based on the district’s enrollment this year, about 750 students would attend West Junior High School.An architect will do a comparison of the costs of renovating West Junior High School and the cost of constructing a new building.
“The decision made by this board tonight in this economically challenging time will not be particularly popular or happy or easy,” said Cindy Leone, of Edgewood, who has three children enrolled in the school district.
The proposal to close only East Junior High School arose after a comprehensive school consolidation plan designed by Superintendent Roslynne Wilson was rejected by a 6-3 vote at the Jan. 10 school board meeting because of significant opposition from parents.
The original plan would have closed Shaffer Primary School in Churchill, Rankin Intermediate School in Rankin and East Junior High School by the start of the 2009-10 school year. The closings would have begun with Shaffer Primary at the end of this school year.
Parents packed the January meeting, concerned that the closings were being rushed and that too many students would be in one school.
Daveen Rae Kurutz can be reached at dkurutz@tribweb.com or 412-380-5627.
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Brentwood landmark slated for demolition
Brad Pedersen
Staff Writer, South Hills Record
Trib-Total Media
Thursday, March 15, 2007British comedian Eddie Izzard once said that Americans “love to tear your history down,” and Brentwood Medical Group seems to be following suit as it prepares to tear down Brentwood’s Point View Hotel and Restaurant on Brownsville Road.
A three-story medical facility will be built at 3720 Brownsville Road, where the Point View stands, for now. The projected plan is to tear the Point View down to build the facility for Brentwood Medical Group, but demolition has not been scheduled, due to several zoning issues.
“It’s under agreement right now,” said Ralph Costa, Brentwood building inspector. “They came up for a hearing on a height variance on the building, and that was granted. It is contingent upon that. I don’t know where they actually stand at this point.”
According to Costa, without the variance, instead of a three-story building, Brentwood Medical Group would have had to build an expanded two-story building, in accordance with zoning restrictions. The main concern was how it would affect parking at the facility.
Dawn Synborski, zoning and ordinance chair, said the new building could be completed by early 2008.There are no specifics on when the Point View was built, although most estimate it was built during or before the 1820s along the Brownsville Road carriage route. When it was constructed, it was a part of Baldwin Township, which was broken into several villages, including Point View. Brentwood became a borough in 1915.
Early records show that the original owner was Lucast Dudt, who sold it to the Gartner family. The business was then purchased by Joseph Clendening, who sold it to the Andolina family in 1936.
The Andolina family controlled the Point View until 1976, when they sold it to the Vickless family.
The hotel boasted eight modest rooms and the most famous was referred to as the President’s Room. Prior to their presidencies, three presidents stayed in the room.
While on the campaign trail in the late 1820s, Andrew Jackson stayed at the hotel during a horseback trip from Fort Cumberland to Allegheny City, now known as Pittsburgh.
The hotel had its next presidential visit in the 1840s, approximately 20 years later, when Zachary Taylor stopped at the hotel with a large group of campaign supporters. Like Jackson, he was on his way into the city as a part of his presidential campaign.
President James Buchanan made several trips to the Point View prior to holding the office, according to a 1917 letter written by Birgitta Grad, who copied the information from two earlier newspapers dating back to 1865 and 1871.
Grad said that the picky Buchanan traveled in a “splendid traveling coach,” which he required to be meticulously cleaned at each stop, and always required clean linens.
Although the presidential stays are famous and well noted, the Point View is also famous for having undocumented stops as a part of the Underground Railroad during the 1860s.
The Point View is one of few structures standing that served as an Underground Railroad “station” in Allegheny County, along with the Bingham House in Chatham Village and the Morning Glory Inn, Southside.
In the basement underneath the sitting room was an extensive tunnel system leading from the hotel to the other side of Brownsville Road, which was referred to as Brentwood Farm. There is no documentation on how the system worked, though it is mentioned in Grad’s letter.
Grad wrote that the trapdoor leading into the Point View’s cellar was located under the sitting room in a “blind cellar.”
It is reported that the tunnel system collapsed when the borough widened and lowered Brownsville Road, which used to be level with the Point View.
In her letter, Grad wrote that there was a trapdoor and blind cellar under the sitting room, where slaves from Maryland and Virginia “were hidden for a short time.”
Since the time of the presidential stays and Underground Railroad, the building has gone through several updates, including the addition of the kitchen and bar area, aluminum siding and many other changes. These changes have helped deny the Point View a historical landmark designation. A high cost to restore the Point View to its original state has kept previous owners from earning the designation.
“It’s time consuming and a little bit expensive with all the research that needs to go into it if you are not doing it yourself and use a consultant,” said Frank Stroker, assistant archivist with the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation. “With all the research and multiple sources and cross reference and quality archival photographing, it can be quite time consuming.”
The historical value of the house kept people like Sarah Martin into Brentwood to visit the Point View.
“The Point View Hotel has been identified as one of the safe houses in this area, along with the Bingham house in Mount Washington, as well as a few others,” said Martin, who works with the Pittsburgh Board of Education. “For many years, the proprietor of the Point View allowed me to bring small groups of administrators and students to see the area in the basement where slaves were reportedly hidden.”
According to Martin, when she returned to schedule her yearly visit, there was a sign on the door with a number, indicating the hotel was for sale. To her dismay, when she called the number, Martin found that USA Housing was in talks with a possible buyer.
“I am sure that many people were involved in the decision to sell this establishment and that the decision to sell was in the best interest of all the parties,” said Martin. “I have nothing to say about that business decision, however knowing the history of the place, I would trust that someone would be willing to discuss how we might be able to document the historical significance of the Point View before it is torn down or renovated.”
Stroker said that he is unaware of any attempts to designate the Point View as a historical landmark.
Although the Point View is not designated as a landmark, it will always be a landmark to borough residents.
“It happened and they are going to expand,” said Lockhart. “There are plans for a medical building. I just heard a couple residents saying it’s a shame that it’s gone.”
But for others, the Point View being torn down is a chance for the borough to move ahead.
“It will be good for the community,” said Costa. “A lot of people hate to see that building being torn down, but it is shot. There’s no saving it.”