Category Archive: News Wire Services
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For Fifth and Forbes, a place to start small and think big
By Patricia Lowry,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Tuesday, June 28, 2005Preservation Pittsburgh wants to convert the first floor of the former Regal Shoe Co. building at Fifth and Market into a transit cafe, with office space above. It’s the work of Alden & Harlow, one of the city’s most prominent architectural firms in the early 20th century.
In a cartoon in the current New Yorker, a big man sitting at a big desk in a big city hands a folder to a smaller, weary man sitting across from him. The folder is labeled “Plan Z.”
“Of course,” the big man says, “if this one flops we’re done.”
Somebody ought to warn the little guy: Beware of a big man with a big plan.
Three years and three months from the day Mayor Tom Murphy announced Plan C, his revised Fifth and Forbes renewal project, we’ve got zip. In fact we’ve got a lot less zip than we had when the massive, demolition-oriented Plan A was hatched in October 1999. Back then, there were one or two empty storefronts; now there are many more as property and business owners wait for the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, which owns several properties in the district, to make a move.
When Carl Dranoff, the most recent potential developer, pulled out a few weeks ago, there was no rush to announce Plan D. Come January, the mayor and his men will move on. The empty storefronts will be hanging around for some time.
There’s still a frightening amount of alphabet left in Fifth and Forbes, but with a new administration next year, there are new opportunities for fresh ideas.
Here’s one: Preservation Pittsburgh wants to put a “transit cafe” in a great old building at the corner of Fifth and Market. It doesn’t look like much now, but in its day it was quite the place, an elegant little shoe showroom designed by Alden & Harlow for the Regal Shoe Co., one of a chain of Boston-based stores.
Of human scale and quaint antecedent, Regal Shoe was one of two buildings inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement that the firm designed Downtown in the first decade of the 20th century. The other, the former White Dog Cafe, was among the nine structures sacrificed for the new Lazarus store in 1996. The cafe had been remodeled, but ah, what it once was and could have been again.
We have a second chance with the Regal Shoe building, which has had a happier fate. Over time its canopy was removed and some of its windows were covered over, but its integrity has not been greatly compromised.
Downtowns need low-rise buildings like this, buildings with a social and architectural history to anchor the modern office towers, and Fifth and Forbes provide them. Plan A disregarded them, calling for the removal of 62 buildings and acquiring them by eminent domain if necessary.
But massive demolition wasn’t the only troubling aspect of Plan A. Just as wrong-headed was its intent to wrestle ownership from dozens of local and often longtime entrepreneurs and concentrate ownership in the hands of a single developer, sending all of the profits out town. Fine for a suburban mall, but this is not the way cities work. Urban retail lasts longest when it is steady and incremental, supported by government policies that understand its organic, symbiotic nature.
If you’ve ever waited for a bus or been panhandled at the bustling corner of Fifth and Market, you don’t need me to tell you how good a transit cafe sounds. A place to come in out of the cold and heat and rain, pick up a coffee and a newspaper, “maybe even a bouquet of flowers on the way home,” said architect Rob Pfaffmann, president of Preservation Pittsburgh, the nonprofit advocacy group launched in 1991 after the demolition of the Syria Mosque.
Bringing flowers back to the vacant building would be a sort of homecoming, as Lubin & Smalley operated a florist’s shop there for about 70 years after Regal Shoe moved out.
A transit cafe is just one idea; the important thing is to get a retail establishment up and running again at that gateway location. Located at one of the entrances to the Fifth and Forbes district, the building has an importance beyond it size, just 15 feet deep and 80 feet wide.
Restoring and renovating the building would show that preservation is a viable and desirable component of the revitalization as it moves forward, Pfaffmann said. Office space on the second floor could be used to house community meetings during the Fifth/Forbes planning process.
Pfaffmann thinks he knows how to keep the costs down, to about $500,000 for the building’s shell. Preservation Pittsburgh has asked Belmont Technical College in St. Clairsville, Ohio, to consider making it a class project next year.
Each year, Belmont students in the Building Preservation Technology Program put their newly acquired skills into play on a summer field project. Students have worked at Fallingwater, Grey Towers (the Richard Morris Hunt-designed, faux-French medieval castle in Milford, Pike County) and the Octagon House in Washington, D.C. Pfaffmann thinks Belmont students could, for example, rebuild the mullioned windows of the Regal Shoe building.
Closer to home, Carnegie Mellon University students could participate in transforming the building into a green, sustainable design, which should be a component of the revival.
Preservation Pittsburgh also hopes to team with Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation in making the project a case study at the National Trust for Historic Preservation conference, which comes to Pittsburgh in October 2006.
Partnerships will be a key to making this project work, as will a positive reception from the city and the Fifth/Forbes task force, not to mention interest from a shopkeeper. Task force chairman Herb Burger declined comment yesterday, saying it was the city’s decision. URA director Jerome Dettore has said that he is willing to wait for the right developer.
Pfaffmann didn’t say so, but the subliminal message of the project is critical and clear: Stop waiting for a big man with big money and big plans. Start somewhere, and start small. Just start.
(Architecture critic Patricia Lowry can be reached at plowry@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1590.)
Copyright ©1997-2005 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Preservation act / Carrie Furnace can forge redevelopment
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Saturday, June 18, 2005It was an Allegheny County initiative launched under then Chief Executive Jim Roddey. Now the deal has been sealed by his successor, Dan Onorato. In the end the public will get an historic blast furnace, which could one day anchor a steel heritage site, and 137 acres of land, which could spark business, commercial and residential development in Rankin and Swissvale.
The tentative purchase of the Carrie Furnace site from the Park Corp. for $5.75 million from a state grant will be a bargain if the county’s plans for the abandoned industrial property come to fruition. One need only look across the Monongahela River, at Park’s success in developing The Waterfront complex, to see what can be done with a former mill tract.
Mr. Onorato praised that development this week, but said there was no need to duplicate The Waterfront’s big-box, suburban-style retail mix up and down the river. Each idle, former industrial site offers its own potential, and the challenge for developers is to draw out the best from each.
A key difference with the Carrie Furnace site is it contains a hulking old blast furnace, which operated between 1907 and 1983 during Big Steel’s heyday, that will be preserved and used as an educational tool. Plans are to build an adjacent conference center and hotel.
Combine that with the restored Bost Building, the reused Pump House and the historic spot of the 1892 Pinkerton landing on the other side of the Mon, and the county stands to build a greater case for Congress one day to declare the heritage area a National Park site.
But first the county must begin soil testing to gauge the extent of contamination. If all goes as planned, money can be transferred on the purchase in 90 days and the abandoned industrial site will come under the control of Allegheny County.
Then the public sector will have the challenge in Rankin and Swissvale of doing — or maybe even outdoing — what the private sector has done in Homestead and Munhall.
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County’s purchase of Carrie Furnace property sparks visions of past and changes to come
By Ann Belser,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, June 16, 2005The potential of Carrie Furnace truly is in the eye of the beholder.
When August R. Carlino looks at the furnace, he sees a representation of the history of steelmaking.
When Charles H. Starrett III sees the property, he sees the future of economic revitalization for the Mon Valley.
The announcement Monday by Chief Executive Dan Onorato that Allegheny County has reached an agreement with the Park Corp. to purchase the furnace and 137 acres for $5.75 million brought people with many visions of the area together on the site.
“This is where our fathers and grandfathers worked,” said U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Swissvale, whose grandfather worked at Carrie Furnace for 40 years. His father worked across Braddock at the Edgar Thomson Works for 31 years. He said their labor, like that of so many others in the mill, made it possible for his generation to go to college.
Standing on the ground where his grandfather worked, Doyle said his generation will be the one to preserve that history.
“This is a good day and this site will be developed in our lifetime,” Doyle said. “We’re going to leave this better for our kids and grandkids and they’re going to know what our parents and grandparents went through.”
Doyle’s bill to make Carrie Furnace a national historic site has been passed twice by the U.S. House of Representatives. He introduced the measure again Monday afternoon and said this year he was going to try to get U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., to get the measure through the Senate.
And now the pressure is really on Carlino, the president of the Steel Industry Heritage Corp., to get the money to refurbish the old blast furnaces that make up Carrie Furnace.
County Executive Dan Onorato said it’s up to Carlino and his group to raise the money needed to turn the furnaces, which are rusting and have trees growing from the upper levels, into a historic site.
The heritage corporation has estimated that the stabilization and renovations of the furnaces, built in 1907, would cost about $78 million. The renovation will include a series of walkways around the furnaces.
“We’ve got all of our hard work ahead of us now,” Carlino said.
But while some are interested in the past, Starrett, the coordinator of the Enterprise Zone Corp. of Braddock, said the redevelopment of the 137-acre site, which includes some land in Munhall and Whitaker, will help spur the redevelopment of Braddock and Rankin. The plan that was developed for the site extends along the north bank of the Monongahela River from Swissvale to the Edgar Thomson Works in North Braddock and includes land between Braddock Avenue and the river in Braddock.
“This is all a state enterprise zone area,” Starrett said. He said that means that any companies that chose to locate there would qualify for state and county financing programs with 3 percent interest and qualifying companies can get a 20 percent state tax credit on property acquisition and construction costs.
The Carrie Furnace property probably will not be ready for new construction for at least 18 months while the county cleans up any environmental problems left over from years of producing iron on the site.
Onorato said Tuesday that at least the county would be moving toward redeveloping the land instead of letting it sit idle.
“A year and a half is nothing considering the steel mill left in 1983,” he said.
The redevelopment plan calls for a residential development on the property in Swissvale and the historic site with a hotel and conference center, offices, and a transportation center all in Rankin. Braddock would have areas in which more housing is built to fill in where some of the older homes have been abandoned or demolished and near the Edgar Thomson Works the county has planned to locate light industry and warehouses.
The overall redevelopment in the three boroughs encompasses 205 acres.
County Economic Development Director Dennis Davin said work has to be done to spruce up the area near Carrie Furnace. On Monday, as the dignitaries and members of the media were driving to the site, the signs to the Carrie Furnace directed them right past a home that was being demolished and through a neighborhood in which many of the buildings have been left neglected.
Davin said while the former steel site is being cleaned, Braddock Avenue is going to be spruced up, including the buildings at 849, 851 and 853 Braddock Ave. that had been renovated by the Braddock Enhancement Task Force but have been left vacant and need further renovations. Davin said the county’s Department of Human Services plans to move offices in there.
Another move on Braddock Avenue will be to create an entrance for UPMC Braddock on the Braddock Avenue site of the building. Currently that is the back side of the hospital and functions as a loading area while patients and visitors enter from Holland Avenue, a parallel street one block up the hill from Braddock Avenue.
(Ann Belser can be reached at abelser@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1699.)
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Second chance for Carrie Furnace mill site.
County to buy 137 acres of abandoned mill property, hoping to create a model for redevelopment
By Ann Belser,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Tuesday, June 14, 2005After four years of negotiations that spanned two Allegheny County administrations, Chief Executive Dan Onorato got to announce the prize: The county has agreed to buy an abandoned blast furnace and 137 acres of possibly contaminated land around it for $5.75 million.
Like a home buyer looking at a fixer-upper, it’s not the problems that the county is looking at when it sees the site, most of which is located in Rankin and Swissvale. It’s the potential.
“This is going to be the cornerstone of what we do with old industrial sites,” Onorato said on a hot day that was reminiscent of the blast furnace. “We have thousands of acres of waterfront just sitting there dormant.”
The deal also includes some land in Whitaker and Munhall.
Before money is exchanged on the deal, which should be in the next 90 days, the county will begin soil testing to see how much cleanup the site needs, said Dennis Davin, director of the county’s Department of Economic Development.
He said the cleanup should take a year to 18 months before development begins.
Yesterday’s announcement was made under a tent with the old blast furnaces behind Onorato. He said the county is not only going to revitalize the site, but also the communities surrounding it.
Talking about The Waterfront, a development of shops, restaurants, a movie theater, offices and apartments in Homestead, Munhall and West Homestead, he said, “I personally love what’s going on across the river … We’re going to duplicate it up and down the river.”
Plans for development of the Carrie Furnace area were drawn up by Dick Schmitz for the consultants MacLachlan, Cornelius & Filoni in 2001, when Jim Roddey was the county’s chief executive. The county has negotiated with Kelly Park, vice president of Park Corp., since then to buy the land.
The money for the purchase, $41,970 an acre, is coming from the state, which gave the county a $6 million grant that has to be matched with federal or local money. Davin said much of that will be from federal money designated for cleaning up brownfields and from federal Community Development Block Grants.
The land use plan calls for housing in Swissvale near the Pittsburgh line with a possible marina for recreational boaters near those homes. In Rankin, the old blast furnaces would be refurbished as part of a steel heritage historical site with a hotel and conference center to be built near the museum site.
Closer to Braddock, the plan calls for building office buildings with a large parking area nearby for commuters who want to park in Braddock and travel by bus, train or water taxis to Downtown. There also are plans for a bike trail through Braddock, Rankin and Swissvale.
Onorato said the county will not wait to start revitalizing the towns until it can build on the site. The county already is working with Braddock and Rankin officials to build housing.
In Braddock, a move to rejuvenate Braddock Avenue will include working with UPMC Braddock, which currently has an unattractive loading dock on the avenue, to develop a hospital entrance there. Small shops with apartments above them would be built along Braddock Avenue and light industry would be located between Braddock Avenue and the river and near the Edgar Thomson plant.
(Ann Belser can be reached at abelser@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1699.)
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Central Catholic setting the stage
By Tony LaRussa
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, June 6, 2005A $1.8 million renovation of the Central Catholic High School auditorium is being paid for with a donation by alumnus John McGonigle, chief legal officer of Downtown-based Federated Investors.
Little has changed at Central Catholic High School since it opened in Oakland in 1927.
The Christian Brothers still provide the school’s educational and spiritual foundation. Dress shirts and ties remain the order of the day. And recreation after lunch periods consists of walking the quad.
A major change, however, is under way in the Flemish Gothic style building on Fifth Avenue, which the city has designated a historic landmark.
Workers are restoring the school’s 900-seat auditorium to its original appearance while adding modern features to enhance performances.
A Mass and performance to mark the completion of the work is scheduled for Aug. 21.
The $1.8 million project is being paid for with a donation from John McGonigle, who graduated from Central in 1956. McGonigle, 67, is chief legal officer of Downtown-based Federated Investors.
McGonigle’s father, Henry, graduated from Central in 1933. His sons also are graduates, Kevin in 1982 and Patrick in 1985.
“As I’m sure it did for other Central graduates, the auditorium played an important role in my life as a student,” McGonigle said. “I have many fond memories of celebrations of liturgies, musical productions, pep rallies and other activities.”
“In thinking about this project,” McGonigle said, “I realized that one of my own personal goals was to see the auditorium restored to its original condition, returning it to what it must have looked like on the first day of school in 1927.”
Brother Richard Grzeskiewicz, the school’s principal, believes the work being done at the school is “a good sign for the future of Catholic schools in the area.”
“I think it shows that we are building for the future,” Grzeskiewicz said. “We are truly indebted to the McGonigle family for their overwhelming generosity in funding this project.
Central’s enrollment is expected to be 843 students for the 2005-06 school year. The school’s capacity is 880.
Grzeskiewicz said the renovations to what will be called McGonigle Auditorium are particularly important because many of the programs conducted there, such as plays and concerts, involve students from nearby Oakland Catholic High School, which is an all-girls school.
“The performing arts programs are vital in creating a strong bond between the two schools,” Grzeskiewicz said.
Work on the auditorium includes cleaning the red brick, which is set in a herringbone pattern throughout much of the interior, and restoring painted surfaces to their original hues.
One of the most painstaking restoration processes has been cleaning the orange, green and blue-colored wood slats in the ceiling, which originally were finished with an animal fat-based paint that typically cannot be repainted.
“We learned that trying to paint the ceiling wouldn’t work, so workmen had to get up there and clean each of the sections with a vacuum,” said Richard Fosbrink, who heads the school’s performing arts program.
Among the biggest changes is the addition of air conditioning and the replacement of the tattered seats with thick-cushioned, theater-style seats that will be spread out to provide more leg room.
A good deal of the work being done in the auditorium is taking place behind the scenes but will be clear to those who attend performances there.
A modern sound system using linear array speakers set in clusters throughout the room will be installed along with computer-controlled lighting and rigging systems.
“It’s very exciting to see this wonderful room, with all its history, coming back to life,” Fosbrink said. “And the addition of state-of-the-art sound and lighting systems will allow us to improve the quality of our performances and teach the students much more about the operations of a theater, which is our primary focus.”
Tony LaRussa can be reached at tlarussa@tribweb.com.
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Purchase deal boosts Carrie Furnace plans
By Ann Belser,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Friday, June 03, 2005Allegheny County is close to an agreement to purchase the Carrie Furnace site, which has been vacant since the old iron-making facility on the banks of the Monongahela River closed in the mid-1980s.
The purchase of the former blast furnace should allow the county to proceed with a multi-million dollar plan to revitalize the Mon’s north bank from Swissvale to North Braddock.
The development is expected to include a steel industry museum, conference center, housing, offices, a transportation center and light industry.
Dennis Davin, director of the Allegheny County Department of Economic Development, said he hoped the purchase will be announced within the next week or two, but the county will not actually take over the property until the end of the summer.
The financial details were incomplete and the purchase price wasn’t available yesterday.
The news was greeted with a cheer from William H. “Lucky” Price III, the Rankin Council president who has been a member of the county’s Carrie Furnace Steering Committee for the last five years.
“That’s sounds good. I hope that’s true,” he said.
In September, Gov. Ed Rendell gave the county $6 million to be used for the site from the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program. That money has to be matched dollar for dollar by either local or federal money. It can be used to buy the site and for environmental cleanup and infrastructure improvements.
The 103-acre parcel is currently owned by the Park Corp., which bought the property in Rankin and Swissvale in the same sale in which it acquired U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works, which was a 311-acre site.
Park bought the land on both sides of the Monongahela River from the steelmaker in 1988 for nearly $3 million. The land in Rankin and Swissvale was valued at that time at $500,000.
In 2001, the county hired the architecture firm of MacLachlan, Cornelius & Filoni to develop a master plan for 205 acres that includes the Carrie Furnace site and areas of Braddock and Rankin between Braddock Avenue and the Monongahela River to the Edgar Thomson Works. The plan was put together after a series of meetings with residents in Braddock, Rankin and Swissvale.
The county has been negotiating with Park since 2001 to buy the Carrie Furnace property.
A redevelopment plan for the Carrie Furnace site and lower Braddock calls for the furnace to be refurbished into an exhibit as part of the Steel Industry National Historic Park, with a hotel and conference center built near the furnace, which is in Rankin.
The plan calls for building housing on 44 acres to the west of the furnace in Swissvale and office buildings to the east in Rankin.
The hot metal rail bridge that connected Carrie Furnace to the Homestead Works is slated to be converted to a automobile bridge connecting to the Waterfront development, a popular retail, office and housing development built on the former site of the Homestead Works. That development spans three communities, from Munhall through Homestead and into West Homestead.
The redevelopment plan goes beyond property that formerly made up Carrie Furnace and includes a large parking area that could serve as a park-and-ride for commuters using buses, water taxis and, possibly, light rail. The transportation center, to be built on 15 acres, would tie into a tramway running above the area. It would also be linked to the Eliza Furnace Trail for bicycles and pedestrians, extending it through Hazelwood and Duck Hollow to connect to the Carrie Furnace site.
In Braddock, the plan calls for encouraging small businesses, shops, and studios to locate along Braddock Avenue at street level with apartments above. There would also be housing built between Braddock Avenue and the river with light industry placed along the river and near the Edgar Thomson Works on the North Braddock border.
The Homestead Works is now nearly completely redeveloped. John Dindak, the mayor of West Homestead, recently announced that Costco, the chain of warehouse clubs, plans to build a store between the smokestacks and Sandcastle Water Park.
Other brownfields in McKeesport and Duquesne are now controlled by the Regional Industrial Development Corp. Businesses are already located on those sites, though there is more land available at both properties.
(Jerome Sherman contributed to this report. Ann Belser can be reached at abelser@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1699.)
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Ancient habitation site is now listed historic landmark – Rockshelter recognized 50 years ago
By Crystal Ola
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Sunday, May 15, 2005Fifty years after the discovery of an area providing clues to the way North Americans lived 16,000 years ago, Meadowcroft Rockshelter will be able to celebrate the anniversary this summer with its recent designation as a National Historic Landmark.
“We have been working toward this goal for more than five years,” said Dave Scofield, director of Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Museum of Rural Life in Jefferson, three miles west of Avella. “This is a real validation not only of the importance of the site, but the significance of the site on a national scale.”
For thousands of years, the rock overhang offered protection for those who camped at the site. The rockshelter is believed to provide the earliest evidence of human habitation in North America.
Meadowcroft Rockshelter has received international attention since James Adovasio began excavating the site in 1973. Adovasio is the director of the anthropology and archaeology department at Mercyhurst College. He will give a lecture and slide show and lead a special tour of the site June 18, July 16 and Aug. 20.
Adovasio caused a stir in the anthropology and archaeology world when he used his research to challenge the theory that the first Americans crossed the Bering Strait and settled in the southwest about 12,000 years ago. Before the discovery of the rockshelter, the oldest evidence of human habitation in North America was near Clovis, N.M.
But the discovery of items such as chips of pottery, charcoal and deer bones led Adovasio to postulate people were living in America thousands of years earlier. Humans also returned to the site for thousands of years, as evidenced by campfires and even an 18th-century gin bottle left by Europeans, perhaps making Meadowcroft the site with the longest record of human habitation in the country.
Public tours of the rockshelter began two years ago when stairs were built to the site. The rockshelter entertains 5,000 visitors annually.
Meadowcroft is working with the National Parks Service to schedule a public recognition ceremony, possibly in June, Scofield said. He also hopes to share plans at the ceremony to construct a permanent, protective roof over the area, which would also make the site more accessible to larger tour groups. The roof may be built next year, but construction is contingent on fund-raising efforts.
Meadowcroft is in very exclusive company; 4 percent of the 77,000 sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places are named National Historic Landmarks, Scofield said.
“It doesn’t happen every day,” he said.
Regular tours are available during museum hours. The museum is open noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays in May and Wednesdays through Fridays from noon to 5 p.m., in addition to the weekend schedule, from Memorial Day through Labor Day.
Tickets for Adovasio’s insider tours cost $20 each and advance registration is required. The June 18 tour is sold out.
For more information, go to www.meadowcroftmuseum. org or call 724-587-3412.
(Crystal Ola is a freelance writer.)
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Historic designation OK’d for Buhl building
By The Tribune Review
Wednesday, May 4, 2005The Pittsburgh Planning Commission on Tuesday approved a historic designation for the former Buhl Planetarium building on the North Side.
Built in 1939 on the site of the former Allegheny City Hall and donated to the city by the Buhl Foundation, it was among the first planetariums in the country.
The square structure of Indiana limestone topped by a copper dome was spared when the heart of the North Side was razed in the 1960s to make way for the Allegheny Center. After a decade of dormancy, the planetarium building has since 2004 been incorporated into the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. The designation now needs the approval of City