Category Archive: Preservation News
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Dedication today for rebuilt Homestead landmark
By Jan Ackerman,
Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Monday, September 30, 2002More than a dozen years after a group of Mon Valley residents started thinking about preserving some of their steel-making history, the centerpiece of their work, the Bost Building in Homestead, is about to be dedicated.
Gov. Mark Schweiker will attend the ceremony at 9 a.m. today. So will U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Swissvale, who is trying to push legislation through Congress that would incorporate the Bost Building, the vacant Carrie Furnaces in Rankin and the pump house at the Waterfront development into a $100 million “Homestead Steel Works National Historic Site.”
It cost $4.5 million to renovate the Bost Building, which served as headquarters for the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers during the 1892 lockout and strike at the Homestead Works, said August R. Carlino, executive director of Steel Industry Heritage Corp.
That seems like an astounding price, but Carlino said renovation of the former hotel that was headed for sheriff’s sale in 1991 was an 11-year project fraught with unexpected problems.
“At one point during the reconstruction, the building had no foundation. It was sitting in the air on steel beams without most of the flooring on all three floors,” Carlino said. “It was a remarkable feat of construction.”
After completion of the reconstruction earlier this year, Carlino and his staff of 13 settled into the building at 623 E. Eighth Ave. which they hope will someday become a visitors center for a national historic site in the Mon Valley. They still don’t own the other two parts of the proposed museum or have Congressional approval or funding to turn it into a national historic site.
While Carlino’s organization is best known for its work on the steel museum project, its mission is much broader.
Each year, the Steel Industry Heritage Corp. receives $1 million from the National Park Service and more than $350,000 from the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources as contractor for the “Rivers of Steel” national and state heritage areas, Carlino said. Both areas were created in 1996 through mandates from Congress and the commonwealth of Pennsylvania as part of an effort to promote and develop historical, cultural and natural resources in areas across the country.
In southwestern Pennsylvania, the Rivers of Steel heritage areas include Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland counties and focus on industrial towns along the Allegheny, Monongahela, Ohio, Kiski-Conemaugh and Youghiogheny rivers.
There are 11 state heritage areas in Pennsylvania and five of them also have federal designations, Carlino said.
Carlino said his nonprofit organization has funneled more than $40 million into Western Pennsylvania since it was formed in 1991. Some funds come from federal appropriations, others come from grants.
“There is always money out there,” said Carlino, 42, a Pittsburgh native who spent 10 years in Washington, D.C., as a legislative assistant to U.S. Rep. William Coyne and lobbyist for a law firm. “If you don’t ask for it, someone else will get it.”
According to the organization’s filings with the Internal Revenue Service, the money is being spent on everything from bicycle trails to building riverfront parks in communities to planning for future historic sites to developing bus and riverboat tours. It also has catalogued historic archives, developed promotional brochures and developed a Web site.
Carlino said Steel Heritage contributed $250,000 to the production of the short film, “Forge of a Nation,” which plays at the Rangos Omnimax Theater at the Carnegie Science Center before every feature film. The total cost for the film was $650,000.
His organization also has provided money to help repair Carnegie Library buildings in Braddock and Homestead, the B.F. Jones Library in Aliquippa and the Allegheny-Kiski Valley Historical Society Museum in Tarentum, and to help convert the W.A. Young & Sons Foundry and Machine Shop in Rices Landing, Greene County, into a museum and interpretive and educational facility.
The corporation has funded the installation of signs and exhibits and additional work for the Flatiron Building Interpretive Visitors Center in Brownsville, Fayette County, and sunk money into development projects on the North Shore and at the Port of Pittsburgh.
“We have 120 projects going on in seven counties,” Carlino said. “It is truly regional. It is not just Homestead.”
Carlino said his agency’s day-to-day working budget is about $850,000 year. His own salary was $93,475 in 2000, according to the IRS. Its 13 employees have expertise from the worlds of museums as well as from recreation, planning and community organizing.
Doris J. Dyen, who holds a doctorate, is director of the cultural conservation division which gathers, documents and catalogs the oral histories and the industrial heritage of the region.
There are a folk life and education specialist, an archivist who catalogs historic documents and several planners and community organizers on staff.
Larry Ridenour, a former Allegheny County planner who now is a recreational conservation coordinator, is developing bicycle trails and riverfront projects for Carlino’s organization, which works with the Steel Valley Trail Council to link the trails being built in Pittsburgh to those that run to Washington, D.C. His effort is centered on the 18.35 miles of trail from the Glenwood Bridge to Clairton.
“Our job is to establish the trail, build it and take care of it,” Ridenour said.
The organization runs Big Steel boat tours for tourists and field trips for students to explore industrial sites and ethnic communities of the Mon Valley. Part of its effort involves building docks and moorings and riverfront parks for communities including Kittanning and Ford City in Armstrong County and Brownsville.
The dedication of the Bost Building is significant because it is the first time that Carlino’s group has a building to show as evidence that a national museum could someday be built.
The late U.S. Sen. John Heinz was an early champion of establishing a national steel museum. Arthur P. Ziegler Jr., president of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, and David Bergholz and Robert B. Pease, formerly of the Allegheny Conference, helped to launch the initiative.
“In the early years, we limped along,” said Pease, among 17 non-paid members of the heritage corporation’s board of directors. “The one thing that was exciting was that John Heinz thought this was super.”
“Sen. Heinz was our champion. He sponsored the original legislation,” said Jo DeBolt, then head of the Mon Valley Initiative and a key player in the early efforts to save the Bost Building.
More than a decade later, there’s still no museum or national historic site, only a Congressional bill that would create one and determination by those who have worked on the project that eventually it will happen.
Jan Ackerman can be reached at jackerman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1370.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette -
Fate of Homestead historic buildings, CVS still clouded by confusion
By Jim Hosek,
Tri-State Sports & News Service
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Wednesday, September 18, 2002Some controversies never end.
It remains uncertain four years after the battle lines were drawn whether Gustine Properties will be allowed to raze 10 dilapidated historic buildings to develop a CVS super pharmacy on East Eighth Avenue in Homestead.
The Steel Valley Historic Architectural Review Board, which two weeks ago recommended allowing two to be razed, now wants Gustine to provide more information before making a recommendation on the other eight.
But that panel is only advisory. Homestead council has the final say, and last Thursday, it agreed to table a motion to allow demolition of the former Rainbow Kitchen and the former Amos Supermarket.
That was after David Lewis and Elisa Cavalier told council that Gustine and CVS never should have been in a position to ask to raze the buildings.
Lewis, who wears many hats, represented the Homestead area Economic Revitalization Corp., while Cavalier is general counsel for the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
They complained earlier this year that Gustine should be cited for allowing the buildings to deteriorate and maintained building inspectors erred by giving Gustine a notice that the buildings had to be repaired or razed.
Gustine then applied for a demolition permit, which was denied, and later appealed that decision to the review board.
Cavalier argued that building inspectors had no authority under the borough’s laws to say razing the buildings was an alternative.
“Under your ordinance, they should have been told to repair or be fined,” she said.
Council President Evan Baker acknowledged a problem with building inspections in general, adding that council needs to know if the law was not followed before proceeding.
Gustine sued the borough, municipal officials and various organizations two years ago to allow it to raze the buildings and erect the CVS.
Between 1998 and 2000, council took at least 10 votes related to the project, sometimes reversing itself.
It’s been a major battle between those who believe the 10 old buildings can be refurbished to keep the historic, small-town atmosphere of the Eighth Avenue business district and those who believe the buildings are an eyesore and that an infusion of tax dollars from CVS will help the community.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Solid character of Mexican War Streets houses lured these renovators
By Gretchen McKay
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Saturday, September 14, 2002Most people would not call a turn-of-the-century parsonage-turned-boarding house-turned-apartment building the ideal home. Andrea Nichola Fridley and her husband, Jim Lawrence, are not like most people.
Fridley, a graphic designer and painter from Hermitage who lived for 10 years in New York City before returning home, is able to picture possibility and greatness where others see only a giant headache of a mess.
Visitors will be able to see a little bit of both on tomorrow’s Mexican War Streets House & Garden Tour, which will feature Fridley and Lawrence’s stone townhouse along with two dozen other North Side properties.
Unlike most of the other stops on the self-guided tour, the couple’s home on Buena Vista Street is very much a work in progress. The house was purchased in the fall of 2000, but the interior renovation began only this spring. Fridley and Lawrence still live in the three-story Victorian that Fridley bought just down the street when she first moved into the neighborhood in 1997. Scaffolding and exposed lathe aside, this is one of the neighborhood’s more unusual houses.
Built between 1895 and 1900 as a parsonage for what was then the Westminster Presbyterian Church across the street, the sandstone structure was converted to a boarding house in the ’50s and to two apartments in the ’60s.
Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation considers it a “significant” example of Richardsonian Romanesque-style architecture. More importantly, it’s a heady dose of reality for anyone considering taking on an abandoned or long-neglected historic home. Tour-goers need only step inside the towering front doors to get a pretty good idea of what’s involved in bringing a turn-of-the-century structure back to life after it’s been chopped into pieces.
Even though the couple has barely started, “it’s been a ton of work,” admits Fridley, 38, somewhat wearily. Most of the past six months, for example, has been spent stripping all of the old wallpaper off the plaster walls, knocking down walls, and pulling up carpets. It took several months just to paint the front porch.
Not that she and Lawrence, a program director for telecommunications consulting firm Stratecast Partners, are complaining. It is, after all, a pretty great house despite all the dust and debris.
Along with a three-part Palladian window on the third-floor dormer and 9-foot ceilings, the house features a wooden front porch with fluted columns and a double-door front entrance topped by a transom. A tripartite window crowned with a leaded-glass transom brightens the front parlor while a marbleized slate fireplace gives it character. The hallway lined with original Lincrusta leads to a magnificent oak box staircase with hand-turned spindles. The 3,300-square-foot house also features something you don’t often find in this tiny North Side neighborhood: a large side yard shaded by a giant maple and mulberry trees.
What makes the job a little easier is the fact that Fridley has gone through the renovation process before and knew that projects of this size take time. When she decided to move back to Pittsburgh five years ago, she looked to set up housekeeping in an area that exuded the same funky, urban atmosphere as her adopted home of Manhattan.
While she liked the South Side’s energy, she ultimately decided that when it came to housing, the neighborhood more resembled the suburbs of Brooklyn than the streets of New York City — that is, there was way too much aluminum siding.
“I wanted some place aesthetically pleasing,” Fridley said.
The Mexican War Streets’ many Italianate, Gothic Revival and Queen Anne row houses reminded her of the brownstones lining the streets of Greenwich Village, an intimate, historic district favored by up-and-coming fashion designers, artists and writers.
Just as important, because many of the homes were in desperate need of restoration, “the prices were right,” says Fridley, who ended up buying and restoring a three-story Victorian townhouse. When she met and married Lawrence, they soon found that the house was too small for both to work from home. So they put out some feelers, and when a neighbor said he’d be interested in selling about two months later, they jumped at the chance.
One of their first jobs was to remove the walls that divided the house into two apartments. Knowing they wanted to bring the place back to its original footprint, “we needed to feel the flow,” says Fridley.
But they also had to get the exterior in good shape, so “things wouldn’t come crashing down,” she says with a laugh.
In addition to jacking up the front porch, which was sinking, Angel Contracting repaired the front gutter and replaced three front windows. The couple hired Reber Restoration to repoint the entire front of the house. They also removed a gazebo and some decking a former owner had installed, pulled out a galley kitchen on the second floor and replaced a window in the kitchen area with a door to accommodate a kitchen addition designed by Jill Joyce of Joyce Design Group in Lawrenceville.
Yet to come: The couple must replace 19 windows, repoint the side of the house, remodel 2 1/2 bathrooms and landscape the yard.
As expected, the project has suffered the occasional setback. When contractors jacked up the back of the house to put in a beam for a new kitchen addition, everything fell a couple of inches, causing the three-course-thick brick walls on the rear of the second and third floors to crack.
But that, Fridley philosophically notes, comes with the territory.
“At least we didn’t lose the end of the house.”
Gretchen McKay covers homes and real estate for the Post-Gazette.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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When you look for art, it’s everywhere
by Marilyn McDevitt Rubin
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Sunday, September 08, 2002A walk in the middle of a working day does a person good. This person. It relieves tensions, blows away cobwebs and gives me something new to think about. Walking through Downtown every day, I’m looking for adventure, for ideas and for lunch, and it’s a rare day when I don’t find two out of the three.
Just breezing through Lazarus one sale day recently, I chanced to look up and see two porcelain female heads that I’d passed without noticing, many times. I stayed to marvel at their exceptional beauty.
“White glazed terra cotta art nouveau icons procured from the original 514 Wood Street building, circa 1905,” the plaque read. “One of the best examples of art nouveau ornamentation in Pittsburgh.”
So they’ve always been Downtown and, until moved into the two Wood Street entrances of Lazarus, always out of sight. Originally they were hung three flights up, on the outside of a building whose last tenant appears, from an old photo, to have been Foot Locker. When the building was razed, someone made the decision to save the four women. Praise be.
Walter Kidney, architectural historian with the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, kindly shared what he knew, and he was the only one who knew anything. He suggested calls to the architect, the builder and the executive offices at Lazarus. Not one person I spoke to could offer any information. What I most wanted to know was the artist’s name so that I could repeat it like a mantra, giving recognition long overdue. The name appears to be lost.
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At least 35 years ago, living in Chicago, I bought a friend a signed Pierre Soulages lithograph for his birthday. As I recall, the frame cost more than the print with its broad swipes of dark color, and both cost less than $40.
One day recently, when I walked into One Oliver Plaza at Wood Street for an Arnold Zegarelli haircut, those wide swaths of midnight blue paint behind the guard’s desk in the lobby jogged my memory.
Pierre Soulages?
It was indeed!
The ceramic wall relief is composed of 294 glazed, 11-inch tiles arranged in a rectangular grid that covers the wall. It is signed in the glaze, on the lower right, on two panels. Though there seems to be no other place for the guard’s desk, its present position in front of the mural surely compromises the power of the work.
James Sterling, general manager of Grubb & Ellis Management Service, provided an estimate of the work’s value as assessed by Sam Berkovitz of Concept Art Gallery in Regent Square.
In his report, Berkovitz noted that the value is reduced by the work’s stationary position. Removing it would be difficult and expensive and, as he puts it, “fraught with risk of destroying the mural.”
He recommended, instead, insuring the Soulages for $150,000.
“The mural probably could not be replaced,” he writes. “However, if an artist of similar stature were to make a replacement, the cost would begin at $150,000.”
Soulages is 83.
My friend in Chicago, a collector on a modest scale who still treasures his Soulages, estimates its present worth to be at least 30 times whatever I paid for it.
***There are four art-related reasons to visit the lobby of the Frick Building. To see them all in one sweep, enter on Grant Street and, after looking up and to the right and left, walk straight through to the lobby with its exits to Fifth and Forbes.
In windows above and to each side of the Grant Street entrance, two majestic bronze lions stand guard. Their upright posture and exaggerated elegance suggest to me bankers and businessmen. Sculptor of the Frick lions was A. Phimster Proctor, who, over lunch, received his commission directly from Henry Clay Frick.
Several lions near the Frick Building are more magnificent. On the outside wall of the Allegheny County Courthouse, lions, done in a pseudo-Byzantine style, are gorgeous beasts in mid-roar. The dates given are 1884-87, sculptor unknown. The two grand and terrifying lions sprawled across pedestals outside Pittsburgh Dollar Savings Bank (circa 1871), at Fourth Avenue and Smithfield Street, have a don’t-mess-with-me look in their eyes. These were sculpted in stone on the site by Max Kohler.
Two other important pieces in the neoclassic Frick Building are a John La Farge stained glass window, “Fortune and Her Wheel,” mounted overhead in the main lobby, and a Malvina Hoffman white marble bust of Henry Clay Frick, directly below the window.
Mr. Frick, businessman, has been on my mind of late. While his misdeeds are not easy to forgive, they seem less terrible when compared with those of today’s executives at Enron, ImClone, Tyco, Adelphia and WorldCom. Toward the end of his life, Frick would have trouble sleeping and would rise to wander through the halls of his New York City mansion. But he left us that magnificent mansion, after having filled it with masterpieces.
Although I can’t read his character from Hoffman’s sculpture, I do recognize the work as quality. Hoffman studied with Rodin and admired Michelangelo, and both of these influences show.
I’m not at all sure about the quality of the La Farge stained glass window. Fortune is depicted riding a winged wheel across the water. She has been described as a giddy, disheveled strumpet, possibly because she let the neckline of her gown slip below one breast, or perhaps because of the abandon with which she showered riches on some, leaving others to starve. John La Farge (1835-1910) is considered an important American painter and decorative artist. Whether this piece is important, each viewer must decide.
Marilyn McDevitt Rubin can be reached at mrubin@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1749.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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No death knell for our old morgue
By Dan Majors,
Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Friday, September 06, 2002There was a time, a long time ago, when buildings were built of sterner stuff. Not having access to modern lightweight materials, builders relied on bigger, heavier, stronger components. Like giant stones and rocks.
That’s how they built the pyramids. And the Great Wall of China. And, of course, the Allegheny County Morgue.
Our morgue is a Romanesque structure built Downtown a hundred years ago on what was then called Diamond Street, later renamed Forbes Avenue. Even then, it was an awesome edifice.
But after a couple of decades, long about 1929 or so, some local elected officials decided that the morgue had been built in the perfect location … for the new County Office Building.
So Kress-Oravetz House Moving Co. was hired to pick up the 6,000-ton morgue and move it 300 feet, to the other side of Fourth Avenue, where it sits today.
You have to understand that, back then, it was often easier to move a building than it was to tear it down and rebuild it. Not only because of how well they were built, but because there weren’t as many obstructions such as overhead power lines.
Nowadays, if you want to put up a building somewhere, you just level whatever stands in your way and quickly throw up a new one. Remember the B&O Railroad Terminal? Jenkins Arcade? Three Rivers Stadium?
Currently on Allegheny County’s drawing board are plans for a $40.1 million, eight-story office building, the county’s first new such structure since the County Office Building was finished in 1927. It’ll be built Downtown, where the old jail annex stands.
The top two floors will be new digs for the coroner’s forensic laboratories.
But that doesn’t mean that the current morgue will be left to rot. The county is planning to spend $4.3 million refurbishing it.
The City Council is expected to vote Wednesday on a recommendation that the old morgue be designated a city historic building.
City development reporter Tom Barnes tells us that the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation nominated the morgue for historic status in February. The city’s Historic Review Commission recommended approval in May, and the planning commission followed suit shortly afterward.
The official designation could be on the mayor’s desk for his signature before the end of the month.
It’ll be nice to see the old morgue get a new life.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Historic Review Commission to vote on mortuary status
By Ellen James
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, September 3, 2002On Wednesday, the Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission will consider whether Allegheny County’s century-old mortuary should be designated an historic structure.
Pittsburgh architect Frederick J. Osterling, a disciple of the jail and courthouse’s architect, designed the mortuary to match the two other buildings and to create a fortress-like enclave of government centered Downtown, according to a county report about the construction of the three buildings.And it is that urban design that prompted the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation to nominate the building, built between 1901 and 1903, as a city-designated historic structure.
“Our position was that the mortuary exemplified urban design techniques and overall quality of design or detail,” said Cathy McCollom, director of operations and marketing for the foundation. “Osterling picked up on exterior details from the jail and worked them into the mortuary.”
McCollom said the review commission will vote Wednesday on whether to recommend the mortuary as an historic structure.
If the structure, a solidly built Romanesque building with two gargoyles guarding its entrance, is approved, it would then have to be approved by the Planning Commission and City Council. Final approval would come from Mayor Tom Murphy.
The building originally faced Forbes Avenue along Diamond Street. In 1929, county officials needed a new building for deeds, wills and lawsuits, but the mortuary sat in the spot that would be most convenient for the new building, which is now the County Office Building.
Instead of demolishing the morgue, officials decided to move the 8,000-ton granite building 297 feet to its present location along Fourth Avenue.
It took three months to move the building, but that didn’t stop the regular day-to-day business of the morgue. As Levi Bird Duff, a consultant in the move, said in an interview shortly before his death, “People were killing and dying every day. The coroner’s functions couldn’t be stopped.”
Routine business such as autopsies and inquests continued; and water, gas, plumbing, telephone and electrical service were uninterrupted.
In a feat of engineering prowess, the mortuary was raised 20 feet off its foundation and placed on 22 tracks of hundreds of rails and slowly pulled to its present location by a team of horses. The building then had to be lowered another 7 feet to fit into its present foundation.
The building survived the move with minimum damage.
“It really was a marvel of engineering,” said Tom Donatelli, director of public works for the county.
If the building is approved as an historic structure, the county couldn’t make any changes to the exterior without city approval. There has been no objection from county officials regarding the proposed status.
Ellen James can be reached at epjames02@yahoo.com.
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Clemente Bridge’s future looking brighter
By Tom Barnes,
Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Friday, August 23, 2002Work will begin Monday on an elaborate $500,000 plan to illuminate the Roberto Clemente Bridge, one of three “sister bridges” that span the Allegheny River between Downtown and the North Shore.
Duquesne Light Co. is providing funding to devise and install the wiring and lighting fixtures on the bridge, built in 1924 and formerly named the Sixth Street Bridge. The money includes $50,000 for an endowment to maintain the fixtures and pay for electricity.
Arthur Ziegler, president of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, which worked with Duquesne Light on the the project, said it hopes additional corporate sponsors can be found so that more bridges can get similar treatment.
“The lighting will make the rivers look good and draw attention to the handsome structure of the many bridges we have,” Ziegler said.
He’s especially interested in lighting the Ninth Street Bridge — because it’s closest to the new convention center — and the Seventh Street Bridge, the second and third of the “sister” bridges. He said the Fort Pitt and 16th Street bridges are also leading candidates for lighting if sponsors can be found.
History & Landmarks found two lighting experts, Ray Grenald of Philadelphia and Hal Hilbish of Sewickley to provide technical expertise on lighting design. Grenald advised History & Landmarks when it put lights on the Smithfield Street Bridge in 1983.
Work is to begin Monday to install wiring, brackets and other elements of the Clemente Bridge lighting system, said Maureen Hogel, a Duquesne Light senior vice president. The work will take about 10 weeks and should be completed by November. A precise date for turning on the lights hasn’t been set.
Duquesne Light agreed to be the first corporate sponsor in November, soon after Morgan K. O’Brien became chief executive officer and decided to relocate company offices from suburban locations back to Downtown, to the Chamber of Commerce Building on Seventh Avenue.
“This seemed like a good opportunity for us to say that we’re back in Pittsburgh, that we’re committed to the city and that we want to be a partner in seeing it grow,” Hogel said.
The work of installing the light fixtures and wiring will, from time to time over the next 10 weeks, entail closing a lane or two on the bridge to traffic.
Duquesne Light officials yesterday released an artist’s depiction of the lighted bridge.
The picture shows six different elements of the lighting plan. On the Downtown and North Shore ends, new structures holding five lamps each will be erected atop stone piers. The tops of the lamps will stand 13 feet above the tops of the piers.
The bright lamps will serve to mark the entrances to the bridge, Duquesne Light officials said.
Thirty-two pedestrian lights, designed to be old-fashioned in appearance, will be erected along both sides of the bridge, 16 on each side. These lights, which are intended to be decorative as well as functional, will be designed to match the light fixtures that were used when the bridge opened in 1924.
Tall, thin poles will hold “roadway lights,” more powerful than the pedestrian lights, which will shine down directly on the road surface for the benefit of motorists. These poles are designed to be visually unobtrusive. Brackets to hold the poles must be welded to the outside of the bridge railings.
A fourth type of lighting will shine up toward the bridge towers, the two tall superstructures that face Downtown and the North Shore and whose “Aztec gold” color should show up well in the lights.
Blue lights will be placed along the nodes of the bridge cables — called catenaries — that curve from the railings up to the top of the towers. These will be similar in appearance to the blue lights that dot the upper reaches of PNC Park at the northern end of the bridge.
Lastly, lights will be placed on the underside of the bridge and will shine down on the stone piers that support the bridge.
Besides History & Landmarks and Duquesne Light, other groups involved in the Clemente Bridge lighting project include the Pirates; the Renaissance Hotel, at the Downtown end of the span; Councilman Sala Udin, who represents Downtown and the North Shore; Allegheny County, which owns the bridge; and the Riverlife Task Force, a 3-year-old private group that held 120 public hearings on what should be done to improve local riverfronts and found strong public support for enhancing the appearance of the city’s bridges at night.
Tom Barnes can be reached at tbarnes@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1548.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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2 years after Plan A failed, the city works on Plan C – Corroding Fifth/Forbes awaits rebirth
By Tom Barnes and Timothy McNulty,
Post-Gazette Staff Writers
Sunday, August 04, 2002David Kashi, a Downtown jewelry store owner, says some of his friends think he’s crazy to invest money in a neighborhood where graffiti has replaced gleaming glass and empty buildings hover over silent sidewalks.
Kashi, who’s had a store for 15 years in the rundown lower section of Fifth Avenue just off Liberty, is spending thousands of dollars to renovate a former Candy-Rama store at Fifth and Wood streets and will move his jewelry store into that space.
He said he’s decided to move ahead even before Mayor Tom Murphy unveils his long-awaited “Plan C” for reinvigorating the area.
“Everybody told me not to invest money in the city — to get out of the city,” he said last week. “They said it’s a dead horse.”
Kashi’s former store at 210 Fifth Ave. now sits empty, adjacent to a forlorn stretch of the street from Graeme to Market streets, where three stores are deserted, with graffiti on the windows. Across the street at Market and Fifth, the boarded-up windows of another empty store have been painted with an urban mural titled “Celebrate Pittsburgh.”
But there isn’t much to celebrate.
Nearly two years after Murphy abandoned his much-criticized “Marketplace at Fifth and Forbes” plan, which would have demolished more than 60 older buildings and replaced them with 40 new ones, he’s now working on an alternative called Plan C.
But administration officials aren’t saying when an actual proposal for redevelopment will be put forward.
“They have been talking about [improving the area] for so long,” Kashi said. “There is no help from the authorities, so I took the initiative.”
The portions of Fifth and Forbes just off Market Square “look bad and are getting worse every day,” said Mulugetta Birru, director of the Urban Redevelopment Authority. “The city can’t wait too long. We are missing out on opportunities” to attract new stores.
“I am anxious to see something happen,” said Bonnie Klein, co-owner of Camera Repair Service, just off Market Square.
She was one of 13 members of Murphy’s Plan C Task Force on Fifth and Forbes, which spent more than a year studying options for renewal before delivering its report to Murphy in April.
In early June, in response to Murphy’s request, a handful of development companies submitted proposals for shopping, residential and hotel projects in the area roughly bounded by Fifth, Forbes, Market Square and Smithfield Street.
Klein and several others on the Plan C task force said they were still in the dark about what Murphy wants to do with the Fifth-Forbes area.
The city has done “nothing at all” to keep up the commercial stretch of Forbes, said Gabriel Fontana, who has run Gabriel Shoe Repair on the street for 26 years. That neglect affects business, he said.
“There aren’t too many people [here] like there used to be,” he said. “There are a lot of stores closing up, a lot of empty stores.”
Craig Kwiecinski, a spokesman for Murphy, said things were happening and would be announced shortly.
“We are still reviewing the applications and meeting with the development community,” he said, but added he couldn’t speculate on a time frame for action.
Cathy McCollom, an official of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation and also a member of the Plan C task force, said there could be an upside to the length of time it has taken to improve the area.
While it’s difficult to see the number of empty storefronts and deteriorated facades, she said, the wait could eventually bring down asking prices and make it easier for the city to assemble the properties it needs to make something happen.
Time is not on Murphy’s side.
The Fifth-Forbes area took a serious hit in February, when a McDonald’s at Forbes and Wood shut down. Its boarded windows are a frequent target for graffiti.
In that same area along Forbes, National Record Mart and the large G.C. Murphy are closed, adding to the forlorn appearance of the block.
The old NRM is partially occupied by a discount store that sells, among other things, “trouser socks” and “flavored blunt wrap” used by people who roll tobacco and other things.
Walking west toward Market Square, there’s a T-shirt and trinket shop outside the so-called “Skinny Building” at Forbes and Wood across from the former McDonald’s. It’s an arts showcase run by activists from Ground Zero, a group formed to oppose Murphy’s first redevelopment plan.
The second floor of the narrow building is smeared with large, looping graffiti. Pat Clark of Ground Zero said the paint would be removed soon. Sidewalks are crumbling or patched with lumps of asphalt.
There are some improvements to report.
At Forbes and Smithfield, a new brick facade is being added to the CVS drugstore. The outside of the Chart Room Cafe has a new paint job, partly funded by Ground Zero supporters who patronize the bar.
The front of Mama Gina’s pizza shop, which is bustling at lunchtime, is dappled with bright new pastel paints. Cardamone’s Hair and Nail Salon at Forbes and Wood was also recently renovated and expanded.
Murphy said recently that the city received “five, maybe seven” responses from developers interested in some aspect of the Fifth-Forbes renewal.
He hasn’t released the names, but Donald Hunter of Annapolis, Md., who served as a consultant to the Plan C task force, is one of them.
One of his ideas is to turn the old G.C. Murphy, at least its ground floor, into a “public market,” which also, possibly, could spill out into Market Square.
Birru wasn’t sure that would be a good idea, however, saying it could hurt the farmers markets now operating in the Strip District.
Hunter is interested in creating a new hotel in the triangular area bounded by Liberty, Forbes and Stanwix. He said that hotel would, however, have to wait until after a proposed hotel is built next to the new convention center.
Another good idea for invigorating Fifth Avenue, he said, is expanding the current Saks Fifth Avenue store so that it actually has a presence on Fifth, where a former Revco drugstore now sits next to Lazarus.
Hunter said he wasn’t a developer of retail or residential uses, but he was certain other companies could take on those type of projects.
He said buildings shouldn’t be done in a piecemeal way. That approach “won’t turn things around in the eyes of skeptical investors and a skeptical public,” he said.
Birru agreed, saying that a successful Fifth-Forbes project “has to have a critical mass” of buildings. “Acquiring just a few buildings isn’t going to do it.”
Murphy’s previous “Marketplace” plan foundered, in large part, because he wouldn’t swear off the use of eminent domain, the city’s power to condemn and take over privately owned property. A nonprofit law firm from Washington, D.C., offered to defend property owners for free in court.
Some historic preservationists opposed Murphy’s “Marketplace” plan because they wanted to save 100-year-old structures along lower Fifth and lower Forbes.
Murphy has said he wouldn’t use the eminent domain power for the new Plan C.
Yet Birru thinks such a stance also could complicate property-acquisition efforts. Some property owners are content just to sit on their property and hope the city will pay inflated prices for it, he said.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette