Category Archive: Preservation News
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New looks for old steel sites
Tuesday, May 01, 2001
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette architecture critic
By coincidence, two day-long charrettes will be held Saturday to help plan for the future of two struggling neighborhoods, both shaped by the steel industry’s rise and fall.
The closing of the LTV coke plant in Hazelwood, said Pittsburgh city planner Maureen Hogan, “was a real opportunity to think through new uses for the site, and also look at Hazelwood in general and figure out what kind of neighborhood it should it be, how we should position it, how to revitalize it and what resources should be directed to it. We want to take the neighborhood through a planning process to see what would be appropriate to the [LTV] site.”
Several buyers are interested in the 180-acre site, and the planning process will help the community articulate to buyers its goals for the site and the neighborhood.
This “strategic visioning process” will identify Hazelwood’s role in the region’s economy and establish guidelines for appropriate land uses and infrastructure improvements. It will focus on Hazelwood in the context of the region, the city and the surrounding neighborhoods — with an eye to strengthening connections to Oakland and the Pittsburgh Technology Center. It also will explore options for the redevelopment of Junction Hollow, to create more opportunities for both Oakland and Hazelwood.
The charrette will be facilitated by The Saratoga Associates, an architecture and planning firm from Saratoga Springs, N.Y. It will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (with registration at 8:30 a.m.) at Carnegie Mellon Research Institute, 700 Technology Drive, Pittsburgh Technology Center, followed by a neighborhood reception and celebration from 4 to 5 p.m.
For information, call: Hazelwood Initiative at 412-421-7234 or Wanda Wilson, city Planning Department, at 412-255-2223.
Meanwhile, in Homestead, local architects will lead a charrette that follows up on a recently completed comprehensive plan for Eighth Avenue, the town’s historic main street.
“The idea is to look at [making] connections and sparking ideas in the community for the next place they might go,” said Anne Swager, director of the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Institute of Architects, one of the charrette’s three sponsors.
“We’re going to look at connections to the residential districts, to the Waterfront development and to the river, to the proposed Steel Valley Heritage Park, to the historic churches and the ethnic community,” Swager said. The charrette also will examine how to better link Eighth Avenue with its neighboring, parallel streets in the National Register Historic District.
The charrette will be held in the Moose Building, 112 E. Eighth Ave., from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., with the public invited to hear the results at 4 p.m.
On Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Carnegie Library of Homestead, Duquesne University professor Bob Gleeson will launch the charrette with a talk about Homestead’s history and its impact on the town’s economic future. Gleeson heads Duquesne’s Institute for Economic Transformation.
For information, call the AIA at 412-471-9548.
Touring Beech and beyond
“Take a Walk on the North Side” is the title of a new walking tour of Allegheny West’s Beech Avenue. One of the city’s most architecturally intact and historically significant streets, Beech Avenue was home to the infant Gertrude Stein, to Mary Roberts Rinehart (who lived at 954 Beech when she published “The Circular Staircase” in 1908), and to many prominent 19th-century industrialists and businessmen and their families.
The tour, to be led by staff members from Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, also includes Calvary United Methodist and Emmanuel Episcopal churches. It will be given Saturday from 10 to 11 a.m. and continue year-round on the same day and time (except the second weekend of December). The tour costs $3 per person and begins and ends at Calvary United Methodist Church (Allegheny Avenue entrance). Large groups are asked to register in advance, but individuals can just show up.
The walking tour brochure also includes self-guided tours of Millionaires’ Row along Ridge Avenue and Brighton Road, the upper-middle-class houses of Lincoln and Galveston avenues, and nods to the Mexican War Streets and Manchester neighborhoods and North Side attractions.
The brochure is available upon request from two of its sponsors — the Landmarks Foundation at 412-471-5808, Ext. 516; and the Office of Cultural Tourism at 412-281-7711 or 800-359-0758. The Allegheny City Society and the Alcoa Foundation are also supporting the tour.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Fifth and Forbes ready for another go-around
3,000 Downtown merchants, property owners invited to offer revitalization input tomorrow
Wednesday, April 25, 2001
By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Three thousand Downtown property owners and merchants have been invited to a meeting tomorrow to discuss solutions to a bitter, two-year dispute over how to revitalize the rundown commercial core along Fifth and Forbes avenues.
The 11-member Plan C Task Force — named by Mayor Tom Murphy in December after he abandoned a $522 million renewal plan called Market Place at Fifth and Forbes — will hold a hearing from 2 to 4 p.m. to collect ideas on what Downtown needs, particularly what it needs to stay alive after 5 p.m.
Hundreds of people are expected to attend the hearing at the Italian Sons and Daughters of America building at Forbes Avenue and Wood Street. That is ground zero in the long-running dispute between Murphy and his critics in the historic preservation and business communities.
“We have to come up with a clear vision for Fifth and Forbes,” said task force member Harry Finnigan, director of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership. “We have to come up with rules that will provide direction for revitalization and let private-sector investors be part of it. If we don’t do that, we will have failed miserably.”
Despite angry words exchanged last year by Murphy and his opponents, “we all agree on a number of things the area needs. We all want to create a vibrant, colorful Downtown core,” said marketing director of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, which fought Murphy’s Market Place plan.
McCollom said points of agreement include:
All stores in the target area, bounded roughly by Fifth and Forbes avenues, Smithfield Street and Market Square, need to have a unified plan for signs, advertising, marketing and hours of operation.
The city won’t use its eminent domain power to condemn and take over privately owned buildings.
Buildings and shops along Fifth and Forbes must have their windows and facades beautified, using both private funds and city loans or grants.
The mix of stores should include national, regional and local businesses.
Additional parking and housing are crucial.
But major points of disagreement remain. One is the exact formula of national vs. local stores in the final retail mix.Under Murphy’s abandoned plan, national stores, such as Tiffany’s jewelers and the House of Blues music club, were given preference, angering local business owners.
Another unsettled issue, McCollom said, is who will take the lead in quarterbacking the renewal plan.
It could be Murphy or the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority — which Murphy controls — or Finnigan’s 7-year-old Downtown Partnership or a year-old group of building owners called the Golden Triangle Community Development Group, which fought Murphy’s previous plan.
A second hearing will be held May 10.
In recent weeks the Plan C Task Force has held informal talks with some developers.
One was Frank Kass, chairman of Continental Real Estate Cos. of Columbus, Ohio, whose firm is doing the massive Waterfront retail-entertainment project in Homestead and the housing component of the South Side Works on East Carson Street.
Kass said Pittsburgh’s central core has a lot going for it, but needs more parking and permanent housing.
He suggested that the city “immediately begin buying up any piece of property that is underutilized and is for sale.” Even if the city knew what it wanted to add to Downtown, it currently doesn’t control enough property to make it happen.
He also suggested the use of government-sponsored facade grants to help owners spruce up the outsides of their buildings, and a technique called reverse taxation, in which an underused building or vacant land is more heavily taxed to encourage development while taxes decrease for buildings that are fully used.
The Plan C Task Force is also looking at the possible use of historic tax credits, which could reduce taxes for owners of historic buildings who make improvements.
Last year, Murphy angered historic preservationists by proposing the demolition of more than 60 buildings along Fifth and Forbes, many nearly 100 years old.
The task force has also interviewed Wayne Snyder, head of a firm called Kravco, near Philadelphia.
The 50-year-old company is primarily known for developing regional shopping malls but recently established a new division called Downtown Works, which focuses on urban redevelopment.
“Downtown Pittsburgh’s complement of department stores is a testimony to the general strength of Downtown,” he said.
“The next thing is to put residential [units] there and better entertainment and funkier, more diverse restaurants,” he said.
Local developer Craig Cozza of Mount Washington has also met with the Plan C group.
He is working with the Golden Triangle Community Development Group to use the first two floors of the old G.C. Murphy building for a 40,000-square-foot music club and a farmers market.
The music club would be run in connection with Rich Engler of SFX Entertainment, a nationally known concert promoter.
Cozza said Engler, formerly of DiCesare Engler, a Pittsburgh concert promoter, knows the local entertainment scene, while SFX could bring in national acts.
“There would be different kinds of music on each night — a jazz night, a blues night, a family entertainment night,” Cozza said.
“There would be something for everyone.”
Also, farmers from a nine-county area would have a place in the building to sell their wares.
In warm weather the farmers market would move out into Market Square, Cozza said.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Panel sets sights on revitalization of Point State Park
New vision to focus on history, recreation at Pittsburgh’s signature park
Saturday, March 31, 2001
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Almost 27 years after the dedication of Point State Park, civic leaders and park stakeholders are coming together to create a new vision for the green triangle of land shaped by the confluence of Pittsburgh’s rivers.
About 30 members of the Point State Park revitalization committee — a group so new it doesn’t yet have an official name — met yesterday for the first time to talk about how the park might become more friendly to active recreation and more mindful of its history.
The committee is a joint project of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development — the 57-year-old public policy group that created the park — and the Pittsburgh Riverlife Task Force, formed in 1999 to shape a bold vision for the city’s waterfront.
Conceived as a quiet oasis, the state-owned, city-maintained park has been criticized in recent years for being too quiet — for permitting walking and jogging but outlawing activities like bicycle-riding and in-line skating. At other times, the “quiet oasis” becomes a sea of bodies, and the city’s front lawn gets more use, and more wear and tear, than its designers anticipated, with large festival and fireworks crowds quickly turning its grass to dirt or mud.
And while a newly expanded Fort Pitt Museum will reopen in the park in June, some believe the park hasn’t made the most of its colonial military history, especially in light of the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War in 2004.
With no comprehensive plan for the park, ideas tumbled into the vacuum.
Last summer, Mayor Tom Murphy suggested rebuilding Fort Duquesne as an attraction — a possibility that’s being investigated by the Fort Duquesne Commission, led by former county Commissioner Bob Cranmer.
In the fall, the Riverlife Task Force’s consulting landscape architect, Hargreaves Associates, suggested establishing a gateway to the park and a new, more direct entrance, with a pedestrian bridge over the sunken wall of Fort Pitt.
And just this week, a group called the Point State Park Garden Committee revealed it has been working for seven years to create a Peace Garden in the park — and has secured the state and local approvals to do it.
For now, though, all those ideas are on hold while the revitalization committee comes up with an overarching plan.
“There are several wonderful projects that have been proposed but they should be considered in the light of a comprehensive vision for the park that we can all buy into,” said committee Chairman Jim Broadhurst, an Allegheny Conference member and chairman of Eat ‘n Park Restaurants.
Broadhurst said the park effort dovetails with the conference’s mission to improve the quality of life in Western Pennsylvania and with its recently completed long-range plan to enhance the area’s amenities.
Commissioning a planning and programming study for Point State Park was one of the Riverlife Task Force’s recommendations last fall.
Both the Fort Duquesne and Peace Garden groups are represented on the committee, which also includes local history museums, foundations, city and state government and others.
“I think we have an extraordinary opportunity right now” to make the park the centerpiece of the new development along the riverfront, Mayor Murphy told the group.
“It should become a real statement for this region.”
But what kind of statement?
Citing the “long-standing disagreement on the use of the park,” Murphy told the committee members they first have to determine a philosophy of use.
“Is it going to be a dynamic park or a passive park?”
Barry Hannegan, director of historic design programs for Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, was invited to brief the group on the history of the park’s design. Landscape architect Ralph Griswold, the park’s designer, envisioned it as “the calm eye in the center of the city,” Hannegan said, and used only plants that would have been there in colonial times.
“We should keep in mind that we’re working with an extraordinary continuum of history and affection.”
Broadhurst said the committee will look at ways to better interpret the park’s history, increase recreational opportunities and visitor amenities, develop design standards and create a management system. It also will determine whether the park should continue to host large community gatherings.
But the committee won’t be working alone.
Like the Riverlife Task Force’s plan for the riverfronts, the Point State Park plan will be shaped through a public participation process.
“We’ll either do a [design] charrette or a community brainstorming, and on a fairly aggressive timeline,” said Riverlife Task Force Director Davitt Woodwell.
In the next few months, the committee will create a schedule, budget and a request for qualifications from firms interested in studying the park’s existing uses and future possibilities. The firm also would direct the public process and shape the final plan, to be completed by summer 2002.
Although the entire cost of the plan is not yet known, John Oliver, secretary of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, has pledged $50,000 to develop it, with the committee working to raise more from local foundations.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Independence Middle School eighth-graders simulate entering Ellis Island as immigrants
Wednesday, March 21, 2001
By Mary Niederberger, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
On most weekdays, Billy Wasko, Ben Petchel, Alex Brown and Nicole Hisiro are normal eighth-graders at Independence Middle School in Bethel Park.
But one day last month, the four were immigrants from France, arriving at Ellis Island in 1914 after World War I broke out in their homeland.
There were other groups of immigrants that day as well. One was a family fleeing Italy and the Fascist rule of Benito Mussolini, another was leaving Cuba to protest the rise of new dictator Fidel Castro.
Much like the immigrants of decades earlier, the student immigrants arrived with their most important possessions, carefully selected, in one suitcase. They were herded as a group — 450 in all — into the school gym, which served as their version of Ellis Island.
They were met by stern-looking immigration officials, who looked a lot like their teachers, dressed in black suits. From there, they were divided by nationality and sent for simulated medical exams and tests to see if they could read and write.
Those who passed the tests were sent in smaller groups for immigration processing, where officials, who were really foreign language teachers, gave them instructions in foreign tongues so they could see how difficult it was for the real immigrants who came to America.
Finally, student immigrants were sent along for the rest of their make-believe journey to Pittsburgh. There, the immigrants would get jobs in steel mills, glass factories or slaughterhouses or set up their own restaurants or tailor shops.
The academic exercise that allowed the eighth-graders to experience a piece of history was the kickoff to the Pittsburgh Unit — an interdisciplinary effort that teaches the history of Pittsburgh through the eyes of immigrants.
Created by teachers, it encompasses almost every subject the students have and has been offered at Independence Middle School for the past seven years. The unit received an Award of Merit last fall from the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation.
The lessons last most of a nine-week grading period. For the kickoff day and on days when students give dramatic presentations of their experiences, many come dressed in costume. Teachers also dress to fit their roles as immigration officials wearing black suits and doctors giving physicals in white coats.
While the unit’s lessons appear most heavily in social studies and reading, the Pittsburgh theme is carried into almost every class — even math and art, which are tied together in a lesson.
In that application, students received a tiny block of paper that holds part of a larger scene of Pittsburgh. As a math exercise, they have to practice proportions to get their block reproduced in the correct proportions on a larger piece of paper, math teacher Wayne Paul said.
Each block is colored and then connected to the others, as in a puzzle, to create a large Pittsburgh scene such as a skyline of the city.
Another art exercise requires students, while on a walking tour of Mount Washington, to locate and identify various forms of architecture photographed by the art teacher and handed out before the walk.
As a home economics lesson, the students create a cookbook of ethnic family recipes and hold a Pittsburgh food fair where they eat locally produced products such as chipped ham, ketchup, pickles and Klondike ice cream bars.
In language arts, teacher Gloria Feather teaches a segment on recognizing “Pittsburghese.”
By the end of the nine-week period, students working in groups complete a research paper that details some aspect of the region’s history such as the steel industry, higher education, the rivers, or art and architecture.
The papers, which are researched from the archives at the Heinz Regional History Center as well as the school’s computer lab and library, are presented for parents at an exposition night.
“I think it’s a lot more work than anything we’ve done so far this year,” said Brenna Brucker, 13. “But it does make learning fun.”
The unit also helps connect students to their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations, teacher Marcy Rosen said. “It really helps them reconnect with the past. Often they go to their parents or grandparents and ask questions.”
That’s exactly what Jordan Panico, 14, did. Both of his grandmothers were immigrants — one from Poland, the other from Italy — who came through Ellis Island.
“I’ve been talking to my grandmothers a lot about this. They like answering my questions,” he said.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Renovator turned innovator when she started Old House Fair
Saturday, February 24, 2001
By Gretchen McKay, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Joedda Sampson knows better than most how gratifying it is to take an abandoned decaying house everyone has given up on and, with equal parts hard work and vision, slowly breathe life back into it.
Over the past two decades, Sampson has restored nearly 20 of Pittsburgh’s most dilapidated, historic properties, including two in the North Side’s Allegheny West neighborhood, a townhouse in the Mexican War Streets and, most recently, the Gwinner-Harter house, an 1870 Victorian mansion on Fifth Avenue in Shadyside.
It’s personally rewarding work, life-changing even. But fun? Don’t count on it.
“Any restoration is a major undertaking, even if it’s a small house,” Sampson says from the grand dining room of Victoria Hall in Bloomfield, the 1865 Second Empire mansion turned convent she bought in 1994, painstakingly restored and then turned into a banquet and cultural center.
Old houses, after all, are like old people — something can go wrong every day, and it’s not always easy to find a solution, she says. Decide to renovate one, and “you’ll be tested at every bend and corner.”
So before jumping in and rescuing that turn-of-the-century fixer-upper from the wrecking ball, she cautions, be sure to ask yourself: Are you ready for that type of challenge? Because no matter what you do — and count on doing plenty — the house will continue aging.
“It’s never going to turn into that new house on the golf course,” she says with a knowing smile.
Today, Sampson will talk about home restoration and interior design at the sixth annual Old House Fair at Victoria Hall. During her 35-minute session, which begins at 1:10 p.m. in the hall’s cabaret, the restoration contractor/designer — who also owns Homestyles home furnishing shop at Station Square — will talk about the benefits of old-house living. She also will give pointers on how to develop your own personal style.
It’s a subject Sampson, a former makeup artist for Revlon, is deeply familiar with. Though she has no formal training in renovation, her renown as a designer and historic preservationist extends far beyond Pittsburgh. Three of her renovations — the Victoria House Bed and Breakfast and Cafe Victoria, both in the Allegheny West section of the North Side, and the Gwinner-Harter House — have been featured in Victoria magazine. And she is one of 18 top women designers profiled in a new book by the editors of Victoria magazine, “Designers in Residence” (Hearst Books, $30).
Unfortunately, Sampson says, too many people make the mistake of trying to re-create what they see in books and magazines when decorating their homes rather than developing an individual style that fits both their particular architecture and lifestyle.
“They create this movie set look and then wonder why they can’t live in it,” she says.
Maybe it’s because she grew up in a 100-year-old log cabin in West Virginia, but Sampson has always loved the look and feel of old houses.
A self-professed “Victorian obsessive,” she’s particularly crazy about homes built during the Victorian period, which hit its peak in the latter part of the 19th century and included such architecturally distinctive styles as Queen Anne, Second Empire and Stick and Shingle.
“I just love the largeness of the era,” she says, “and not just aesthetically. There was a lot of mystery and passion during that time as well as large emotions.”
So it was only natural that when Sampson, 48, relocated from New York to Pittsburgh in the mid ’70s, she felt instantly at home. While many cities will have a certain street or perhaps a whole block with late 19th-century houses, Pittsburgh, she was thrilled to discover, boasted entire communities of historic properties. Even better, there was a wide variety of sizes and styles to choose from, with everything from Shadyside’s three-story Victorian mansions to six-room row houses in Lawrenceville.
As a result, “almost anyone can afford to live in a pretty marvelous old house,” she says.
Finding master craftspeople and even general information on how to restore those old houses, however, proved to be a different matter. Sampson, who started wallpapering at age 9 and has studied design throughout the years, was able to make do during her many renovations. But that wasn’t always the case with less-handy homeowners.
“What I kept hearing was, ‘I’d really like to live in an old house but I don’t know where to start,'” she says.
So six years ago, Sampson partnered with Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation and came up with the idea for the Old House Fair, which brings together homeowners and professionals with special skills in old house restoration, decorating and gardening for informal talks and question-and-answer sessions.
“We wanted to create a market for people who live in or are thinking about buying an old house, even if it was only once a year,” says Sampson.
The fair was such a big success, they decided to make it an annual event. It now draws nearly 1,000 visitors, as well as dozens of vendors and exhibitors. That pleases Sampson a great deal.
There’s not a whole lot of architectural history left in this country, she maintains, and Pittsburghers tend to take what they have for granted, fabulous or not.
“They’ve seen it all their lives, so it’s no big thing,” she says. “But outsiders come in and are amazed, both by the number of properties and the [relatively low] prices.”
She smiles.
“So we need to do what we can to preserve it.”
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Competition aims to improve city’s historic public spaces
Thursday, February 22, 2001
By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation will stage a juried competition this fall, inviting young designers to come up with ideas for making eight historic public spaces in the city more attractive and more usable.
The eight spaces range from large public plazas, such as Market Square, Downtown, and the sunken plaza at Allegheny Center on the North Side, to tiny Lyndhurst Green in Point Breeze and the area formed by the convergence of three streets in Troy Hill.
“We’ve got all of these wonderful nodes in the city, and they’re often taken for granted or unrecognized, and when they are recognized, often not treated very intelligently or effectively in terms of design,” said Barry Hannegan, Landmarks’ director of historic design programs.
“The competition will draw, we hope, everybody’s attention to the visual richness that the older portions of the city have and also point out that it could be richer still.”
Hannegan said the competition was intended “to encourage people not only to recognize and hold on to things with historic significance, but also to make them continue as viable elements of the city.”
While there are no plans to implement any of the proposals, Hannegan said that “if something really sensational came along that everybody thought Pittsburgh should have, then we’d see how that could be accomplished.”
The competition is open to architects, landscape architects, planners and artists under the age of 35.
Hannegan limited it to young designers because they “don’t often have an opportunity, a forum or a platform where they can get up and strut their stuff. And I have the strong impression there’s an extreme diversity in the young design community here, and I’d like to find out if my assumption is right.
“I was cautioned by a friend who teaches at an architecture school in Boston that we didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for, and I hope that means some off-the-map or over-the-top proposals.”
The eight sites are:
Market Square, Downtown.
Doughboy Square, junction of Butler Street and Penn Avenue, Lawrenceville.
Oakland Square, Dawson Street, Oakland.
The former Ober Park, Allegheny Center (now the center’s sunken plaza).
Lyndhurst Green, Beechwood Boulevard and Reynolds Street, Point Breeze.
Convergence of Lowrie, Ely and Froman streets, Troy Hill.
Morrow Triangle Park, Baum Boulevard, Bloomfield.
Intersection of Mahon and Kirkpatrick streets with Centre Avenue, Hill District.
“A number of these spaces are largely negative and we think could be enhanced in keeping with the existing historic neighborhood,,” Hannegan said.The sites were chosen because of their well-defined character.
“Almost all of them involve an interesting arrangement of street patterns,” he said. “They all are, or have the potential of being, focal points in the city’s structure. They’re all places where the pulse should increase and the adrenaline should flow about being there.”
Landmarks is offering three prizes, of $5,000, $2,000 and $1,000, for first-, second- and third-place designs.
A letter of intention to enter the competition must be received by Landmarks by May 1. Submissions must be delivered to the Mattress Factory, where the jurying will occur, on Sept. 8. Materials submitted with entries will be selected for inclusion in an exhibition at the Mattress Factory in September.
Th competition will be launched during Landmarks’ sixth annual Old House Fair, which will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at Victoria Hall, 201 S. Winebiddle St., Bloomfield. Landmarks also is mailing invitations to compete to about 1,000 individuals and firms in Pittsburgh.
City Planning Director Susan Golomb will serve on the competition’s advisory panel, along with two Landmarks officials, Arthur Ziegler, its president, and Phil Hallen, its chairman. Hannegan will serve as one of five jurors.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Snapshot – Walter Curtis Kidney
Age: 69.
Occupation: Architectural Historian, Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
Best aspect of job: Researching and writing.
Family: Single.
Current project: “A book on the architect Henry Hornbostel.”
Hobbies: Trying to figure out the dates and locations of historic photographs. “Sometimes I can look at a view of downtown from Mount Washington and say `That had to be taken in 1906, because of what’s there and what isn’t there.'”
Favorite film: “The Children of Paradise.” “Colorful characters in a fascinating place (Paris 1840) makes romanticism comprehensible.”
Favorite read: Mystery stories and psychological novels and novels of manners.
Three things always in your refrigerator: Bread, chocolate and shrimp.
Favorite vacation: “I loaf sometimes, but never take vacations.”
Where he can be found Saturday nights: Home.
People may be surprised to know: “My only academic degree is a BA in philosophy.”
– William Loeffler
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Carson home gets environmentally friendly makeover-PPG uses project to test new products; unions donate labor
By Pete Bishop
TRIBUNE-REVIEW 02/15/2001
Thanks to donations of time, effort and expertise, the girlhood home of one of America’s most famous environmentalists is getting an environmentally friendly face-lift.
The Rachel Carson Homestead in Springdale Borough already sports new stainless steel gutters and a new roof of asphalt shingles that are configured to look like weathered cedar, said Danelle Ardell, Rachel Carson Homestead Association board president.
Interior painting is under way and exterior painting is scheduled, and both are “special because we’re using a paint formulated by PPG that has no volatile organic compounds,” she said.
“It’s good for the environment so that sensitive people are not accosted by the fumes of paint, and it’s also good for the workers.”
PPG Industries and Air Products, one of its resin suppliers, donated the paint, roofing materials and gutters.
District Council 57 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, United Union of Roofers Local 37, Sheet Metal Workers International Local 12 and the Carpenters Regional District Council of Western Pennsylvania contributed the labor.
Ardell said Arthur P. Ziegler Jr., president of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, and Ellis Schmidlapp of Landmark Design Associates helped assure that the materials used maintained the historic authenticity of the Marion Avenue building in which Carson was born in 1907.
After graduating from Pennsylvania College for Women, now Chatham College, Carson wrote natural history articles for the Baltimore Sun and later became editor-in-chief of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service publications.
Her book “Silent Spring,” published in 1962 and warning of the long-term effects of misusing pesticides, ranked fifth among the Modern Library’s 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century published in English.
Carson’s other books were “The Sense of Wonder,” “Under the Sea Wind,” “The Sea Around Us” and “The Edge of the Sea.” She died of breast cancer in 1964 at the age of 56.
PPG donated the materials because “we’re kind of attached to this historical landmark right here in Springdale” and because it welcomed the chance to “help out with the restoration of that facility,” said Bill Boberski, director of technology for architectural coatings at the plant there.
“Also, we always have products in development, and in this case we had some products that are very environmentally friendly. We were kind of anxious to take the opportunity to work with those products in that facility, which is linked to environmental issues, to find out how well they work and demonstrate their performance.”
Similarly, having supervised apprentices work on the homestead “gives us the opportunity to demonstrate the work we’re able to perform,” said Lee Libert, assistant educational coordinator of the carpenters’ council.
Furthermore, “it’s a nonprofit situation they’re in, and we see worthwhile projects as a responsibility,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”
Bill Ellenberger, apprenticeship and health and safety program director, said Council 57 tries to expand its apprenticeship program annually “into the community doing some worthwhile projects. These are ways we can get our apprentices acquainted with the community and get them to accept some responsibility.”
Ardell said work should be done by April, at which time some furnishings will be changed “with the goal of making it look more like it did when Rachel Carson lived there.” The Carsons took all their furniture with them when they moved after Rachel’s college graduation.
The homestead is closed to the public until renovations are completed. The free Wild Creatures Nature Trail, with seven learning stations teaching nature lessons with signs and letting visitors know what Carson might have experienced at each spot, is open daily during daylight hours.
– Pete Bishop can be reached at pbishop `Silent Spring: Alarums and Excursions.’
Where: Henry Heymann Theatre in the lower level of the Stephen Foster Memorial, Forbes Avenue, Oakland.
When: Continues through March 4. Curtain times are 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday.
Ticket information: (412) 624-7529.
Recepition: On Feb. 24, the Rachel Carson Homestead Association and Chatham College’s Rachel Carson Institute will have a post-show reception at the theater. Proceeds will benefit a project that distributes educational book covers about Carson. Tickets cost $45. For details, call Lisa Elliott at (724) 274-5459
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. © Tribune Review