Category Archive: Preservation News
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Steps leading to Panther Hollow fixed
By Richard Byrne Reilly
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, April 1, 2008A flight of steps leading from Anderson Playground to Panther Hollow in Schenley Park is ready for walking.
“The steps were made of sandstone, and over the years had become deteriorated and dislodged. It wasn’t safe to use them,” said Phil Gruszka, director of parks management and maintenance at the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy.
The work was completed by the conservancy and the city’s Department of Public Works. The $33,000 cost was picked up by a donor.
Panther Hollow includes 80 acres of trails, streams, woodlands and a lake in Oakland. Bikers and runners can frequently be seen using the series of trails that crisscross the park.
Repairing the steps is just one phase of a larger project in which the conservancy and volunteers restore other areas of the park, including removing non-native species that have disturbed the area’s ecology, and grading trails that have been washed out by storms. That project is expected to take several years.
Workers will construct a wildflower meadow adjacent to the Schenley Park pool. The meadow will help absorb excess rain and stop erosion that flows down the slope during rain, Gruszka said.
Fixing the steps “makes a major trail connector safe and usable,” Gruszka said.
Richard Byrne Reilly can be reached at rreilly@tribweb.com or 412-380-5625.
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$500,000 rehab revives Edgewood’s landmark rail depot
By Melanie Donahoo
FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Port Authority of Allegheny County will lease the turn-of-the-century Edgewood Train Station to the borough of Edgewood for the nominal fee of $1 per year.
Nearly $500,000 in renovations have been made to the architectural landmark, as part of a cooperation agreement between the borough and the transit agency, authority spokesman David Whipkey said.
The station, which sits along the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway Extension, got a new roof, water and sewer lines, electrical services, exterior lighting and doors. The woodwork was rehabilitated. Port Authority began the work in November 2006 with money from a federal grant, Whipkey said.
The borough plans to rent the station once all renovations are complete. The building still needs rest rooms, insulation and aesthetic repairs to the interior, said borough Manager Kurt Ferguson.
“This is just a small piece of a much larger project that’s going to develop that whole corridor,” Ferguson said. “So I think it’s an important step in making the rest of those things happen.”
The borough plans to update the Edgewood Avenue corridor and improve its infrastructure and connection to Swissvale. Edgewood is working with Port Authority to find additional money to complete the 1,500-square foot train station. One possibility is offering the tenants a reduced rent in exchange for making the final repairs.
“We will put together an outline for a request-for-proposal and examine what possibilities exist,” Ferguson said. “There are certain limitations with the building that would probably make it more conducive to some sort of office use than it would a retail space.”
Built in 1903 and designed by noted architect Frank Furness, the train station was declared a landmark by the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation in 1998. The station once was a stop for trains on the old Penn Central Railroad main line and is believed to be the last existing building in Allegheny County designed by Furness.
Considered the founder of the Philadelphia school of architecture, Furness designed more than 400 buildings during his career, including many railway stations for the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio railroads.
Because the money is not yet in hand, there is no time frame for completion of the station’s renovations, Ferguson said.
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Seven Businesses Support Landmarks’ through the State Educational Improvement Tax Credit Program
PHLF News
March 7, 2008Thanks to contributions from Ellwood Group, Inc., PNC Bank, Allegheny Technologies Incorporated, Equitable Energy, Frank B. Fuhrer Wholesale Company, Bridges & Company, Inc., and Hefren-Tillotson, Inc., Landmarks is involving 10 Pittsburgh Public Schools in its “Building Pride/Building Character” program.
Through a series of field trips and art activities, elementary-school students learn about the places and elements that give character to their city. In the process, they feel more connected to their school, neighborhood, and city. To support the EITC program, visit:
https://phlf.org/2008/03/06/educational-improvement-tax-credit-program-building-pridebuilding-character/ -
RiverWalk makes old new again
By Ron DaParma
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, March 12, 2008Having one of the nation’s leading advocacy groups for environmentally friendly “green building” as a new tenant means a lot to Mark Stephen Bibro.
He’s general manager of RiverWalk Corporate Centre, a massive, 102-year-old complex on Pittsburgh’s South Side — for years known as the Terminal Buildings.
The Green Building Alliance is scheduled to open its headquarters there at the end of this month, putting a deeper stamp on the transformation of the nearly 1-million-square-foot complex, once said to be the largest warehouse between New York and Chicago.
“People walk in — particularly those who have not been here for a long time — and expect to see an old warehouse, but when they open the door, their first comment generally is, ‘Wow,’ ” said Bibro.
Since he took over day-to-day management duties about seven years ago, the tenant roster has swelled from about 25 to more than 90, bringing occupancy to 75 percent.
That includes many non-warehouse-type tenants, such as the Green Building Alliance, which intends to make its offices a showcase for recycled materials and other sustainable products.“It really has a lot of important features for us,” said Jeaneen A. Zappa, deputy director of the Alliance. “It’s a historic building and it allows us to show that green building can be done in an existing space and not just a new building, which is a common misconception.”
“We have high-tech, low-tech and no-tech,” said Bibro, whose late father was one of a group of tenants and friends of local businessman Dan Lackner that bought the complex in 1963. The building, designed by architect Charles Bickle, opened in 1906 as a state-of-the-art warehouse, modeled after the Cupples Station in St. Louis.
Although the Lackner family’s Paper Products Co., a distributor, is still the largest tenant, with 170,000 square feet, the complex is populated by a diverse mix of companies.
“We have 14 other nonprofits, four commercial printers, four architects, a sculptor and yoga and martial arts studios,” Bibro said.
In addition, there are companies such as high-tech artificial lung device manufacturer A-Lung Technologies Inc., and a group of other creative types such as Steelcoast, a creative agency that provides marketing and communications services to its clients.
“We wanted raw warehouse space, and this was exactly what we were looking for,” said Scott Bowlin, principal and creative designer for the firm, which has a staff of 11 in its 2,500-square-foot space.
“We wanted a distinctive look, and we were able to create that here,” he said of Steelcoast’s office, whose decorative touches include a nonworking gasoline pump and old-fashioned telephone booth.
“This is 1 million square feet, so you can have a sculptor on the same floor as A-Lung, and on the same floor with an architect,” said Bibro. “We also just brought in a paint studio. You can put those all in the same building, and they don’t contradict. They really complement one another.”
Efforts to transform the complex took two different tracks, according to Bibro.
First, a multimillion-dollar renovation upgraded mechanical systems and fire alarm equipment and addressed accessibility issues that weren’t dealt with 100 years ago, he said.
Next came an effort to change image.
“Our image used to be as a good location, but also a truck terminal, dirty, with storage and materials, and trucks going in and out all the time,” he said. “So even though the building was cleaned, and the windows were new, and we no longer had trailer trucks moving in and out, it took people actually coming here for events to say this place is great.”
One initiative that helped was to invite nonprofit groups to hold their monthly board meetings there, and that started the word spreading, he said.
Then, organizations such as the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America and the Visiting Nurses Foundation took advantage of Bibro’s offer for free use of a vacant 60,000-square-foot space on the top (sixth) floor to stage fundraising and other larger events.
That brought thousands of people into the building who had never seen it before, he said.
“SteelCoast is an example of a company that came to an event just because they wanted to support a charity, and they told me a few months later that their goal was to eventually move into our building,” Bibro said.
“Now the building hums 24/7 because all these young techies and other people here work that way,” he said. “You come here at 2 o’clock in the morning and there are always 10 companies working on a project or something like that.”
Ron DaParma can be reached at rdaparma@tribweb.com or 412-320-7907
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Door to History: New owners of old Union Trust Building hope to find use for bank vault
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
By Sally Kalson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
When the Union Trust Building opened Downtown in 1923, its safe deposit vault in the basement was reported to be the largest and strongest in the world — 80 feet long, 45 feet wide, 8 2/3 feet high, with walls 20 inches thick.
Now, 85 years and several bank mergers and sales later, the vault is still an impressive, if musty, catacomb that harkens back to another era. With its rows of burnished bronze cubbies, clanking gates and massive circular 55-ton door, it could easily be imagined as the set of an old bank heist movie starring James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson.
There’s almost nothing left there to steal now. Citizens Bank, which took over the vault from Mellon Bank after buying the latter’s consumer and small business operation in 2001, began notifying depositors several months ago to empty their lock boxes because it was vacating the premises.
Only about 1,800 of 12,000 boxes were in use at that point. Most have been cleared out by their owners, although some unclaimed boxes remain. On March 21, the vault will officially close; any leftovers will be drilled and moved to the Citizens branch across the street for safekeeping while the bank looks for their owners.
Citizens Bank president Ralph Papa, who was with Mellon for many years before the sale, said there was no need to keep the Union Trust vault in operation.
“We have more than 90 branches around the area, and the vast majority have safe deposit boxes,” he said. “There are lots of places for people to move the contents.”
Still, the closing of the storied vault sounds like the end of an era. But the Union Trust Building’s new owners say they are well aware of the basement’s historic nature.
“We’re looking at a number of uses,” said Rick Barreca, CEO of the Mika Realty Group of Los Angeles, which last month paid $24.1 million for the 11-story property.
“Our hope is that we can work with another financial institution in the future that might make use of the vault,” Mr. Barreca said. “It’s really a work of art, a unique facility that I think is irreplaceable. We have a large commitment to the building, and the vault is one of the benefits of owning it.” …..
That’s a sensible attitude, because it’s hard to see how the structure could be removed without tremendous cost and disruption. Mika is considering excavating under the building for a parking garage, but Mr. Barreca said “there’s plenty of room for that without touching the vault.”
Sparse history
Much has been written about the Union Trust Building from the ground up. The edifice is considered by many to be Downtown’s most spectacular, with its ornate Flemish Gothic exterior, 10-story rotunda, circular skylight and the twin “chapels” on the roof that actually house elevator machinery. It takes up the entire city block bounded by Fifth and Oliver avenues, Grant Street and William Penn Place. The design is credited to F.J. Osterling, but was probably conceptualized by Pierre A. Liesch, who worked for Osterling briefly, according to the late historian James D. Van Trump. In 1973, the building was recognized as a historic landmark.
But when it comes to the underground portion, there’s very little on the historical record. However, one article from the Pittsburgh Sun newspaper, dated Nov. 21, 1932, contained a descriptive bonanza.
“Great Vault Is World’s Largest” was the Sun headline that introduced the facility to the public. The report included illustrations of the vault opening and its interior and noted that the total weight of the doors and equipment was 5 million pounds.
The report described the vaults as “great fire, burglar, flood and mob proof strongholds,” built of “a double tier of interlocked heavy steel beams, surrounded by and imbedded in solid concrete, lined with the hardest and toughest armor plate.
“Every inch is guarded by electric alarms, and every protective device developed by human genius and skill has been installed to make absolutely safe the possessions deposited in it.
“The material is finished in solid bronze, and the boxes are 26 inches deep and are made of open hearth steel, the doors being one-half inch thick. The portable boxes are aluminum and were made by the Aluminum Company of America.”
The article went on to recommend the “impregnable trunk vault” as the ideal repository for silverware, heirlooms, valuable books and other bulky possessions.
All the more noteworthy is the fact that the vaults were retrofitted, because the building was not designed as a bank. It opened in 1917 as the Union Arcade, built by Henry Clay Frick on land he purchased from the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. At the time, it claimed to be the largest arcade in the world, with 240 shops on the first four floors and 760 office suites on the upper levels.
Six years later, the Union Trust Co. took over more than two acres of floor space, put its name on the edifice and its vault under it. The retrofitting was done by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, successor of D. H. Burnham & Co., architects of the Frick and Oliver buildings.
The newspaper described the vaults as occupying two levels — nearly 28,000 square feet on the safe deposit floor, and some 20,000 square feet on “the silver vault floor” for paintings, bullion and other heavy possessions.
That left the folks at Citizens scratching their heads, because the vault as it exists today has only one floor. “Nobody seems to know about that second floor,” said spokeswoman Angela Wagner.
The vault is changed in other ways as well. The open central area depicted in the Sun’s 1923 illustration is now crammed full of deposit boxes that were forklifted over from Mellon Bank’s Smithfield Street location after that building was sold in 1999 and made into a Lord & Taylor department store that closed five years later.
It’s hard to say for sure if the vault anteroom floor is original. The surface comes up higher than the bottom of the vault door, so the floor must be dropped by means of a long pole and lever to clear the way for swinging the enormous door open or closed. That may be depicted by the curved line in the illustration, but it’s difficult to tell.
The Union Trust Co. merged with Mellon Bank in 1946 to form Mellon National Bank & Trust Co. The building was rechristened Two Mellon Bank Center in the 1990s, but most Pittsburghers never stopped calling it the Union Trust Building.
Mellon — now Bank of New York Mellon — left the premises in 2006, and the structure is virtually empty except for Larrimor’s on the street-level corner of Grant and Fifth. Mika Realty hopes the high-end men’s clothier will remain, and CB Richard Ellis is charged with attracting new retail and office tenants.
As for the vault, it’s not going anywhere.
Sally Kalson can be reached at skalson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1610.
First published on March 12, 2008 at 12:00 am
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Owners’ fear: Razing houses will bring down theirs too
Monday, March 10, 2008
By Diana Nelson Jones,
Pittsburgh Post-GazetteThe estate of her dead neighbor owns the condemned vacant row house beside Cynthia Powell’s home on Chateau Street. Its facade is strenuously bowing and trying to persuade hers to come with it.
No contractor has been willing to touch the offending building, and Ms. Powell says she can’t afford the loan she needs to stabilize her house against it. So her house has been condemned, too.
This has been a three-year spiral for Ms. Powell, whose Manchester neighborhood has many pending dates with the wrecking ball. Of the 25 demolitions the city has asked the Historic Review Commission to approve since October 2006, 21 have been in that neighborhood. It’s the only entire neighborhood to have city historic designation, but that status is in danger; less and less density would eventually alter the boundary.
“Once you lose too many, then you have to question: What’s the value of an historic district?” said Tom Hardy, executive director of the Manchester Citizens Corp. The nonprofit development group counted 103 vacant properties — about 20 percent of the neighborhood — in a 2005 inventory and recommended 100 be renovated, he said. Some have been razed, either for safety reasons or because the properties were not feasible fixes, and more are slated for demolition.
“The challenge is,” said Mr. Hardy, “which ones will you be successful at turning around considering realistic market forces?”
Manchester’s story today is a tale of two neighborhoods: the one that tour buses drive through slowly so people can admire the Victorian architecture, and the other of dumb, hollow hulks, their balconies and porches sagging, the definition of their brickwork vague, as if they are literally fading away.
The dual identity coexists side by side in places, and that’s an untenable situation for Ms. Powell, whose house is a party-wall domino trying to remain standing. For Duane Hill, the decrepitude adjacent to his home on Sheffield Street is outrunning his efforts to renovate.
The Historic Review Commission provides oversight for changes to properties in the city’s 12 historic districts and advocates for the life of those properties. It almost never hears opposition to demolition applications, but last week, Ms. Powell and Mr. Hill showed up to fight.
Dan Cipriani, acting chief of the Bureau of Building Inspections, said that, of the 200 buildings the city razes each year, almost all go down without a champion. The owners either want them down or they belong to people who can’t be found or are dead.
Mr. Hill lives beside a property he had been trying to shore up when the city condemned it.
“I was working on it when one wall started to bow,” he told the commission. “I have a contractor who is going to take on the job. If I could get you some information to show you we are going to fix it, could you please not tear it down? We’re going to start working on it soon, as soon as the weather breaks.”
“We’re glad to hear that,” said the commission’s chairman, Michael Stern, referring to any plan to redeem a building. “Usually, we’re up here just voting on demolitions.”
Commissioners denied the city its demolition of Mr. Hill’s property but with a stipulation — that a building permit be in place within two months.
For Ms. Powell, the outlook isn’t as rosy.
“We were trying to tear down 1904 to help her out, so she could fix her wall,” Russ Blaich, the Bureau of Building Inspection’s demolitions inspector, told the commission. “But the contractor who got the bid was afraid the bricks would blow.”
Mr. Cipriani said the building beside Ms. Powell’s was approved for demolition last year, but the demolition contractor “found that anything he would do would have an adverse effect on Ms. Powell’s house.”
“I moved out,” Ms. Powell told the commission. “I pay my taxes like anyone else, and I am not behind on my water bill. I want to keep my house.”
“Russ thinks there’s a public safety hazard,” said Mr. Stern.
“Rock and a hard place,” Mr. Blaich said sympathetically.
“I’m not going to tear my house down,” Ms. Powell said.
“I know they have a limited budget,” said Mr. Stern, “but maybe we could try to talk to Manchester Citizens Corp. and maybe [Pittsburgh] History & Landmarks [Foundation] to see if they could help. What about if we’d ask them to consider funding or working with you on this?”
“Whatever it takes,” said Ms. Powell.
Katherine Molnar, the city’s preservation planner, said she will talk to Manchester Citizens and the foundation but is “unaware of the various options and possibilities that might assist Ms. Powell.”
“Ms. Powell did indicate a willingness to repair her own building if the neighboring structure was shored up first. I feel hopeful that these two structures will persevere,” Ms. Molnar said.
Mr. Cipriani said the lamentable fact is that a delay of demolition usually just means further debilitation. In most cases, he said, “any of this should have been done 10 years ago.”
Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.
First published on March 10, 2008 at 12:00 am -
Book on Stained Glass Artist Charles J. Connick To Be Released this Fall
PHLF News
March 7, 2008This November Landmarks will publish “Charles J. Connick: His Education and His Windows in and near Pittsburgh,” by Albert M. Tannler.
The full-color, perfect-bound book will be the first to fully document Connick’s formative years in Pittsburgh and Boston and his extraordinary windows in ten architecturally-significant landmarks in the Pittsburgh region.
To learn more about the publication or to contribute, click the button below.
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Black leaders seek delay in Schenley decision
By Bill Zlatos
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, February 27, 2008A group of black community leaders is urging the city school board tonight to postpone or vote against a proposal to move students from Schenley High School in Oakland.
In a letter dated today to board members, the Black Political Empowerment Project or B-PEP urged the board to reconsider Superintendent Mark Roosevelt’s proposed closing of Schenley. Roosevelt wants to close the school because of the estimated $64.3 million cost of removing asbestos and upgrading the building.
Under Roosevelt’s plan, to be voted on today, the district would close Schenley and move students this fall while it decides whether to shut the school down permanently or renovate it. As a result, the board is considering the following actions:
* Relocating Schenley students who would be in grades 10 through 12 to now-closed Reizenstein in East Liberty; * Shifting 174 students in the robotics technology program at Schenley to Peabody High School in East Liberty: and * Sending ninth graders who live in Schenley’s feeder pattern to a proposed University Prep School at Milliones in the Hill District.
B-PEP Chairman Tim Stevens recommended hold off on moving the Schenley students until the district develops a comprehensive approach to meeting the needs of the nine high schools that did not meet federal academic standards.
Bill Zlatos can be reached at bzlatos@tribweb.com or 412-320-7828.