Category Archive: Preservation News
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URA is ready to sell; Millcraft is ready to start
Price tag is $2.5 million for G.C. Murphy’s parcel where apartments slatedWednesday, December 13, 2006
By Mark Belko,
Pittsburgh Post-GazetteThe city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority is poised to sell old G.C. Murphy’s store buildings and other properties to a Washington County developer for $2.5 million — another key step in the redevelopment of the downtrodden Fifth and Forbes corridor, Downtown.
Millcraft Industries Inc., doing business as Downtown Streets Pittsburgh LP, intends to convert the former store and the adjacent properties into shops and apartments targeting middle-income wage earners and renting from $750 to $1,500 a month.
“We’re finally getting it off the ground, so we’re excited,” said Lucas Piatt, Millcraft vice president of real estate. “We’re ready to start digging.”
URA board members are expected to vote tomorrow on a proposal to sell six Fifth Avenue parcels, including three that make up the Murphy’s store, to Downtown Streets Pittsburgh.
Downtown Streets is a subsidiary of Millcraft. Mr. Piatt said Ira Morgan, a friend of late Mayor Bob O’Connor, no longer is part of the development team.
The purchase price represents a bargain of sorts for Millcraft — the URA paid $3.83 million for the buildings, all of which were purchased over the last four years. Mr. Piatt said the $2.5 million is in line with the values provided by an appraiser hired by the URA and Millcraft.
Millcraft originally had looked at converting the Murphy’s store to condominiums and apartments, but switched to all apartments in order to take advantage of federal tax credits available to developers of historic structures, thus lowering redevelopment costs.
The apartments would target $40,000 to $50,000 wage earners and offer a more affordable alternative to the luxury condos under construction in the Golden Triangle, including those at Piatt Place in the former Lazarus-Macy’s building, Millcraft’s other Downtown project.
Millcraft now estimates that the cost of converting the Murphy’s store will run $30 million to $40 million, up from the initial $21 million estimate.
The URA board also is expected to act tomorrow on a proposed agreement with Millcraft on 10 other authority-owned parcels on Forbes Avenue and Wood Street in the Fifth-Forbes corridor.
They are to be developed in phases by Millcraft, and would include a $50 million, 18-story Forbes Village high-rise on Forbes near Market Square that is to offer a mix of condos, apartments and shops.
As part of the action, Millcraft would have exclusive control over the properties for an unspecified period, with redevelopment proposals to be made at a later date.
URA Executive Director Jerome Dettore could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Once the Murphy’s project gets rolling, there will be two major redevelopments occurring simultaneously on Fifth Avenue in the heart of the Downtown retail corridor.
The other, across the street from the Murphy’s construction, is the $170 million Three PNC Center skyscraper that will house offices, a hotel and luxury condos. It is expected to open in 2008. Construction has started.
Also tomorrow, the URA is expected to sell three parcels, one on Fifth Avenue and two on Market Street, to a subsidiary of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation for $257,000.
The foundation intends to convert the vacant structures into upper-floor apartments, with street-level retail.
(Mark Belko can be reached at mbelko@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1262. )
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State Capitol is national landmark
By The Pittsburgh Tribune Review
Tuesday, December 5, 2006HARRISBURG – The ornate state Capitol building earns oohs and ahhs every day from visitors impressed by its marble, gold leaf and intricate decoration.
The building’s special place in American history recently earned it another honor, as the U.S. Interior Department has granted it National Historic Landmark status.In announcing the action Monday, the Capitol Preservation Committee said it learned of the decision last month, and expects to install a commemorative bronze plaque in the spring.
Landmark status is currently bestowed on more than 2,300 of the 76,000 entries on the National Register of Historic Places. Among the landmarks are Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the site of the Pearl Harbor attack in Hawaii, the Alcatraz prison in San Francisco and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Atlanta birthplace.
The Capitol was designed by Joseph M. Huston, with a dome patterned on St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and a grand staircase reminiscent of the Paris Opera.
President Theodore Roosevelt attended its dedication on Oct. 4, 1906.
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State agency to begin survey of region’s historic farms
By Don Hopey,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, November 23, 2006Dozens of historic buildings and farms have fallen through the cracks in the southwestern Pennsylvania coalfields, but a planned survey may help the state produce a much-needed safety net.
The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission has received a $75,000 federal grant from Preserve America to conduct a two-year survey of more than 2,800 farms and other properties in Washington and Greene counties.
While some historic buildings, like the Ernest Thralls House near Spraggs in Greene County, have been damaged by longwall mine subsidence because the state did little to save them, others have been lost because not even the agencies that are supposed to protect them knew they were there, tucked along the back roads in the rolling hills of the mostly rural counties.
Carol Lee, the commission’s National Register of Historic Places coordinator, said the state’s official history agency is limited by staffing and funding, and doesn’t know how many historic properties have been damaged by longwall mining or even how many listed or eligible properties still exist.
“We have listed and eligible historic properties in each county, but we would have to survey or get reports from local groups to know what is happening to them,” Ms. Lee said.
That lack of information can be a problem because the commission is supposed to provide the state Department of Environmental Protection, which issues mining permits, with pre-mining advisory opinions about whether subsidence caused by longwall operations will damage those properties.
The commission lists 92 properties in Washington County on the National Register of Historic Places and another 197 sites eligible for listing, and 41 properties in Greene County, with another 23 judged eligible. But some historians say there are many more.
The commission will plan the historical farm survey this winter and begin field survey work next spring.
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Historic Vandergrift looks to future
By Marjorie Wertz
FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, November 19, 2006In 1901, six years after the establishment of Vandergrift, Westmoreland County, Steel Workers Magazine called the town a “working man’s paradise.”
Designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the architect of New York’s Central Park and the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Vandergrift was a planned community founded by George G. McMurtry, president of the Apollo Iron and Steel Co., Apollo. It was named after Captain J.J. Vandergrift, a director of the steel mill.
“McMurtry was one of the first industrialists who gave respect to the working man,” said Ken Blose, a member of the Victorian Vandergrift Museum and Historical Society. “He believed that educated, churchgoing men who owned their own homes in their own community would make the best workers. These were radical thoughts at that time.”
McMurtry needed to expand his galvanized steel mill, so he bought a 650-acre farm site several miles downstream on the Kiskiminetas River. Olmstead designed the town so that the streets followed the natural slope of the hills and the curve of the river. The mill was constructed; streets were graded; utilities were installed; trees were planted; and street lights were erected.
“There were 14 main streets in the original design and only one place where two streets crossed,” Blose said. “There are no real corners. Every corner is a sweeping curve.”
Once the town was laid out, lots were sold only to men who worked in the mill. McMurtry established a bank so mill workers could buy homes at rates they could afford.
“For a man working in a mill in 1895, the opportunity to purchase his own home was practically nil,” Blose said.
McMurtry continued his philanthropic actions through the purchase of pipe organs for all the town’s churches. He also donated land for schools and the fire department and bought the fire department’s first equipment. Blose said McMurtry also sold land for $1 to the town for a cemetery.
“And what land that was undeveloped, he allowed the townspeople to use for recreational purposes,” Blose said.
At the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Vandergrift won two gold medals for best town design, and, in 1907, the Vandergrift steel mill was the largest rolling mill in the world, producing high-quality silicon steel.
“The steel for the centerpiece of the 1964 New York World’s Fair; the Unisphere, the largest metal sculpture in the world, was finished and polished in Vandergrift. Some of the steel for the St. Louis Arch was produced in Vandergrift, and the hinges for the gates and other parts of the Panama Canal were produced in the Vandergrift Foundry,” Blose said.
McMurtry also was the primary contributor to the construction of the town’s municipal building, which housed the jail, administration offices and a 500-seat theater. That building, the Casino Theatre, is undergoing renovations by a group of volunteers, Casino Theatre Restoration and Management.
“The theatre was being used by the borough for storage,” said Mary Lee Kessler, treasurer of the organization. “The theatre seats, stage curtain and all the decorative items within the theatre had been removed. There were rumors that the theatre was going to be torn down. We couldn’t let that happen.”
Built in 1900 in the Greek revival style, the theatre was a popular venue on the vaudeville circuit. President William H. Taft, boxing champ Bob Fitzsimmons, composer Hoagy Carmichael, Tex Ritter and the Three Stooges visited the Casino.
The Casino was remodeled in 1927 as the area’s largest movie theater, and in the ’50s, it was converted to show wide-screen movies. It closed in 1981.
“The east wing of the building still houses the library, and the west wing has the offices of the borough secretary, the jail and police station,” Kessler said. “The theatre was in great disrepair, but the borough was very open to a responsible group attempting to revive it, so they leased it to us for $1 a year with the understanding that we would apply for grants to renovate it.”
Kessler has been successful in obtaining grants for renovation projects. The organization was able to locate 475 seats for $5,000 and install electrical wiring, lighting and sound. A group of volunteers, affectionately called the Tuesday Night Work Crew, arrive at the theatre Tuesday evenings and “do what needs to be done,” Kessler said.
“We replaced the four wooden ionic columns in the front of the theatre, excavated in the basement, and now there’s a very pretty ladies lounge there. We also reopened the mezzanine level and renovated the front lawn,” she said.
The discovery of two old movie window cards netted the organization about $37,000, which was used to repair the theatre’s roof. A group of Eagle Scouts was cleaning out a portion of the theatre’s upper floor when it located an old desk with an ink blotter. Under the blotter, the group found a perfectly preserved window card for the 1927 science fiction movie “Metropolis,” directed by Fritz Lang.
“One of the volunteers contacted a fellow from Greensburg who was extremely excited because memorabilia from that move is very collectible,” Kessler said. “That window card was auctioned off by Sotheby’s, and we netted $24,000.”
A second window card for the movie that had a small bend in one corner was auctioned several years later and sold for about $13,000.
The Casino Theatre officially reopened its doors in August 1995. Three years ago, Mickey Rooney performed there, and in April, trumpeter Maynard Ferguson gave one of his last performances before dying Aug. 23.
“Every year we do a magic show for children at the end of October, and during the first weekend of December, we self-produce ‘Hometown Christmas.’ This year, it will be a musical revue,” Kessler said.
On Nov. 25, 14 bands will put on a benefit concert at the Casino to help the organization pay the heating bill.
“This is a fun place to be. The people who volunteer here are very enthusiastic,” Kessler added.
The Vandergrift Improvement Program — VIP — is another nonprofit organization comprising local residents, businesses, municipal and state government officials working to protect, preserve and restore the community through the National Trust for Historical Preservations’ Main Street approach.
“We had 15 vacant storefronts out of 100 stores in our town. We didn’t want the town to rot away,” said Wayne Teeple, vice president of the 100-member VIP.
The premise of the town’s Main Street approach is to encourage economic revitalization through a four-pronged system — design, economic restructuring, promotion and organization — to address all of the commercial district’s needs.
The town, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is in the first year of the Main Street program.
“We had to raise $94,000 to obtain funding for a Department of Community and Economic Development Main Street grant,” Teeple said. “Within a three-month period, the residents and Vandergrift government pledged that amount over a five-year period.”
The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, a nonprofit historic preservation group, was hired to manage the Main Street program, said Eugene Matta, director of the foundation’s real estate and special-development programs.
Shaun Yurcaba, of History and Landmarks, is Vandergrift’s Main Street coordinator. She is helping VIP coordinate its efforts.
“The four committees working in design, economic restructuring, promotion and organization fulfill the requirements of the Main Street program,” Yurcaba said.
The design committee is developing guidelines for the protection of historical buildings during changes or renovations. Those on the economic restructuring committee are determining how many businesses are downtown and what types of businesses are in place in order to gauge what improvements are needed.
“The organization committee works on establishing relationships with other community organizations such as the Casino Theatre renovation group and the historical society,” Yurcaba added.
Trying to bring people into town is the work of the promotion committee, which sponsors events such as a summer car cruise and a 2007 pet calendar contest, in which people cast ballots for their favorite pet photos at Vandergrift businesses.
“Once we go into year two of the Main Street project, we become eligible for an $80,000 grant — $30,000 of it will be available to downtown building owners in the form of grants,” Teeple said. “They can apply for a $5,000 matching grant for renovating the facades of their buildings. We already have five building owners interested in this.”
Other groups are working toward Vandergrift’s revitalization, as well.
“Sustainable Pittsburgh is working with us so that Vandergrift becomes a green sustainable development,” Matta said. “And the Mascaro Sustainability Initiative through the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Engineering is also working on quite a project in Vandergrift.”
Sustainable Pittsburgh served as the “matchmaker” between the initiative and Vandergrift, said Eric Beckman, co-director of the Mascaro Sustainability Initiative.
“The goal of MSI is to create the next generation of technology that is cost-effective and sustainable,” Beckman said. “We brought in a team of undergraduate engineering students into Vandergrift and asked them if they could bring energy conservation to the Casino Theatre. The question became ‘How do you lower energy bills without destroying the historic value of the community?’ ”
The shallow, yet swift-flowing Kiski River, which surrounds Vandergrift on three sides, might be able answer, Beckman said. The group submitted a proposal to the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance for a sustainable creative energy grant.
“We went in on this proposal with Sustainable Pittsburgh. Whatever we come up with in Vandergrift, we could use in other parts of the state,” Beckman said. “Eventually, we want to create something that will generate electricity and try it out in Vandergrift. The town will be our test bed.”
All the partnerships have helped VIP pick up steam on revitalization projects.
“Other towns are calling us for information. Everyone has a passion for this, and it’s something that’s really taking off,” Teeple said.
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- Carino’s, which closed several years ago, was housed in one of Vandergrift’s signature buildings. — Bob Fritz/For the Tribune-Review
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- John Pomfret repainted a turn-of-the-century tin ceiling in his store, Pomfret’s Paint and Variety. — Bob Fritz/For the Tribune-Review
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- The Casino Theatre was remodeled in 1927 and again in the ’50s before closing in 1981. It reopened in August 1995 after undergoing extensive work. The building houses a library, municipal offices and a police station. — Bob Fritz/For the Tribune-Review
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- Mary Lee Kessler is treasurer of Casino Theatre Restoration and Management, a group of volunteers renovating the theater. — Steven Dietz/For the Tribune-Review
Marjorie Wertz can be reached at .
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Ethel Hagler / Respected community organizer from the North Side: Dec. 17, 1908 – Nov. 11, 2006
By Diana Nelson Jones,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Wednesday, November 15, 2006Upon learning that Ethel Hagler had died, many who knew her gasped.
Yes, she was mortal, and 97 when she died Saturday. But the North Sider had been indomitable, amassing a lifetime of feats in community building that sometimes seemed as improbable as a Frank Capra movie.
The most tangible of those, Neighborhood Housing Services, she started in 1968 from a trailer on Jacksonia Street. She and two friends lobbied bankers to open the chance of home ownership to low-income neighbors, most of them black, who had never established credit or known how institutional borrowing worked.
Today, Neighborhood Housing Services are established in 250 U.S. cities.
Louann Ross, executive director of the local office, said that when she travels in community development circles and says she is from Pittsburgh, “people gasp and say, ‘That’s where residential community development leadership started!’ ”
“I tell the story all the time,” she said. “These were women without much formal education. They began visiting banks and foundations. They raised $750,000. Think about how much money that was then. It still is. They just kept talking about the importance of this. They must have been mighty powerful words.”
Mrs. Hagler came to Pittsburgh from Dante, Va., with her husband, William Spencer Hagler. They set up housekeeping on Lorraine Street, where she lived her life until her last months in nursing homes. Her earliest and most enduring cause was the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
On her 90th birthday, when the neighborhood and City Council honored her, she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “You get to know people when you go to church, you know.”
She started a block club, organized neighbors to visit shut-ins and deliver Christmas baskets. She helped found the Central Northside Neighborhood Council. In the 1960s, she partnered with the Garden Club of Allegheny County on beautification projects. One was an annual window box sale to raise money for her church.
The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation promoted the window box sales, which lasted 40 years and led neighbors to home improvements, said Arthur Ziegler, president of the foundation.
As a result of their association, the foundation invited Mrs. Hagler onto its board, he said, “because she was so committed and had so much knowledge of how neighborhoods worked and how to lead.”
Eliza Nevin knew Mrs. Hagler from their beautification efforts on the North Side in the 1970s.
“She had the rare ability to love all kinds of people,” said Ms. Nevin. “When some people saw dangers in gentrification, she was out talking to the, quote, gentry, enlisting their help. When people were [lamenting] garbage and drug deals, she was forging these public-private partnerships to plant trees and flowers everywhere, to show people what a nice community can be like.
“She saw injustice and worked on the love part of it. She was different from everybody else.”
Former city Councilman Sala Udin said that when he decided to run for council in that district in 1995, he had to get to know her first.
“I learned very early that she was the absolute single person it was necessary to be in touch with if you had political ambitions on the North Side. She was called the mayor of the North Side,” Mr. Udin said.
Peggy King, who met Mrs. Hagler through the garden club project, said her friend “had that force of personality, that presence.”
“She didn’t shrink from being the star of the show,” she said, “but if someone was sick, she was bringing food and changing beds. She was the best of what the human species has to offer.”
Patricia Sutton described her aunt as “a very strong-willed person who refused to settle for ‘no.’ ”
At the end of her life, so homesick for Lorraine Street, Mrs. Hagler would sit in her nursing home at a display honoring former Steelers running back Jerome Bettis, said Ms. Sutton.
“It said ‘The Bus Stops Here,’ and she sat there waiting for the bus to go home,” she said.
She had lived without her husband for many years, but her niece said that a final instruction, “the last thing I could make out, was, ‘Patricia, make sure Spence knows where I am.’ ”
Visitation will be Friday at Brown Chapel AME Church, 1400 Boyle St., North Side, from 2 to 4 p.m. A memorial tribute will be held there from 7 to 9 p.m. Mrs. Hagler will be buried in Highwood Cemetery.
Donations may be made to the Sutton-Hagler Scholarship Fund, c/o PNC Bank, P.O. Box 6263, Pittsburgh 15212-0263.
(Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626. )
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Historic Vandergrift looks to future
By Marjorie Wertz
FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, November 19, 2006In 1901, six years after the establishment of Vandergrift, Westmoreland County, Steel Workers Magazine called the town a “working man’s paradise.”
Designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the architect of New York’s Central Park and the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Vandergrift was a planned community founded by George G. McMurtry, president of the Apollo Iron and Steel Co., Apollo. It was named after Captain J.J. Vandergrift, a director of the steel mill.“McMurtry was one of the first industrialists who gave respect to the working man,” said Ken Blose, a member of the Victorian Vandergrift Museum and Historical Society. “He believed that educated, churchgoing men who owned their own homes in their own community would make the best workers. These were radical thoughts at that time.”
McMurtry needed to expand his galvanized steel mill, so he bought a 650-acre farm site several miles downstream on the Kiskiminetas River. Olmstead designed the town so that the streets followed the natural slope of the hills and the curve of the river. The mill was constructed; streets were graded; utilities were installed; trees were planted; and street lights were erected.
“There were 14 main streets in the original design and only one place where two streets crossed,” Blose said. “There are no real corners. Every corner is a sweeping curve.”
Once the town was laid out, lots were sold only to men who worked in the mill. McMurtry established a bank so mill workers could buy homes at rates they could afford.
“For a man working in a mill in 1895, the opportunity to purchase his own home was practically nil,” Blose said.
McMurtry continued his philanthropic actions through the purchase of pipe organs for all the town’s churches. He also donated land for schools and the fire department and bought the fire department’s first equipment. Blose said McMurtry also sold land for $1 to the town for a cemetery.
“And what land that was undeveloped, he allowed the townspeople to use for recreational purposes,” Blose said.
At the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Vandergrift won two gold medals for best town design, and, in 1907, the Vandergrift steel mill was the largest rolling mill in the world, producing high-quality silicon steel.
“The steel for the centerpiece of the 1964 New York World’s Fair; the Unisphere, the largest metal sculpture in the world, was finished and polished in Vandergrift. Some of the steel for the St. Louis Arch was produced in Vandergrift, and the hinges for the gates and other parts of the Panama Canal were produced in the Vandergrift Foundry,” Blose said.
McMurtry also was the primary contributor to the construction of the town’s municipal building, which housed the jail, administration offices and a 500-seat theater. That building, the Casino Theatre, is undergoing renovations by a group of volunteers, Casino Theatre Restoration and Management.
“The theatre was being used by the borough for storage,” said Mary Lee Kessler, treasurer of the organization. “The theatre seats, stage curtain and all the decorative items within the theatre had been removed. There were rumors that the theatre was going to be torn down. We couldn’t let that happen.”
Built in 1900 in the Greek revival style, the theatre was a popular venue on the vaudeville circuit. President William H. Taft, boxing champ Bob Fitzsimmons, composer Hoagy Carmichael, Tex Ritter and the Three Stooges visited the Casino.
The Casino was remodeled in 1927 as the area’s largest movie theater, and in the ’50s, it was converted to show wide-screen movies. It closed in 1981.
“The east wing of the building still houses the library, and the west wing has the offices of the borough secretary, the jail and police station,” Kessler said. “The theatre was in great disrepair, but the borough was very open to a responsible group attempting to revive it, so they leased it to us for $1 a year with the understanding that we would apply for grants to renovate it.”
Kessler has been successful in obtaining grants for renovation projects. The organization was able to locate 475 seats for $5,000 and install electrical wiring, lighting and sound. A group of volunteers, affectionately called the Tuesday Night Work Crew, arrive at the theatre Tuesday evenings and “do what needs to be done,” Kessler said.
“We replaced the four wooden ionic columns in the front of the theatre, excavated in the basement, and now there’s a very pretty ladies lounge there. We also reopened the mezzanine level and renovated the front lawn,” she said.
The discovery of two old movie window cards netted the organization about $37,000, which was used to repair the theatre’s roof. A group of Eagle Scouts was cleaning out a portion of the theatre’s upper floor when it located an old desk with an ink blotter. Under the blotter, the group found a perfectly preserved window card for the 1927 science fiction movie “Metropolis,” directed by Fritz Lang.
“One of the volunteers contacted a fellow from Greensburg who was extremely excited because memorabilia from that move is very collectible,” Kessler said. “That window card was auctioned off by Sotheby’s, and we netted $24,000.”
A second window card for the movie that had a small bend in one corner was auctioned several years later and sold for about $13,000.
The Casino Theatre officially reopened its doors in August 1995. Three years ago, Mickey Rooney performed there, and in April, trumpeter Maynard Ferguson gave one of his last performances before dying Aug. 23.
“Every year we do a magic show for children at the end of October, and during the first weekend of December, we self-produce ‘Hometown Christmas.’ This year, it will be a musical revue,” Kessler said.
On Nov. 25, 14 bands will put on a benefit concert at the Casino to help the organization pay the heating bill.
“This is a fun place to be. The people who volunteer here are very enthusiastic,” Kessler added.
The Vandergrift Improvement Program — VIP — is another nonprofit organization comprising local residents, businesses, municipal and state government officials working to protect, preserve and restore the community through the National Trust for Historical Preservations’ Main Street approach.
“We had 15 vacant storefronts out of 100 stores in our town. We didn’t want the town to rot away,” said Wayne Teeple, vice president of the 100-member VIP.
The premise of the town’s Main Street approach is to encourage economic revitalization through a four-pronged system — design, economic restructuring, promotion and organization — to address all of the commercial district’s needs.
The town, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is in the first year of the Main Street program.
“We had to raise $94,000 to obtain funding for a Department of Community and Economic Development Main Street grant,” Teeple said. “Within a three-month period, the residents and Vandergrift government pledged that amount over a five-year period.”
The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, a nonprofit historic preservation group, was hired to manage the Main Street program, said Eugene Matta, director of the foundation’s real estate and special-development programs.
Shaun Yurcaba, of History and Landmarks, is Vandergrift’s Main Street coordinator. She is helping VIP coordinate its efforts.
“The four committees working in design, economic restructuring, promotion and organization fulfill the requirements of the Main Street program,” Yurcaba said.
The design committee is developing guidelines for the protection of historical buildings during changes or renovations. Those on the economic restructuring committee are determining how many businesses are downtown and what types of businesses are in place in order to gauge what improvements are needed.
“The organization committee works on establishing relationships with other community organizations such as the Casino Theatre renovation group and the historical society,” Yurcaba added.
Trying to bring people into town is the work of the promotion committee, which sponsors events such as a summer car cruise and a 2007 pet calendar contest, in which people cast ballots for their favorite pet photos at Vandergrift businesses.
“Once we go into year two of the Main Street project, we become eligible for an $80,000 grant — $30,000 of it will be available to downtown building owners in the form of grants,” Teeple said. “They can apply for a $5,000 matching grant for renovating the facades of their buildings. We already have five building owners interested in this.”
Other groups are working toward Vandergrift’s revitalization, as well.
“Sustainable Pittsburgh is working with us so that Vandergrift becomes a green sustainable development,” Matta said. “And the Mascaro Sustainability Initiative through the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Engineering is also working on quite a project in Vandergrift.”
Sustainable Pittsburgh served as the “matchmaker” between the initiative and Vandergrift, said Eric Beckman, co-director of the Mascaro Sustainability Initiative.
“The goal of MSI is to create the next generation of technology that is cost-effective and sustainable,” Beckman said. “We brought in a team of undergraduate engineering students into Vandergrift and asked them if they could bring energy conservation to the Casino Theatre. The question became ‘How do you lower energy bills without destroying the historic value of the community?’ ”
The shallow, yet swift-flowing Kiski River, which surrounds Vandergrift on three sides, might be able answer, Beckman said. The group submitted a proposal to the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance for a sustainable creative energy grant.
“We went in on this proposal with Sustainable Pittsburgh. Whatever we come up with in Vandergrift, we could use in other parts of the state,” Beckman said. “Eventually, we want to create something that will generate electricity and try it out in Vandergrift. The town will be our test bed.”
All the partnerships have helped VIP pick up steam on revitalization projects.
“Other towns are calling us for information. Everyone has a passion for this, and it’s something that’s really taking off,” Teeple said.
Marjorie Wertz can be reached at .
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Interview of Attendees at the 2006 Old House Fair
November 3, 2006
Interview of Attendees at the 2006 Old House Fair which was part of the National Preservation Conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation
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Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr. Keynote Address at the 2006 National Preservation Conference
PHLF News
October 31, 2006“Preservation In Pittsburgh” Keynote address of Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr. at the 2006 National Preservation Conference held in Pittsburgh, PA, October 31, 2006