Category Archive: Preservation News
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Eclectic Pittsburgh architecture reflects industrial influence
By Sarah Billingsley,
Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2003Pittsburgh homes, grand to humble, are unique.
Picture a typical Pittsburgh basement. The floor is slightly pitched, usually licked with a weary shade of paint that was on sale by the gallon. The cold, damp slope bottoms at the drain. There’s a deep basin, with rusty fixtures. It appears old enough to belong to Blarney Castle, but this stone you don’t want to kiss; it’s limey, mineral-stained and cracked.
There’s the narrow, low-ceilinged room, maybe under the porch, with an earth floor and a closed-off coal chute. These features could be true of houses everywhere. Now picture the Pittsburgh toilet. It’s also in your basement, probably in the center of the room. If your house is well appointed, it’s enclosed. If your house is modest, it’s secreted under the stairs. It’s often yellowed with age, activated by an old-fashioned flushing mechanism.
You don’t find this everywhere. Nor do you find the Pittsburgh shower — which is a little tougher to spot in basements nowadays, since most homeowners removed it when they rolled out the indoor-outdoor carpeting, stuck a Ping-Pong table down there and called it a rec room.
It’s a showerhead, dangling from the pipes, right over the drain in the floor. Pittsburgh real estate agents agree that these idiosyncratic features had a purpose, and it’s not as a luxurious second bath. Decades ago, men who worked hard and got dirty at it would enter their homes through the basement door, scrub themselves at the basin, shower off the dirt and sweat, then head upstairs to the clean upper floors of the house.
The door leading into the basement, the basement toilet and the basement shower were courtesy features in a Pittsburgh home. Pittsburgh was one of the great industrial cities of America, and Pittsburgh residences, from the 19th century on, are tiny mirrors of the American industrial landscape. They are constructed to mimic the style (or deliberate lack of style) of those who ruled industry and this city. Homes were built to accommodate the lifestyles of those who worked in the mills.
“There’s a practical quality to the Pittsburgh house,” said architectural historian Al Tannler of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
Tannler, who is mostly concerned with the outside of Pittsburgh buildings, not basement toilets, cites porches as a prevalent exterior feature particular to Pittsburgh houses. In the East End especially, Tannler notes, many homeowners have torn down their porches or left only a portion intact, creating odd facades.
Tannler says a 1911 survey of Pittsburgh houses by architectural historian and critic Montgomery Schuyler, “The Building of Pittsburgh,” pinpoints Pittsburgh’s style as residential architecture, “unquestionably artistic but impossible to classify under any historical style.”
“We can call it eclecticism,” said Tannler. “You’re staring at a Colonial Revival from the outside, but once indoors you’re inside of a Mission, or the other way around.”
A healthy irreverence toward building styles and a lack of uniformity classify Pittsburgh homes. No one architectural style dominates.
Margaret Henderson Floyd, author of “Architecture After Richardson,” attributes the diversity of styles to the fact that Pittsburgh never developed a school of architecture like the Prairie School in Chicago, though architects of note practiced here and added their work to the mix of buildings.
Tannler dubs the state of Pittsburgh politics in the 19th and 20th centuries a “Scotch-Irish-Presbyterian oligarchy.” These influential men — Carnegie, Frick and Schwab — were fixed on English residential architecture. Many houses were built in a manner similar to Carnegie’s Scottish summer home, Skibo Castle, in what Floyd calls “a mostly conservative tradition, domestic rather than palatial.” This style was copied for smaller homes.
Tannler points out an additional feature of these domestic mansions: Unlike in other cities, all the grand houses of Pittsburgh were built with libraries. All of these domestic idiosyncrasies make Pittsburgh homes original and link us daily to a rich industrial past.
Sarah Billingsley can be reached at sbillingsley@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1661.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Riverlife Task Force proposes tunnel to untangle Route 28
By Joe Grata,
Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2003A city group has offered a new engineering concept to untangle the traffic mess on a stretch of Route 28 where the 31st Street Bridge and Rialto Street intersect it.
The design would accommodate local traffic on a landscaped deck at the existing level of Route 28 and relocate mainline traffic into a four-lane tunnel beneath it and next to railroad tracks at the foot of Troy Hill.
Thru traffic would move nonstop on Route 28 after reconstruction of its last two miles between Millvale and the East Ohio Street/Interstate 279 interchange on the North Side.
More importantly, the plan would eliminate thousands of feet of retaining walls up to 60 feet high that other alternatives call for and preserve the wooded hillside along the highway, says the Riverlife Task Force, a group dedicated to enhancing the river corridors of Pittsburgh.
The group hired a national consulting firm, Vollmer Associates, known for creating environmentally friendly transportation projects, to create the alternative to Pennsylvania Department of Transportation plans for rebuilding the stretch of Route 28.
Edward Patton, manager of engineering services for Vollmer’s regional office in Pittsburgh, said the design at the 31st Street Bridge establishes the pattern for the rest of the project — a boulevard concept that residents and preservationists favored at a public meeting last month.
Separately, the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation is investigating the acquisition of air rights over two unused tracks of four that Norfolk Southern Railway owns. The tracks abut Route 28, sitting below a retaining wall that helps create the shelf of land for the highway. Owning air rights would allow engineers to consider building part of Route 28 over the railroad property, toward the Allegheny riverfront.
Both the Riverlife Task Force and Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation plans for Route 28 would save historic St. Nicholas Church.
“I’m interested in seeing what [the Riverlife Task Force] plan looks like,” PennDOT District 11 Executive Ray Hack said. “At this stage of the planning process, we’re open to ideas. This is the time for anyone with suggestions.”
PennDOT engineers are to provide Vollmer Associates with information on geology, traffic volumes, elevations and other technical matters so the firm can continue to advance and refine its concept.
“The Riverlife Task Force is focusing on the potential impact of PennDOT’s project on the green hillsides and the communities that will be affected,” said Ted McConnell, the task force’s legal counsel. “We’re looking for a design that’s sensitive to the setting.”
Lisa Schroeder, director of the task force, said although Route 28 sits some distance back from the Allegheny River, the group became interested in PennDOT’s highway plans “because the hillside helps define the river corridor and is part of the city’s unique topography.”
This isn’t the first time the 3-year-old Riverlife Task Force has become involved with PennDOT. It persuaded the state to develop and install see-through guardrails on the Fort Pitt Bridge instead of 42-inch-high solid concrete barriers, thereby preserving views of the city and three rivers.
PennDOT’s newest options for Route 28 at the 31st Street Bridge would realign Rialto Street to create a four-way intersection, extensively altering the hillside, while Vollmer’s concept would keep Rialto in place.
PennDOT has also proposed elevating the southbound lanes of Route 28 and cutting them into the hillside. Vollmer would place the mainline traffic in the underpass-like tunnel, only minimally disturbing the hillside.
The speed limit would probably be 40 mph under both PennDOT’s and the Riverlife Task Force’s boulevard concepts, but Route 28’s capacity and traffic flow would be substantially improved.
Estimated cost of the PennDOT project is $160 million to $200 million, depending on the alternative chosen, but the timetable does not call for work to begin before 2008.
Joe Grata can be reached at jgrata@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1985.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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General’s funeral will be re-enacted
By Meredith Polley
For the Tribune-Review
Sunday, August 10, 2003To commemorate the bicentennial of Gen. John Neville’s death, visitors to the Neville House in Collier today can experience a closed-coffin re-enactment of a 19th-century funeral.
The Rev. Richard Davies, of Old St. Luke’s Church, which Neville helped found, will perform a service at 2 p.m. in the parlor of the mansion known as Woodville Plantation.If weather permits, costumed soldiers and a drummer from the Fort Pitt Royal Americans then will carry the coffin outdoors to a spot where a number of modern dignitaries will assist in recreating the general’s funeral.
They include historian Ron Carlisle, author of “The Story of Woodville;” U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair; and Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation Executive Director Louise Sturgess.
The Neville House Associates volunteers who run the house planned the event to draw attention to Neville’s career and Woodville’s history.
“We want to show people what funerals of the day were like,” said Neville House President Nancy Bishop. “We know it’s unusual, but mostly because it is the 200th anniversary of Neville’s death, we knew we had to do something.”Neville, who died at 72 on July 29, 1803, served in the Revolutionary War, was a commandant at Fort Pitt and a friend of George Washington. The local tax collector, Neville lost his later residence, called Bower Hill, when angry farmers protested the excise tax on whiskey in 1794.
Visitors who attend the service may be asked to read eulogies to make the funeral authentic and interactive.
The event will include the dedication of a memorial shelter on the grounds built to house three original Neville tombstones — including those of Neville and his wife. The house will be open from 1 to 4 p.m. All events are free.
Mari Jean Ferguson, a Neville House docent and professor at La Roche College, showed off a collection of artifacts Thursday.
Ferguson said she hopes the services will be inspirational.
“It helps to have our heroes,” she said. “To know that others overcame many challenges in the past can inspire us today, and the connections people make with history can show that we are one big family
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No Surprise: Landmark asset destroyed for faulty vision
No Surprise: Landmark asset destroyed for faulty vision
August 7th, 2003
Grand Marble Columns 
Lobby View 
DESTROYED 
ABANDONED Lord & Taylor has announced that it will close the store that it built at enormous public cost in the once grand main banking room of Mellon Bank.
Landmarks had opposed the destruction of this exceptional room with its sixteen marble columns, the marble floor and counters, the grand chandeliers, and the bronze ornaments.
We felt that the space was a tremendous magnet to attract people to the Fifth/Forbes area, and it should be given a use that enhanced it.
Instead about $27 million dollars of public money was used for loans and grants to the May Company and its subsidiaries Kaufmann’s and Lord & Taylor and the asset was destroyed.
Across the country, department stores are vacating, dying, or at the best, like Kaufmann’s downtown, shrinking.
They have been described by retail developers as “dinosaurs.”
Landmarks advocated putting the public dollars that were invested in Lazarus, and Lord & Taylor ($70 to $90 million?) into loft housing in the historic buildings together with a considerable amount of new housing coupled with a great new glass Market House at Market Square. Bring in the people and the retail will follow on its own is our belief.
The Cultural District also could serve as an anchor and we proposed better linkage at Liberty Avenue and Market Square to induce people going to the theatres to come into the Fifth/Forbes area.
Lazarus and Lord & Taylor have not brought the promised results of independent retailers springing up voluntarily all around them. In fact, there is a far greater degree of vacancy around Lazarus today than there was before it was built when vacancy was zero.
We believe that the current Fifth/Forbes developer Kravco is on the right track and will release a plan that organically builds the revitalization of the area in a way the speaks to our local market and that will therefore work. We believe the firm will not artificially inflate dinosaurs, but will engage with the future rather than with paleontology.
The tragedy is that the great banking room can never be regained, and in addition the taxpayer is now holding the bill for its destruction.
Copyright © 1997-2007 Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, 100 West Statio
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How about a store less ritzy Downtown?
y Mike Seate
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, August 4, 2003You can’t help feeling sorry for our city over the imminent closing of Downtown’s 3-year-old Lord & Taylor department store. Sure, the pundits with their “told-you-so’s” are right: It was silly to throw taxpayer money at the store in the belief that downtown Pittsburgh could support four upscale department stores.
As a shopping hub, Downtown peaked when steel was the undisputed king.The Murphy administration and the city Urban Redevelopment Authority — which gave an $11.75 million loan to May Department Stores Co., Lord & Taylor’s St. Louis-based parent company — had to at least suspect we were already pretty well covered in the $90 umbrella department by Kaufmann’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. Then came Lord & Taylor and, with a loan of its own, a Lazarus followed.
Today, the city is in a mad scramble to fill the soon-to-be-vacant store with another retailer better suited to Fox Chapel or Sewickley than the central business district of an ailing mid-sized city like our own. It’s time to face reality.
Downtown Pittsburgh is like hundreds of other middle-income cities where discount retailers — Wal-Mart, Kmart, maybe a Target — serve poorer, urban consumers while well-to-do shoppers patronize upscale shops in the suburbs.
Don’t lump me in with the urban-bashers who are laughing in their suburban malls over this fiasco. I wanted to see Lord & Taylor help turn Downtown’s grimy Fifth Avenue business corridor around. As someone who grew up shopping in the Downtown, I’ve had a hard time watching the area’s decline over the past 30 years.
I’m sure Mayor Murphy’s team and the URA must have had a vision of returning Downtown to its former glory. You can visit the Carnegie Library in Oakland and see vivid images of a city most of us wouldn’t recognize: streets full of well-dressed white people in furs, suits and fedoras. It more closely resembles a scene from a Fred Astaire movie than the Downtown we know today.
It seems painfully clear to nearly everyone — except city officials — that those shoppers aren’t interested in coming to Downtown in significant numbers. Not when they can shop with free parking, no weather and — let’s face it — fewer poor people and people of color out in the ‘burbs. That doesn’t mean Downtown has to become a sea of plywood-covered windows and “Mookie’s House Of Bling-Bling” jewelry shops.
Me’Shawn Beverly, of the Strip District, was shopping Downtown on Friday. This single mother of three said the Burlington Coat Factory on Smithfield Street is the type of store — reasonably priced, that is — that families like hers need to see more of Downtown.
Beverly, a domestic worker, says she visited Lord & Taylor only once, “to check things out when they first opened.” She was a more frequent visitor than others I spoke with — including some who thought the regal-looking building still housed a bank.
“I still don’t get why there’s no grocery store or a T.J. Maxx down here like up at Waterworks. Get us a grocery store, and I won’t be catching jitneys to the South Side every Saturday,” Beverly said angrily.
I hope she and others will say that loud enough and often enough that someone in city government will listen.
Mike Seate is a staff writer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He can be reached at (412) 320-7845 or e-mail him at mseate@tribweb.com
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review © Pittsburgh Tribune Review
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Issue One: Lord & Taylor’s departure form Pittsburgh
Sunday, August 03, 2003
Disgraceful Downtown
The decision by May Co. to close the Lord & Taylor store comes as no surprise (“Lord & Taylor Leaving: 3-Year-Old Downtown Store Is Among 32 Retailer Is Unloading,” July 31). Business in Downtown Pittsburgh is hardly booming. What is a surprise is Mayor Tom Murphy’s immediate response that the company committed to a five-year agreement to operate the store and that he will hold it to that agreement.
The mayor promised any business coming into Downtown a revitalized business district. Where is his Fifth and Forbes project that we have heard about for more than five years? If anyone has not honored a commitment, it is certainly our mayor.
Our Downtown shopping district is a disgrace. There is nothing Downtown anymore to attract shoppers. Getting into and out of the city is ridiculous. Parking is expensive and not readily available. The mayor wanted to force many of the small stores out of business (through eminent domain) to make way for his Downtown growth spurt, which has never taken place.
Storefronts on Fifth Avenue are empty and boarded up. Hardly appealing! Before the mayor criticizes May Co., he needs to look at the promises he has failed to honor. There is more to the city of Pittsburgh than the North Side, Mr. Mayor.
PAMELA L. KOVACS
Point BreezeA costly mistake
I am honestly not surprised that Lord & Taylor is leaving Pittsburgh. I am also not surprised that Mayor Tom Murphy and his “powers that be” turned a deaf ear to local historians and preservationists some three years ago and allowed the former Mellon Bank building to be gutted/destroyed for nothing more than a chain department store.The current administration claims to be interested in Pittsburgh’s future, but always at the expense of its past. Let’s not continue to raze what made Pittsburgh what it was and is, in the name of misguided progress.
SCOTT C. KERR
McCandlessNo surprise to me
As a relative newcomer to Pittsburgh, I am not surprised that the Downtown Lord & Taylor store is closing. Pittsburgh is not New York or Chicago; in both cities, a large population of city dwellers as well as city workers sustains downtown shopping. In smaller cities, upscale department stores are typically in the suburbs, where the targeted shoppers live. Moreover, suburban malls offer free parking as well as an enclave of other stores and restaurants catering to those shoppers.Contrary to what might be popular belief, shoppers spending a fair amount of money on clothing do not want to pay an additional $10 to $14 for parking. In addition, on a given shopping trip, they want to choose from a variety of stores and, finally, have lunch or a snack at a nice cafe.
For Pittsburgh to attract upscale shoppers, it must offer: 1) free or very inexpensive parking, not just after 4 p.m. at Christmas, but all the time; 2) a large group of upscale stores that constitute a shopping destination; 3) nice cafes and restaurants offering light meals; and 4) pleasant surroundings — an area that appears to be falling apart does not encourage such shopping.
Whether Pittsburgh can offer these elements Downtown is anyone’s guess. My suggestion to the mayor is, rather than continuing to hope for what will not happen and continuing to lose stores, consider changing the focus to an area such as Shadyside, where upscale shoppers live and shop and where there is potential for more parking space.
ELLYN S. ROTH
Schenley FarmsCity leaders don’t listen
I am a former Pittsburgh resident living in Connecticut, and I read the Post-Gazette online. Regarding the story about Lord & Taylor leaving the city, I’m curious as to why the mayor doesn’t seem to understand why the retailer is leaving.The residents of the city and surrounding suburbs have said for years that if the parking situation Downtown doesn’t improve, Downtown will never thrive. There are too few parking spaces, and the people who are in charge of those few parking spaces grossly overcharge for them.
Why would I drive into the city, battle the annual Pittsburgh road construction/detour system and pay an exorbitant amount to park my car to shop?
The city fathers don’t get it, have never gotten it and, by this time, probably never will get it. Nor do they listen to the people who would be ultimately supporting the Downtown stores, who also have said this for years.
It makes me scratch my head in wonder to see them scratching their heads in wonder.
DEB McLAREN
Mystic, ConnJoe Grata can be reached at jgrata@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1985.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Lord & Taylor: Sophistry’s ‘rewards’
Sunday, August 3, 2003
Ah, the “fruits” of government attempting to command the marketplace.
The woefully underperforming, heavily taxpayer-subsidized Lord & Taylor department store in downtown Pittsburgh will be “sold” or closed. It’s part of parent May Department Stores’ restructuring that will shed dozens of outlets in 15 states.
As with its more heavily taxpayer-subsidized Federated Department Stores’ kin — Lazarus, a few blocks away — Lord & Taylor, which opened just three Novembers ago, is a dud. Customers have offered little assistance in the bottom-line department.
Sales last year were nearly $26 million below the threshold required for May to pay back the nearly $12 million public subsidy. A handout was the deciding factor in opening Lord & Taylor, as it was with the more than 60 percent taxpayer-underwritten Lazarus store. The administration of Mayor Tom Murphy attempted to artificially create a market where, as sales have proven, none existed.
Contractually, Lazarus can walk away from its store with little or no liability as early as this fall. Lord & Taylor, if it doesn’t repay the loan by buying out its contract, could do the same in 2005. No problem, Murphyites contend, we’ll simply find new tenants. Only to fail again, as the Law of Command Economics dictates.
This isn’t “economic development.” But it is delusive sophism, the primary instrument by which the few have managed to plunder the many by persuading the victims that they are being robbed for their own benefit.
This despicable behavior is Tom Murphy’s real legacy. And Pittsburgh’s curse.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review © Pittsburgh Tribune Review
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Foundation’s goals come to fruition after parting with Station Square
By Ron DaParma
TRIBUNE-REVIEW REAL ESTATE WRITER
Sunday, August 3, 2003A group of grade-school students ambles down a residential street, looking and learning about the buildings. At times, they stop to draw sketches of the decorative features. A crew of workers restore a historic building, a religious property or former business. A writer toils on a new book about a segment of the region’s architectural history.
The number and scope of these kinds of activities in the Pittsburgh area have increased, thanks, in part, to a $25 million fund established nine years ago. The driving force behind these activities and the fund is the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, a local preservationist organization.
” Rather than putting our assets behind mortgages for more new buildings, we are putting those assets to work in historic preservation and our other activities,” said Arthur P. Ziegler, president of the nonprofit foundation.
That is the course adopted by the foundation since 1994 — the year it sold the last of its holdings at Station Square, the popular entertainment, retail, entertainment complex on the South Side.
” I think it was the right thing to do,” Ziegler said of the sale of the 52-acre property to a partnership of developer Forest City Enterprises Inc. and Promise Companies Inc., Memphis, then owner of Harrah’s Casinos.
Forest City, a prominent Cleveland-based development company, has since taken full control of Station Square. It has continued to enhance the complex, committing $70 million to an expansion that added a Hard Rock Cafe and other restaurants, retail shops and amenities.
At the same time, the 39-year-old foundation has followed a script written by Ziegler and others — placing funds from the Station Square sale into an endowment to support restoration of historic inner-city neighborhoods, preserve architecturally significant buildings and provide educational programs.
” No one can do an historic tour of the South Side better than History & Landmarks,” said Lola O’Dea, director of services for the Brashear Association, a community services organization in that city neighborhood.
O’Dea said the foundation is a valuable partner in the association’s Discover South Side program, and she calls its offerings “informative, fun and exciting.”
In July, the foundation participated in two separate events with a group of school-aged children: one, a walking tour to view neighborhood buildings, including the Morning Glory Inn bed-and-breakfast; and the other, a field trip to the South Side Works, a major mixed-use development now being built between East Carson Street and the Monongahela River.
Such tours are part of an expanded group of education programs sponsored by the foundation that touch thousands each year.
” I would give them an A double plus just for wanting to make a difference,” said Rosemary Moriarty, principal of the Miller African Centered Academy in the Hill District.
During the 2001-02 school year, Landmarks and Mercy Hospital cooperated in a nine-month project that helped students in a mentoring program for grades three to five learn about the history and architectural significance of their school, which opened in 1849 as the first black public school in the city.
” It was very, very rewarding,” Moriarty said. The program concluded with the students presenting a play to convince Landmarks’ trustees that their school was worthy of the Historic Landmark plaque that today adorns the front of the Reed Street building.
The effort brought recognition to the foundation, which received a 2003 Historic Preservation Award from Preservation Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
Such recognition is verification that officials and supporters of the organization made the right choice when they decided the timing was right for the sale of Station Square, Ziegler said.
Prominent among those supporters was philanthropist Richard M. Scaife, owner of the Tribune-Review Publishing Co. His pledge of $5 million through the Allegheny Foundation in 1974 was the key to jump-starting transformation of the one-time Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad warehouse site along the Monongahela River.
” I felt we had accomplished exactly what our board, the Allegheny Foundation and Dick Scaife set out to do,” Ziegler said. “We proved our principles of urban renewal, and we introduced Pittsburghers to the rivers, which was really new here. Sure, it was hard to let go, but there were so many things that we wanted to do, things that we could move on to.”
Louise Sturgess, executive director who oversees the foundation’s education activities, said it strives to turn the region “into a classroom for learning” through its tours, architectural design challenges, special educational programs and publications.
” Landmarks’ education program has greatly expanded since 1994, because of our organization’s support and commitment, and because private foundations and members have contributed to specific programs,” Sturgess said. In 2002, more than 14,000 students, teachers, members and visitors participated, she said.
A majority of the foundation’s education programs are focused in Allegheny County, but they also reach schools in other counties. Examples are an Architectural Design Challenge that annually involves about 200 middle and high school students from Westmoreland County, and a special series of annual tours for Charleroi and Bentworth Elementary Centers in Washington County.
Chris and Jason Farmakis also are beneficiaries of the foundation’s efforts in neighborhood preservation. The two brothers and business partners currently are working to restore a vacant building at 233 W. Eighth Avenue in West Homestead, where in the fall they to open a new embroidery store.
Helping to make the work possible is a $2,500 grant from the Homestead Economic Revitalization Corp. and a $5,000 facade restoration grant secured through Pittsburgh History & Landmarks. It is one of six different grants totaling $30,000 the foundation (with financial support from the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Local Initiative Support Corp. and Eat n’ Park Corp.) arranged for building owners along Eighth Avenue corridor in the Homestead area,
With their help, we are talking a dilapidated, run down, vacant building … and hopefully putting a productive business there that will pay taxes to the community,” said Chris Farmakis “We would not be able to put on a whole new complete facade but for the fact we are able to do it for 50 cents on the dollar.”
Such neighborhood and education efforts will continue as the foundation goes forward, and there surely will be others, Ziegler said.
” Because we are a very flexible organization, we are always trying to be open to needs, opportunities, ideas and learning,” he said. “I think we will continue with the same operating principles, but we will always be willing to look at fresh things.”
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A list of Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation’s activities in 2002:
* Awarded $64,150 to 24 historic religious properties in Allegheny County for building projects.* Saved a historic, 62-acre Westmoreland County farm through creative gift-planning strategies, and talked with 23 farm and land owners about rural preservation.
* Continued restoration of the Allegheny County Courthouse and began work on a museum in the former county jail.
* Partnered with Duquesne Light Co., the Riverlife Task Force and others to light the Roberto Clemente Bridge in Pittsburgh.
* Participated in planning for development projects including Fifth-Forbes, Point State Park and with the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy.
* Published “Henry Hornbostel: An Architect’s Master Touch,” by Walter C. Kidney, the foundation’s architectural historian.
* Committed $395,000 in loans to aid neighborhood restoration programs in the Allegheny West, Bloomfield and Homestead communities.
* Installed a new cedar roof on the Neville House and underwrote restoration studies of the Woods House and Oliver Miller Homestead.
* Connected more than 1,000 people with restoration experts and services during the organization’s Seventh Annual Old House Fair, sponsored by Dollar Bank.
* Involved more than 14,000 students, teachers, members and visitors in a variety of educational programs featuring local history and architecture.
Ron DaParma can be reached at rdaparma@tribweb.com or 412-320-7907.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review © Pittsburgh Tribune Review