Highland Park's Ghost Town

In the 100-year-old image of the Heth's Run Bridge you can see some buildings on the far-side of the biurdge. Those structures are long gone. They may have lasted until the 1930s and the building of the Highland PArk Bridge. Te approaches needed every bit of footprint at the base of the hill to squeeze in the approach ramps.

If you walk the woods above Butler Street east of One Wild Place (formerly Hill Road) you will notice utility lines and poles through the trees along the path of a former road through there. Can it be that this utiltiy line was last used 75 years ago, predating the Highland Park Bridge?

There are also sewers located in the mids of the woods. This old road is now used for a new trail that loops up the PArk Road near Carnegie Lake...another link in a network of trails and paths that could span the East End to Frick Park.

The Fill of Haight's Run

The Heth's Run Bridge still stands but the Valley is no more. Sometime in the 1930s the City started using the Valley of Heth's Run as a trsh dump. This next picture is taken on the river side of the bridge from the 1915 photo...you can see the railing of the Bridge at the top.

This is years of fill...and the fill goes all the back toward the Highland Park neighborhood at Heth's Park off of Hampton Street.

The stream remains, buried. The manholes for the now sewered stream are some of the deepest I have seen...and they had to be extended as the fill deepened.

In the first half of the last decades creative minds and commmunity advocates promoted a valley restoration concept. Funding has been pursued and some has been awarded; but the project has stalled. Lets keep this vision alive and active.

Heth's Run - March 12

Winter's grasp weakened again and this Saturday was perfect for the riverfront walk I can tak directly from my Sheridan Avenue Estate. I started by generally following the path of a raindrop. Before sewers rain landing on Sheridan Avenue flowed toward Heth's Run and then to the Allegheny River.
But, now to follow the flow of a raindrop you need a map.

In the last decade of the 19th century Highland Park was built up and sewer lines dug and put down. At that point most of the water from our Sheridan Estate would flow into the sewers and flow down to the sewer beneath Haights Ave instead of down Heth's Run.

McConway & Torley

With an amazing continuous history at one spot along the River, McConway & Torley maintains an important presence along the Allegheny River.

This industrial heritage deserves to be celebrated while the infrastructure surrounding the operation is integrated into a welcoming public realm. While McConway no longer uses barges and rarely uses trains (may need to check these facts) the walk around the facility is most unwelcome.

And a walk along the River in early March is impossible. I will need to revisit this riverfront via kayak in the warmer months.


This video tells their story

Dog walking

Roosevelt, like so many other dogs I see on these walks, seems to dread these riverfront walks more than the usual sidewalk trek around the neighborhood. On this walk I actually, for the only time ever, had to pull a splinter from his paw. He was hating the railroad ties skipping.

But alas there is a wonderful open lawn at 43rd Street. The problem is it is privately owned by Buncher...and maybe part of the grand property swap proposals of the Vision...to become a riverfront residential commmunity.

A shorter term option to providing grassy open space for dog paws is the small fill area betwen the tracks and the River below the 40th Street Bridge. This was part of the riverine environment between Wainwright's Island and Lawrenceville. The title search on the property will test someone's patience if there is an ownership dispute over the site's use for a public dog walk park.

Revealing the Vision in Style - March 14

This evening at the Engine House No 25 (A fantastic museum to Roberto Clemente images and history) the Allegheny Riverfront Vision became a Plan to implement. We arrived late but I think the podium of speakers included Mayor Ravenstahl, Senator Ferlo, URA Director Rob Stephany, RiverLife Exec Director Lisa Schroeder and they all applauded the cooperative support of the Allegheny Valley Railroad and the Buncher Company.

conveniently a couple of weeks ago the URA received an award of New MArket Tax Credits. Some of those can be used to assist the financing of development on some of the Buncher owned parcels. These were sites that were among the identified priorities.

The City Planning Department was charged with upgrading the Riverfront Overlay District to include some of the ecological objectives set forth in the plan. The sustainabile and ecological principles were highlighted and emphasized by Lisa Schroeder, whose talk I arrived just in time to hear.

In 2006 RiverLife released its Three Rivers Landscape Management Guidelines.. A decade before that Mayor Murphy and the City Planning Department were able to enact a Riverfront Overlay Distict was primarily focussed on access and spatial dimensions of structures.

In the 90s the Friends of the Riverfront started its Riverfronts Naturally program with the ideal of removing knotweed and restoring natives. We prepared a simple guide to the Riverfront and detailed our tasks and golas for each stretch of the Riverfront. It paled in comparison to the RiverLife report but it is sweet in its noble intent...if I may say so myself.

It is time to track how and when the Department of City Planning begins to revisit the Overlay District and integrate it with ecological concepts. One of the primary ecological principles is that nature does not track municipal boundaries. There needs to be an effort to insert the City's efforts into the zoning code of the over seventy municipalities in Allegheny County, and beyond. Perhaps ARTEZ can help...

Grandeur of the Sycamore

With its large girth, white bark, and buttonball seedpods the Sycamore has been a beacon along the Ohio Country's rivers and streams. To travlers and searchers of an earlier age the Sycamore was a marker of good moist soil and marked a way to a source of water.

While the soils of Lawrenceville were once lush and fertile, the are no longer. Rocks and waste and useless soil filled the river plain and lowlands to make way for railroad tracks and factories. But the hardy Sycamore still finds enough soil to take root. This tree is located on the rocky bank at 57th Street, behind Allegheny Cold Storage.

At this time the Sycamore with pale bark and its buttonballs stands out among the gray of the other trees.

You can imagine that once a grove of these Sycamores, bigger and wider than this one, grew on these flatlands.

Across the River from there is a lowland area where Sycamore can once again thrive among its other water loving woodland trees such s the River Maple. The area downriver of the mouth of Pine Creek is where sediment from the Creek has collected high enough to allow for a small almost native riparian woodland habitat.

When I return on my hike I will take a closer look.

Wainwright's Island

Throughout much of the 19th century and Island remained in the Allegheny River from the approximate line of 41st Street to 34th Street. The Island was variously called Wainwright's or McCullough's Island.

Historian's speculate that this was the Island that saved George Washington and Christopher Gist from the icy waters of the Allegheny during their journey as diplomats to the French in the winter of 1754. Here is George Washington's version of the story:

The next day we continued travelling until quite dark, and got to the river about two miles above Shanapin's. We expected to have found the river frozen, but it was not, only about fifty yards from each shore. The ice, I suppose, had broken up above, for it was driving in vast quantities.

There was no way for getting over but on a raft, which we set about, with but one poor hatchet, and finished just after sun setting. This was a whole day's work: we next got it launched, then went on board of it, and set off; but before we were half way over, we were jammed in the ice, in such a manner, that we expected every moment our raft to sink, and ourselves to perish. I put out my setting pole to try to stop the raft, that the ice might pass by, when the rapidity of the stream threw it with so much violence against the pole, that it jerked me out into ten feet water; but I fortunately saved myself by catching hold of one of the raft logs. Notwithstanding all our efforts, we could not get to either shore, but were obliged, as we were near an island, to quit our raft and make to it.

The cold was so extremely severe, that Mr. Gist had all his fingers, and some of his toes frozen, and the water was shut up so hard, that we found no difficulty in getting off the island on the ice in the morning, and went to Mr. Frazier's.

The back channel (where the water was "shut up so hard") was filled in during the heyday of industrial growth after the Civil War. Maps from the early 20th century show the filled in channel as controlled by the City of Pittsburgh...hmmm. Time has wiped away that memory.

But public property does not just drift away...and there are some interesting legal cases that are interpreting ownership and jusridiction of formerly navigable waters. I will address theses in a later blog entry.

Allegheny Riverfront Vision

A post from last week made mention patiently awaiting the ecological restoration concepts of the Allegheny Riverfront Vision. I did not have to wait much longer as it was released on Monday. This is an impressive document striving to push and pull the neighborhood back toward the RIver connection it enjoyed prior to the industrial revolution.

This blog should refer back to it during the Lawrenceville portion of the walk...and perhaps as a model for elsewhere along our Riverfront.

Spring has Sprung Early

A brief warm spell and it was time for my first riverfront hike since Dec 31. I return to 43rd Street, which ends with one of the more dramatic ad hoc overlooks of the River.

This is a view over to Millvale and the Sternwheelers taken during the gray of December 31. The second picture was taken on Feb. 13. The Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute located on the downstream property. The Urban Redevelopment Authority assisted with site control and construction financing. That provided the opportunity to set aside the River Edge for a trail. This was the first foray for the Three Rivers Heritage Trail in the former industrial center of Lawrenceville.

The church visible in Millvale is the St. Nicholas Croatian Church which houses the beautiful and passionate murals of Max Vanko. This blog will have more to say about those on the return hike down the right descending bank. But don't wait for a visit.

After the Civil War the covered Ewalt Bridge made this connection. The Bridge lasted until the 1930s when it was replaced by the Washington's Crossing Bridge.

Prior to the Civil War Andrew Klomen and Henry Phipps owned a a mill in Millvale (hence the name). During the hectic days of the Civil War they sold and went into partnership with Andrew Carnegie and others to construct larger mills on the Lawrenceville side of the Allegheny River. This is the beginnings of the Carnegie industrial dynasty.

Pittsburgh Valve Foundry & Construction Company

This concrete pier below 26th Street is identified on the 1912 Flood Commission map and is located adjacent to the property of the Pittsburgh Valve Foundry & Construction Company.

This is the retaining wall built to stabilize the railroad tracks servicing all of these industries. When was this wall built? How much longer wil it hold? Who will be responsible when it falls...and maybe we should just let it fall. It may start to recreate some of natual riparian habitat.

The Allegheny Riverfront Vision Plan addresses some ecosystem restoration ideas and I patiently wait.

Shannopinstown

In the mid- 18th century, before the region became the epicenter of frontier wars, the population was concentrated along the Allegheny River. Shannopinstown was a village of the Lenni Lenape, natives were moved west as the Europeans settled in the Delaware Valley. The exact location of the village is not exactly known but the descriptions of the early fur traders and scouts (including the French under Celeron in 1749 and Christopher Gist for the Ohio Company of Virginia in 1750) seem to point to an area of present day 32nd Street.

This would be an ideal spot to settle as a large flat area along the River and fed by streams coming from springs in the hill.

This map from 1816 shows the stream emanating from the hollow behind the Iron City Brewery site and curving across the flats to reach the River approximately near 33rd Street. To view the area discussed zoom in to the upper right of the map. The stream is long forgotten by most as it was culverted throughout the industrial era. But it still existing below ground. The first picture below is near the source of Two Mile Run, along the railroad tracks not far from the tunnel beneath Center Avenue. The second picture is the mouth of the old stream (culverted many years ago) near 33rd Street.

Bayardstown

A beautiful late fall day provided the opportunity to hike from 23rd Street to 31st Street. The downriver portion of this walk remains in the first Borough of record in the area.

In his 1989 book, Miscellaneous History of Lawrenceville, Joseph A. Borkowski describes the area:

Northern Liberties was organized and laid out in 1816 and existed until March 1837 when it was annexed by the City of Pittsburgh. It was located on the southern bank of the Allegheny River bounded by Pennsylvania Canal (present Eleventh St.) extended to Grant Blvd. (presently Bigelow) followed eastward to a point midway between 25th and 26th Streets hence along Allegheny westward to Eleventh Street.

Later it became popularly known as Bayardstown for George A. Bayard, who owned several substantial tracts of land.

Recently, it has been referred to as 'The Strip,' whose boundaries are limited to present 27th Street.

Most of the inhabitants of old Bayardstown were from Northern Ireland. They wore stove pipe hats, large boots, frock coats and pantaloons with a barn door flap in front.

The streets of Old Bayardstown were all paved with cobblestones which were gathered by men and boys from the river bottom and sold to street contractors. (Miscellaneous History of Lawrenceville, page 9).

Remnant of barge moorings or a tipple between 25th and 26th street provides an overlook.

Bayardstown quickly became the location of foundries, glass works, and machine shops.

In the 1890 Hopkins Maps the Pittsburgh Junction Railroad is along the river edge...and is often drawn within the boundaries of the River. This railroad is resting on fill. Most of the riveredge property through this area is composed almost entirely of fill used to raise the land above the floodplain.

Pennsy Park -- A Top-down Development Flop

In hindsight it is easy to second-guess their optomism...but in 1966 leaders of the Allegheny Conference and the local Philanthropy/Corporate Community fell into a big vision trap.

In the spring of 1966 Pennsylvania Railroad owned most of the property on the edge of downtown from 11th Street to 21st Street. The properties along the Allegheny River were a railyard and the railroad still owned its station...the current Pennsylvanian. The executives at Pennsylvnia railroad foresaw that the economy was changing and they needed an infusion of cash to maintain solid balance sheet. The strategy was to propose something huge and hope the money starts to flow them.

So, with an assist from the Regional Industrial Development Corporation in May 1966 they announced this hulking vision of a 148 acre and multi-million redevelopment --Pennsy Park.

It appears no investment was forthcoming, the railroad industry continue to collapse and by the 70s the Pennsylvania Railroad did not even exist. Eventually the successor railroads were forced to sale the real estate under duress, and the Buncher Company was in the right spot to purchase.

The best investment for them was surface parking and that use still remains. Through the years various redevelopment proposals were made and received various levels of support. But often opposition developed, sometimes from agencies arguing that development here will accelerate the demise of the Golden TRiangle. It has been a struggle to have the 10 blocks from the Convention Center to 21st Street redeveloped.

An end to Riverfront Parking in the strip?

At its December 2010 Board meeting the Urban Redevelopment Authority approved a creative deal intended to kick start development on the former Pennsylvania Railroad yard in the Strip District. In early February 2011 the City approved acceptance of $15 million of State development funds to prepare the site's infrastructure.

The area from 16th to 21st Street has been a railroad yard from almost the beginnings of the Pennsylvania Roalroad. The area downriver of Sixteenth Street was a railroad yard from the Great Depression era to the early 70s. (Before the DEpression it was the site of some of Pittsburgh's earliest foundries -- see Schoenberger Iron Works).

The Terminal Building, originally built to get the wholesale businesses out of the Golden Triangle in the 20s, will include the nonprofit-managed Pittsburgh market and other uses that create revenue for the Buncher Company.

The Buncher Company has been able to be in the right place to take advantage of opportunities. In the Seventies they were able to acquire key parcels of real estate just outside of the Golden Triangle from Penn Central Railroad as the railroad was forced to sale under fiscal duress. The Buncher Company may have had great ideas for developing the site. The PResident of the Buncher Company, Herbert Green, said that "They did not acquire the property just to look at it"

But "look at it" is what all Pittsburghers did...for over thirty years. The best use of the property was for parking...and there was no reason for Buncher to invest in improvements when revenue can be generated by the hundreds of cars that park there nearly every day.

Finally the wait may be over...and it appears Buncher's hold out wore down the public sector to the tune of at least $15 million (and probably much more public investment - stay tuned). Buncher will develop the parcel in return for the promise of rental income from the publically owned Terminal Buildings.

The area downriver of the Sixteenth Street will remain for parking for the foresseable future. Although the abandoned Seagate Building may find a reuse as a high tech incubator of sorts. The Seagate Building is owned by the Buncher Company and under lease to Seagate for another five years...even though Seagate abandoned the building in 2007.

I wonder if there were any other proposals for the Terminal Buildings reuse? The public planning process will begin earnest in 2011.

The Golden Triangle Boundary of the Allegheny

As I begin my riverfront ramble around Pittsburgh I need to pay homage to the first recorded rambles around the point: the surveyors for the Penn Family. Obviously they were not the first walkers nor the first to record visits in their journal...but they were the first to methodically walk along the riverbank for the purpose of creating boundaries...boundaries that still impact our infrastructure and neighborhoods.

The boundary near where my hike started, below the Fort Wayne Railroad Bridge, was marked by George Woods and Thomas Vickroy as surveyors for the Penn Estate in 1784. The descendants of William Penn were preparing to sale the last of the their lands originally provided in the 1681 Charter from Charles II to their ancestor.

My journey started very near the upper right corner of this map...where Watt Street meets the Allegheny River.

The legal property transfers went like this:

(1) Since the Penns took pride in actually purchasing its land from the native Americans, the Penns acquired 'clean' title to the Pittsburgh area by the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix

(2) In preparing their lands for sale the Penns tended to separate the most valuable lands for their future use. The lands were called Manors and the Manor of Pittsburgh was laid out in 1769.

(3) While the Penns struggled to remian neutral during the Revolutionary War, they could not deny that their claim was derived from English Royalty...the loser. During the War the Pennsylvania Legislature divested the Penns of all their land by statute...but they were kind enough to pay the Penns for the divested land and allowed them to keep their Manors. But the Penns were no longer deriving income from their original Charter...so they eventually needed to sale their remaining lands.

(4) To prepare the lands for sale the Penns asked that its Manor be subdivided into Lots. George Woods and Thomas Vickroy were slected for the job.

Thomas Vickroy recalled the event some half a century later:

We arrived in Pittsburgh in the month of May, 1784, and the first thing we did was to circumscribe the ground where we intended to lay the town out. We began up about where Grant Street now is, on the bank of the Monongahela, and proceeded down the Monongahela, according to the meanderings of the river, to its junction with the Allegheny River. Then up the Allegheny River on the bank, keeping on the bank a certain distance, up to about Washington's Street; from thence to Grant's Hill, thence along Grant's Hill to the place of the beginning. I made a draft of it in Mr. Woods' presence, throwing it into a large scale to see how it would answer to lay out into lots and streets. After that there was a good deal of conversation, and the ground was viewed by Mr. Woods and the persons who lived at the place to fix on the best plan to lay out the town with the greatest convenience.

The Penn's first sale of land in 1784 was to James O'Hara and it was the area between Fort Pitt and the Allegheny River. The legal traditions of recording property ownership in Allegheny County started during this period.

Mayor Masloff's RiverWalk Park

Hidden in the urban riparian forest between the Veterans and Sixteenth Street Bidge is this huge rock and monument for a trail constructed in December 1990. Twenty years later it is a reminder of the aggressive and political issue that riverfront development was during the decade of the '80s.

By the end of 1990 I had been back in Pittsburgh for only one year and was incredibly naive to the ways of Pittsburgh politics (some would say I remain incredibly naive but that is the subject of another blog). In the late 80s there was a pitched battle between the Planning commission and City Council over a multi-million $ entertainment district proposal called "Down-by-the-Riverside". Fortunately the Planning Commission , with its requirement for more design oversight and approval, won.

This development and others in the 80s generated enough awareness about the development potential of the City's riverfront that there was a flurry of official studies, including:

1. The Department of City Planning's Riverfront Plan.
2. And when advocates of more access and/or more development complained about that Plan, the Mayor created a special Riverfront Commission to make further recommendations.
3. And even a Citizen's Commission on Riverfront Development sponsored by the Citizens' League of Southwestern Pennsylvania

In light of all this the plaque and its listing of numerous City agencies and many private sector partners seems to be a plea for compromise. But the one thing they forgot was that any project without a longterm stewardship plan is bound to fail.

So now, Twenty years after the rock is placed along the Strip's Riverfront we find it hidden among the growth and another development proposal for the site being advanced. Lets hope this proposal has more partners and that there are even more names on the next monument rock.

the Northern Liberties

The exploration actually started in the beauty of Pittsburgh's Autumn. In late October I walked the Strip District, the Northern Liberties of the early 19th century. If I had waited until 2011 I would not have had much to say until spring, I am not going to walk if the cold and wind make it painful.

The exploraton heads upstream as I will return to the Golden Triangle later in the year when more of the exciting project around the Convention Center is complete.






So on October 24, 2010 I walk upstream from Eleventh Street to 23rd Street, former railroad yards that served the produce terminals of the strip for generations until the 1970s.

In this picture:

St. Stanislaus Kostka
Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish Church in Polish Hill
Otto Milk Condos (former home of the Phoenix Brewery)

Prior to this area's service to freight this was the site for some of the first heavy industry of Pittsburgh. The Schoenberger Ironworks were located near present day 14th to 16th Street. The wealth from this early ironworks (circa 1820) led to the Schoenberger family endowing St. Margaret's Hospital in Lawrenceville. The hospital eventually moved upstream to its present location in Aspinwall and acquired by its current non-profit owner, UPMC. The ancestry of the St. Margaret's Foundation is distantly linked to the wealth generated here.

A row of lumber poles are standing in a straight line along the riverbank in the area beneath the Veteran's Bridge. This must be remnant of barge docks from some point during the industrial use of this section of town.

Twenty Years

It was 1990 when I found myself in the right place at the right time to join up with visionaries to advance the idea of riverfront trails and river access. In the ensuing twenty years I have been to just about every foot of Riverfront in the City.

Now as I grow older...but not old...I thought I would take 2011 to methodically revisit those Rivers with wiser eyes. I will walk every foot of the City Riverfront (with a few exceptions to avoid imprudent trespass) and record what I see, who I meet, what I have learned, and what I think. Ideally this will generate some sort of dialogue in the virtual world and, eventually, in the real world.

In the process I hope to teach something of interest, gain a little confidence, and mature my insight. I hope you will join me every so often.

I start at the first municipal boundary created for Pittsburgh along the Allegheny River.

Underneath the Fort Wayne Railroad Bridge, formerly the site of the Pennsylvania Canal Aqueduct, and near the site where Meriweather Lewis launched his voyage across the West in 1803.