DEP inteferes with Citizen Action on behalf of the Allegheny River in Warren

This DEP action is more of a help to the WAste Treatment Corp than a punishment. There are times when DEP should empower citizen suits such as Clean Water Action's suit for these same violations. In this case DEP is providing cover to the polluter. The penalty is minimal and the company is given a license to pollute the Allegheny for two more years. The River would have been better served with citizen action through the Courts. http://www.post-gazette.com/news/environment/2013/11/28/DEP-aims-to-reduce-company-s-discharges-into-river/stories/201311280176

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...