Pittsburgh turns scars into revenue magnets

by Gordon Russell, The Times-Picayune

Sunday November 23, 2008, 6:01 PM

MICHAEL DeMOCKER / THE TIMES-PICAYUNEA mural by urban artists towers above the sidewalk in the rebounding East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

This is part of a two-day Times-Picayune series on blight

• Read the rest of the series here

For Pittsburgh, the prescription for a rebound from the utter implosion of the city's steel-based economy was simple: From lemons, make lemonade.

As devastating as the crash was -- and Pittsburgh may never fully recover from the loss of 150,000 well-paying jobs in the late 1970s and early '80s -- the mill shutdowns brought opportunities.

Land once needed to feed insatiable blast furnaces was now available for reuse, though it often required intensive remediation. The closures also have made much of Pittsburgh more attractive: Smoke and grime that once cloaked the city are gone.

There's no better example of such a complete turnaround than Summerset at Frick Park, an upscale subdivision of new homes along a hillside above the Monongahela River that was once an industrial slag heap.

The once-contaminated and denuded landscape, now dotted with trees and crossed by a cleaned-up creek, is not the only tainted site in the steel city to be reborn with public aid.

Washington's Landing, on Herr's Island in the Allegheny River, is home to several members of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team. Not so long ago, the little spit of land was contaminated, having hosted stockyards and a rendering plant, among other unsavory uses.

A few miles away, on the flats alongside the Monongahela, the site of what was once the city's largest mill has also been refashioned. Today, the only clue to South Side Works' past is its name.

The former industrial site is now a slightly citified, and hugely popular, version of a suburban mall. It has a multiscreen cinema and parking garages that wouldn't be out of place in Metairie.

"We had to be able to create a retail space that met people's needs," said Jerry Dettore, the recently retired director of the Urban Redevelopment Authority. "Everyone was getting in their cars and going to shopping malls in the suburbs. That's why downtowns struggled. So we built an urban center with five garages."

The mall has actually had a symbiotic relationship with the nearby South Side Flats, a funky stretch of urbanity that resembles Magazine Street.

The projects, all of them shepherded through and subsidized by the redevelopment authority and the state, which helped clean up pollution, aren't for everyone. They share a suburban aesthetic -- Summerset even has cul-de-sacs -- that tend to annoy city purists.

And they are unapologetically aimed at capturing members of the middle class and even the affluent. Homes in Summerset and Washington's Landing can fetch prices of more than a half-million dollars.

Maureen and Jim Kudis are typical of the first group of buyers. They moved to Summerset after spending seven years in the suburb of Penn Hills, and they couldn't be happier. They had missed the city, but not the work of rehabbing an old house.

"Now, we're at the Steelers game in 10 minutes," Jim Kudis said. "If we want to see a play, it's right there. In the suburbs, you had to drive 10 miles to get to anything."

Tom Murphy, who was mayor of Pittsburgh when those projects were pushed through, insisted that the city try to appeal to people from all walks of life. About half of the redevelopment authority's money was spent on low- and moderate-income housing, he said. The rest went to market-rate homes.

"The true liberals said, 'Why are you using public money to build Summerset?' " Murphy said. "My view was the city needs to get the middle class back, and you do that by building value. You need to have them in the city. You can't say we're going to be a city that just has poor people, because the economics won't work. It's also very condescending."

MICHAEL DeMOCKER / THE TIMES-PICAYUNENew residential developments on Pittsburghs riverfront are drawing former suburbanites to the downtown district. In its redevelopment plan, the city tried to create housing for all income levels