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3m ago
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
III. The North Shore: When Planners Draw the Map
To old-timers like my father, there is no North Shore. For the past 30 years, every time the neighborhood is mentioned on the news, I hear “When did it become the North Shore? It’s the North Side. There is no shore.” He’s right about it not having a shore. The Allegheny usually sits at lest 6 feet below the riverwalk, and in warmer months there are plenty of boats tied off. As to when it became the North Shore, the earliest reference I’ve seen is from 1974, but I haven’t exactly looked very hard. Nonetheless, for reasons that will soon become apparent, I share my father’s disdain for what feels like a neighborhood that was designed more by city planners than by natural processes. But this time the planners won, and to everyone who isn’t my father, it’s the North Shore.
The North Shore begins roughly at the West End Bridge and runs between the river and the highway for about 2 ½ miles before the last occupied land peters out as you approach the line with the independent borough of Millvale. There are roughly three sections. The first section comprises the area around the stadiums, ending around Federal St. This area was historically known as “The Ward”, the first ward of old Allegheny City, and was similar to the Strip in that it was a rough, mixed-use area near a river with small-scale industry and rowhouses for working-class residents. By the ‘30s the residential areas were being cleared out for warehouses, by the ‘50s the area was run down, by the ‘70s there wasn’t much left. When Three Rivers Stadium was built in the late 1960s, the land it sat on was formerly occupied by a scrap yard. The Carnegie Science Center opened in 1992, but other than that this area was basically a no-man’s land for 30 years, a stadium in a sea of parking lots.
In the ‘90s is when the “North Shore” really took off as a buzzword. The Pirates were demanding a new stadium. The Steelers weren’t exactly demanding one, but they figured that if the Pirates got one then they deserved one too. The Pirates threatened to leave; the Steelers didn’t exactly threaten, but there were mysterious rumors of a stadium being built at a racetrack in a neighboring county. To make a long story short, the teams got their stadiums. I could focus this section on the pros and cons of public stadium financing, but that argument has been done to death. What’s more interesting is the other bullshit that went along with this.
It wasn’t enough that the teams got new stadiums; the North Shore had to be an entertainment district. And in typical municipal fashion the city awarded the exclusive development rights to Continental in a no-bid contract. Development has been consistently behind schedule, though there are rumors that the Steelers are quietly trying to prevent construction on the surface lots because they don’t want to lose tailgating space. The existing footprint is smaller than originally envisioned and a large apartment complex has been delayed for about 15 or 20 years at this point. There’s an okay but rather uninspiring stretch of North Shore Drive that’s occupied by several small office buildings and the kind of bars that sell well drinks by the gallon in a plastic cup after 9 pm, actively recruit bachelorette parties, and reference the “hit” TV show Nashville filming there as a reason to show up. I guess this is what politicians must picture when they envision “nightlife”. In the same vein, when the Port Authority (now PRT) decided to expand the light rail network in the mid-2000s with a tunnel under the Allegheny they decided to make it run west along the Ohio so it could have one stop between the stadiums and a terminus near the casino. This routing pretty much foreclosed the possibility of any network expansion into the more populated parts of the North Side or surrounding suburbs in favor of slightly better access for the occasional southern suburban tourist.
The second section is a small area between Federal St. and Anderson St. that has the most urban feel of the neighborhood. It’s a dense collection of midrises including one attraction, the Warhol Museum (that is, if you don’t include my old office). There may have been residential here at one point, but it’s long gone.
The final section is the most obscure. The remainder of the neighborhood is what used to be Schweitzer Loch, or Swiss Hole. There are a few scattered commercial and industrial concerns along River Ave., and it’s bounded by apartment complexes on either end, including lofts in the old Heinz plant, but it’s mostly empty these days. It’s commonly said that the neighborhood was destroyed when the highways were built between the 60s and the 80s, but that’s not exactly the case. George Warhola, Andy Warhol’s nephew, owns a scrapyard in the area, and he explained the real story to a newspaper a few years back. There were plenty of rowhouses there as late as the 90s, and there are a few remnants of the old neighborhood remaining today. What really happened is that Buncher, the developer largely responsible for the Strip, spent several decades buying up property and demolishing the buildings as soon as the deals closed. The idea was that once the last of their Strip real estate is built out they’ll have acquired the entire area and will be able to build their own model New Urbanist community as a sort of extension of the Heinz Lofts. Warhola basically told them to fuck off innumerable times no matter how much he’s been offered. I say good for him. If some developer wants to tear down a real urban neighborhood so they can build a fake urban neighborhood, they deserve to have a scrap yard in the middle of it. People like Warhola aside, Buncher ended up running into a more formidable foe, the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority (ALCOSAN).
Combined sewage outflows have been a problem in Pittsburgh for quite some time. In the old days, all the sewage, whether from stormwater runoff or domestic water use, went straight into the rivers. In the 1950s ALCOSAN built a treatment plant that was intended to end this practice. The problem is that treatment plants are only built for a certain capacity. While they can handle the actual sewage without a problem, since sanitary lines and storm drains are all tied into the same system, they become overloaded any time there is significant rain (which is pretty often in Pittsburgh). To prevent sewers from backing up into people’s homes, there are several combined sewer outflow points along the rivers and their tributaries. The upshot is that anytime we get more than a tenth of an inch of rain, a certain amount of untreated sewage is being directly discharged into area streams. This isn’t a problem unique to Pittsburgh, but it’s worse here than in any other city in the country.
The most straightforward solution to this problem is to redirect sewage into dedicated lines. The problem is that there is a high cost for the authority to build the dedicated lines, and a high cost for homes to tie into them. The terms of an EPA consent decree meant that houses along the new lines were virtually unsaleable for a while (and accordingly sat vacant), because the cost of redoing the sewerage made buying them financially unfeasible. Decades later, split systems have hardly made a dent in the problem. ALCOSAN’s solution, then, is to build a series of tunnels that will hold the excess stormwater so that it can be treated during dry periods. Construction of the system is expected to take years, but it will reduce combined outflows by 70%. Construction, however, requires a a large amount of land to use as an access point for the boring equipment, and there’s no better place for an access point that a large vacant area along the river. So ALCOSAN bought all of this land off of Buncher earlier this year and will soon tear it all up to build their tunnels. What will happen to the land after this is anyone’s guess (I didn’t read anything about any permanent facilities there), but Buncher is out of the game for the moment. My guess is that once the project is complete Buncher will see what the property looks like and maybe buy it back off of ALCOSAN for less than they sold it for, just in time for them to build their dream community. And since the remaining individual landowners will see their property condemned through eminent domain, Buncher won’t have to deal with the George Warholas of the world. But that’s off the table for now.
What does the future of the North Shore look like? Probably not too dissimilar to the present. The area is still pockmarked with a number of large surface lots that are unlikely to go away unless the Steelers abandon their current stadium for one built elsewhere and this seems unlikely to happen, because the Steelers aren’t the kind of team that’s going to start screaming for a new stadium. I’m convinced they’d still be playing at Three Rivers (which was a very good football stadium but a terrible baseball stadium) if there hadn’t been such a push to build a new home for the Pirates. Heinz Field is already about as old as Three Rivers was when calls for its demolition began, and the lease on Heinz is set to run out in 2031, but the Steelers have already indicated that they intend to renew the lease and at the very least haven’t given any indication they want a new venue. While I promised I wouldn’t get into stadium politics here, I personally find it pretty wasteful that NFL teams can’t share stadiums like they used to. When I worked on the North Side, I’d occasionally take walks along the river and would see Heinz Field invariably standing vacant, a monolithic white elephant. You’re talking about a facility that cost hundreds of millions of dollars that’s used 8 times a year for regular season games plus a couple preseason games and maybe 1 or 2 playoff games if you’re lucky. The situation in Pittsburgh is actually better than in most NFL cities, because Pitt also plays here 6 or 7 times a year. Add on a couple concerts and the occasional miscellaneous large event and you’re talking maybe 20 out of 365 days that you actually need a large stadium. And these events are almost always on weekends, which is great for parking but bad for integrating it into the urban fabric. I don’t find the baseball stadium nearly as distasteful, because they at least use it 81 times a year, and the environment surrounding a weekday or weeknight Pirates game adds a festive air to a normally mundane workday, as opposed to a Steelers game, or even a Pitt game, which is like “dropping a circus” on an area that’s not really used to it.
But, as I mentioned earlier, the Steelers unfortunately seem to be driving the North Shore’s development, which means that the surface lots adjacent to the stadium on the eastern side are unlikely to ever be developed. They actually build a parking garage on one of them at an od angle, the seeming intention being to make the remaining space unusable for anything but surface parking. There was some recent development next to PNC Park, and there’s some planned development on the western side of the stadium, but nothing to suggest that this will ever develop into a real neighborhood. ALCOSAN’s acquisition of the entire Schweitzer Loch area takes that off the table for at least the next half decade, though it seems unlikely that anything would have happened over there in that timeframe anyway. Buncher certainly didn’t seem to have any problem selling it after spending 30 years acquiring it, and if they have to wait another 10 to buy it back it then it’s no great loss. Given that the entire area is being controlled by developers who don’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to do anything, or are at the very least facing strong disincentives (hey, we gave you that sweetheart deal, so you’d better play by our rules), buzzwords like gentrification don’t really apply. I don’t see the area becoming anything more than it already is, at least within my lifetime, but I don’t see it becoming anything less either, so I guess that’s a good thing.
Neighborhood Grade: Non-residential. There are only 3 residential complexes in the neighborhood at present, with a fourth one on the horizon, but they’re pretty well spaced from one another, and Heinz Lofts isn’t even in the official neighborhood boundaries (it’s officially in Troy Hill, but that’s crazy talk). There’s practically nothing in the way of functional businesses here, which is to say that there may be some but I’m not aware of any. When I worked down here there were plenty of casual bar and grill type places I could go to for a greasy lunch, but not much in the way of casual grab and go spots with the exception of a cafeteria-type place in an office complex lobby that was obviously geared towards office workers.
Having reached the conclusion of this section, I want to say that my father’s hatred of the term “North Shore” is symbolic of the type of boneheaded planning the whole area represents. I have no idea what my father’s opinions are on urban development are, if he even has any (and considering my parents moved beyond the suburbs when they were still in their 20s to avoid having neighbors it’s a pretty good bet that he doesn’t), but the whole enterprise seems like one of these misguided efforts to generate a tourist area from scratch. “North Side” sounds too urban and gritty, “North Shore” sounds pleasant and inviting. And I will admit, the riverfront is very well done. I enjoy tailgating as much as the next guy, but why leave what should be prime real estate an empty lot most of the year so that the diminishing percentage of people who can afford to go to Steelers games can drink outside for a few hours beforehand? The worst part of this is that there is plenty of space under elevated highways that’s really only suited for parking, so filling in the remaining holes doesn’t diminish the total amount of tailgate space as much as an aerial photo would suggest. Why redirect your light rail system toward serving a nonresidential area? Why give development rights to one company that can be manipulated rather than selling the parcels individually?
The answer to these questions is fairly simple — there seems to be an obsession among city planners towards catering to suburbanites who may visit a few times a year rather than creating a neighborhood where people might want to live every day of the year. The Tilted Kilt was not the kind of bar one was inclined to go to every day after work. By their own convoluted metrics, the North Shore has been a roaring success. Even the slow pace of development contributes to this illusion. Instead of a quick wave of construction that nobody can keep up with and that comes to an end they get an endless cycle of project announcements, groundbreakings, ribbon cuttings, etc. Rinse and repeat for every 5 acre parcel. Get the mayor’s name in the paper (though to his credit the current mayor hasn’t seemed as involved with this nonsense). The fact that what we end up with is an incongruous mishmash of parking lots, legitimate destinations, and tourist tat is completely lost on the so-called City Fathers.
I assure you I’m not as salty about this as I may seem. The riverfront is a legitimate asset, Stage AE gave us the mid-size concert venue we’d needed since Syria Mosque was torn down, and the bars have their market. It’s certainly a lot better than it was during the Three Rivers Stadium days. It’s just frustrating to realize that certain pressures never go away. History, largely correctly, regards these kinds of large-scale renewal efforts as failures, and one would think that our elected officials and hired planners would be hip to this. But there’s still a tendency to abide by these old principles, even if under another name. If the presence of sports stadiums drives the kind of economic development that politicians promise when they want to spend money on them, then the land they own in the vicinity should sell for top dollar. They shouldn’t need to give one developer rights to the entire area because even if the developer can list 500 reasons why it needs all the land to achieve the city’s vision it will still be more economical to sell the parcels individually at market rates. But the risk there is that things might not turn out as the politicians envision. Instead of a nightclub and Southern Tier Brewing you could end up with anything. A lot of black people live on the North Side; what if the land doesn’t sell for as much as you hoped and the commercial strip in front of the stadium is filled with check cashing places and pawn shops? What if it looks like Forbes Ave. did in the ‘90s? What if it just sits vacant? There’s a push/pull dynamic of city planners seeing an undeveloped area and developing a vision for it, and then trying to make sure that vision is achieved, irrespective of whether there’s a market for that vision or not. Developers show glossy renderings of shiny new buildings surrounded by lush landscaping on sunny days inhabited by happy pedestrians, and everyone — politicians, the media, normal people, etc. — thinks “that would be nice”, and the politicians want to make it happen come hell or high water. So then begins the long fight of trying to realize that vision, to turn renderite into reality. But then come all the external pressures and arguments about traffic, parking, affordable housing, architectural design, and, above all, cost, and the whole thing gets slow-walked and built in a piecemeal fashion, and since this was the vision of politicians and not the market, there’s no guarantee that it will fill any real demand.
So what we get is the North Shore we deserve. A place that’s good enough. Cromulence, if you will. But it’s nonetheless a place where one is forced to reckon with whether full potential was ever realized. A place that’s urban without the urbanity. It has pedestrians but no real street life. It’s an office park in the day, a bar neighborhood at night, and a festival ground on the right weekends, but it rarely manages to be all at the same time. It’s a place where a pleasant riverside stroll among rare beauty leads to a terminal vista of an empty parking lot. It’s frustrating. I’ve walked around here more than most other neighborhoods, and I still don’t know what to make of it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
18m ago
I've seen people claiming Biden is old and senile for the last six years, when they weren't claiming he died and was replaced by a surgically altered body double. They have pointed to weird speech gaffes, reading teleprompter cues out loud, and Biden falling off his bike.
I have mostly ignored these examples.
Lately it actually seems like he's as senile as people have been trying to make it seem.
hanikrummihundursvin
35m ago
The politics of Joe Rogan, more or less.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
47m ago
Yeah, the responses to this kind of issue are really one sided. Female attitudes around this issue (at a societal level) will not change in your lifetime, so all you can do is change how you react to it.
freemcflurry
47m ago
I'm not familiar with him, what do you mean by counter-culture?
Set up automated contributions into the s&p 500. This is the greatest return on 10 minutes of effort you will ever have in your life.
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