Category: default || By jt3y

I realize it's kind of absurd for someone from the Mon Valley to criticize ill-advised redevelopment schemes in Dahntahn Picksberg --- pot, meet kettle; kettle, meet pot --- but if I had anything nice to say, I wouldn't be a writer, so I will cast my asparagus and you, alert readers, should feel free to toss it back at me.

I had a meeting Dahntahn on Wednesday morning at One Oxford Centre, and parked over at the Municipal Courts Building garage on First Avenue. My walk to and from Oxford Centre took me right past what's left of the old Public Safety Building, formerly the Post-Gazette Building, at the corner of Grant Street and the Boulevard of the Allies. It's being ripped down to make room for a new parklet that will serve the PNC Bank building across the street, on the site of the old Baltimore & Ohio commuter train station.

Explain to me, someone, why the City of Pittsburgh --- which is constantly belly-aching about how non-profit institutions and tax-exempt land are robbing it of desperately needed revenue --- is allowing a prime corner Downtown to be used for a parklet? (The Post-Gazette's editorial board, which never saw a redevelopment scheme it didn't like, called it a "dandy" idea. If the P-G likes it so much, maybe it should be paying for it, too, but I digress.)

Now, I realize that the Public Safety Building, as a government-owned structure, wasn't providing any revenue to the city's coffers anyway. But it could have been sold to someone who needed office space, or it could have been converted into the residential housing that Downtown Pittsburgh so desperately needs. And then it would have been put back onto the tax rolls.

Yes, the Public Safety Building was rundown, mostly due to 40 years of deferred maintenance, but it wasn't that old --- I don't think the Post-Gazette moved there until the mid-1930s. Watching the bulldozers and jackhammers try to pull the beams down yesterday led me to believe it was still structurally sound, even if the mechanical and electrical systems were aging.

Meanwhile, there's the spiffy new (well, a couple of years old now) Municipal Courts Building, a misbegotten lump of post-modern piffle along the Monongahela River next to the Hotel Graybar, aka the Allegheny County Jail. It's just south of the Liberty Bridge, on what was roughly the passenger coach storage yard for the B&O train station.

Someone, please, explain to me why commercial land --- the railroad property --- was seized for public use, therefore taking it off of the tax rolls; while two blocks away, a perfectly serviceable building is being torn down to make way for a park primarily for use by PNC Bank employees. Call me a starry-eyed old dreamer, but couldn't the old Public Safety Building have been turned into the Municipal Courts Building?

And that brings us to the story of the old Baltimore & Ohio train station. Erected in the 1950s, it was used mostly by the railroad's commuter trains from Pittsburgh to Connellsville (and thusly through Our Fair City); B&O long-distance passenger trains used the P&LE depot (now Station Square).

In 1989, the Port Authority killed the remnant of the old commuter service that ran between Pittsburgh and Versailles. At the time, PAT officials said the service died because of declining ridership, but people who rode the trains tell me they thought it was an assisted suicide; the railroad didn't want to run passenger trains in the first place, and thus did its darnedest to make them as inconvenient and problem-prone as possible. (Have you ever heard of a train running out of fuel? The PATrain did.)

There was also the little problem of the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County coveting the land occupied by the train station and the passenger coach yard. But they couldn't actually build on the land as long as the trains were running. So they killed off the train and took private, eminently developable land --- on the riverfront, no less --- and built the monstrously ugly jail and the neighboring, slightly less repellant court building.

Now, the City of Pittsburgh is doing it again --- taking prime property and turning it into a parcel that will generate no revenue. (Although it may be privately owned by PNC Bank, it will be assessed, I'm sure, at a fraction of what an occupied commercial building would be assessed at.)

And as if to add insult to injury, former City Council President Bob O'Connor, the man who would be mayor, has proposed launching a rail service between Dahntahn and Oakland. Admittedly, he's talking light-rail over the Forbes and Fifth corridor, but wouldn't it be convenient to have self-propelled railcars traveling up and down Second Avenue to Panther Hollow in Oakland? Too bad we don't have a railroad station conveniently located right on Grant Street --- oh, right, we did. Never mind.

Picksberg's financial woes stem from many problems endemic to older urban areas --- aging infrastructure; legacies of debt and bureaucracy; and labor contracts created primarily to serve as political patronage, not to ensure the reliable delivery of public services.

Yet so many of the wounds, particularly in economic and urban development, are self-inflicted, and a prime example can be found in a two-block area near the corner of First Avenue and Grant Street. No private corporation would erect a new office building across the street from a building that they know will soon be empty; and then tear down the empty building for creation of something that produces no revenue. But to the City of Pittsburgh power structure, this seems like a perfectly sane thing to do.

Thus does the city's body politic continue to shoot off its own toes. On the other hand, what's the loss of a few toes when you have a giant sucking chest wound?