Schenley Plaza restaurant construction to start soon

Construction should start soon on the new Eat’n Park restaurant planned for Schenley Plaza,… Construction should start soon on the new Eat’n Park restaurant planned for Schenley Plaza, because the chain has now successfully completed the city’s approval process.

The restaurant location, which has been five years in the making, will likely open before the start of summer, said Mark Broadhurst, Eat’n Park’s director of concept development. The Eat ‘n Park restaurant will serve breakfast, lunch and dinner and feature outdoor seating.

Broadhurst said construction crews will break ground soon, although they need to finalize their contracts before beginning construction.

“We are finalizing details and approving our contractors. We expect to be breaking ground within the next few weeks, weather permitting,” Broadhurst said in an interview earlier this month.

The original plan scheduled groundbreaking for this past fall, but the city’s approval process took longer than expected.

One major step of the process required Eat’n Park to get approval from the Pittsburgh Art Commission, which must sign off on construction plans taking place on city property like Schenley Plaza. The Eat’n Park Hospitality Group received final approval for the project last October, after making a number of changes in its design that lowered building walls and provided for more open spaces.

The new plan for the restaurant’s construction ­— after the delay from city approval — called for groundbreaking in early spring, Broadhurst said.

When the Plaza opened in 2005, it included plans that would place an Eat’n Park near the corner of Forbes and Bigelow, Morton Brown, the city’s public art director, said in an interview last year. The original developer for the space backed out, and Eat’n Park stepped in with a proposal early last year.

For a project like the one on Schenley Plaza to move forward, it had to go through a series of approvals by the city Art Commission.

The first phase is a conceptual phase in which a general idea is presented. At this point there is some idea of the budget, intended materials and approval of the land, Brown said.

Once past this phase, if the concept is well-received, planning moves forward and more documents and designs are presented, Brown said.

This was where the Eat’n Park faced some setbacks, he said.

“The design was good, but we wanted the design to be more open and inviting — to fit in better with the landscape. We also wanted more natural materials to be used,” Brown said. “There is actually a completely green bathroom next door and we wanted the structure to fit in more with that theme.”

After Eat’n Park made the changes, the commission gave conceptual approval to the plans, at which point architects and engineers created construction documents, then re-approached the board for final approval.

Construction can begin now that the Art Commission has given its approval. But this is not the end of the commission’s involvement.

“Once built, the Art Commission re-evaluates the structure to insure that it was built as described in the approved documents,” Brown said.

Schenley Plaza — despite having University buildings on three sides — is not a part of Pitt’s campus; it is part of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. But Pitt spokesman John Fedele said the University does support the construction.

“The University was not involved, but we are pleased to see the development taking place,” he said.

Although the chain of restaurants is popular, not all Pitt students — freshman Nora Perry included — have heard of the new construction. Others thought that the restaurant might change their eating habits.

“The freshmen 15 has a new face,” Perry said after learning about the restaurant. “But I am excited about it.”

At the same time, some students, like sophomore Rob Walker, don’t view the construction favorably.

“I am not a fan,” Walker said. “Schenley Plaza is beautiful and adding a restaurant like that is only going to increase foot and road traffic in an already busy area, and it’ll almost definitely mean an increase in litter in that area.”