Penn Avenue: A neighborhood brought back to life

When Jason Sauer bought an empty storefront at 5015 Penn Ave., he and his friend Jeff used to… When Jason Sauer bought an empty storefront at 5015 Penn Ave., he and his friend Jeff used to sit out front with his German shepherd at night to keep away the nightly crime that infected the neighborhood. His apartment was broken into twice.

“The street was pretty wild. We just set out shop out there,” he said.

Three years and a lot of construction later, Sauer’s once run-down and empty store front is now the art gallery and music venue Most Wanted Fine Art, and the crowds passing by outside aren’t hookers and crackheads. They’re art lovers and young 20-something’s bouncing from one bar or gallery to another.

“It’s made a 180-degree turn,” Saur said of Penn Avenue. “There’s people walking around with their dogs. They’re holding hands. It’s great.”

Most Wanted Fine Art’s story coincides with the street it grew up on, the 4800-5500th blocks of Penn Avenue that run through Friendship. Through the ’90s, Penn Avenue was plagued by crime, drugs and prostitution, before the Penn Arts Initiative was formed in 1998 as an attempt to use art to turn the neighborhood around.

Since its start in ’98, the initiative has reduced the vacancy along Penn Avenue from 78 percent to 21.37 percent and converted nearly 150,000 square feet of vacant property into artists’ homes and workspaces. It’s awarded more than $60,000 to about 60 local artists and youth programs as well as distributed more than $100,000 in grant money and $130,000 in loans to artists.

The startling success and creative solutions the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative have found in reviving Friendship are pretty revolutionary and unique.

According to Josette Fitzgibbons, the citywide Mainstreets coordinator for the Urban Redevelopment Association, the utilization of artists in the community and the recognition of what its community needs gives Friendship a good shot at not just surviving, but flourishing.

“They recognized a need and a trend in the arts community, the need for inexpensive work, gallery and, in some cases, living space, and built it in a dying business district,” she said. “They know their market, and they know what is and isn’t feasible. They approach business district revitalization in a creative and not always traditional manner.”

The initiative was named in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s top 50 Cultural Forces of the Decade. It has been cited in textbooks as a case study of revitalizing neighborhood, and Sauer recently spoke at a conference in Cleveland about it.

THE START

The Initiative was born of a partnership between The Friendship Associates and The Bloomfield Garfield Corporation, which came up with a strategy and a mission for the project and hired two full-time staff members to make it happen.

The Initiative’s mission statement is “to revitalize the Penn Avenue Corridor, between Negley and Mathilda avenues, by using the arts to enhance public perception of the district, instill pride in the neighborhood, foster inter- and intra-community ties and establish an artist’s niche.”

The two non-profit organizations decided that the way to revive the community and fulfill its mission statement was to focus on the major artery that ran through the community: Penn Avenue.

According to Sarah DiLeo, The Penn Arts Initiative marketing director, the Friendship community was full of 400 artists that they considered a great asset to the community and a slew of vacant buildings that were hindering it. They decided that they wanted to combine the two to create a new arts district in the city.

Through grants from Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment center, private foundation and state funding, the Penn Arts Initiative bought 16 buildings, tax free, as it’s a non-profit.

It then turned the buildings around by selling them to artists, like Sauer, and provided the artists with loans, to renovate them into galleries and businesses on the ground floors and apartments and studios on the upper stories, said DiLeo.

From there, as the new storefronts grew, other projects sprouted up to further supliment the neighborhood, like murals, new housing, artists loans and additional grants.

Having been with the Initiative from the start, DiLeo has seen the great transition its made.

“Just to see it grow has been really great,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing to be a part of.”

HOME FOR THE ARTS

Now, it’s the first Friday of the month, and the Initiative’s monthly event, Unblurred, has people roaming in and out of open galleries on Penn Avenue with no reservations about the neighborhood’s safety.

“We started Unblurred just to get people walking up Penn Avenue,” DiLeo said. “People used to be too afraid.”

Penn Avenue is now home to 22 galleries and theaters in its 4800-5500 blocks, including Garfield Artworks, Pittsburgh Glass Center and Dance Alloy Theater.

Outside the walls of galleries, the community of artists has created several pieces of public art to further spruce up the avenue. Since 2001, seven murals were painted on the walls of various businesses.

The initiative’s latest project, Green and Screen, also focuses on the aesthetics of the street. DiLeo explained that it’s trying to “fill in the missing pieces of the block.”

It’s spent $58 million on fixing up the facades of buildings along the avenue and landscaping parking lots and empty spaces on the avenue.

HOMES FOR PEOPLE

As well as making Penn Avenue a home for the arts, the Initiative wanted to make it a home for people, as well.

And like the galleries, it started with the artists. The grants that the artists received covered the renovation of the entire buildings, not just the bottom floors.

After, the artists started building housing, and apartments first started influencing landlords to stop splitting old Victorian homes into seven or eight apartments. By creating larger spaces, they hoped to up property value and draw in families rather than renters.

And property values are up in the neighborhood. DiLeo estimates that Friendship property sold for about $30,000 to $50,000 in the late ’90s, whereas now Penn Avenue properties are valued at about $150,000 to $500,000.

Another major achievement for the community’s housing needs was getting rid of some of the absentee landlords in the neighborhood.

In an attempt to control the crime and get the landlords to take responsibility for the property, in one case members of the Friendship community flyered the landlord’s neighborhood with signs that said, “Did you know your neighbor is an absentee landlord?” The landlord sold the property soon after.

DiLeo said that after that incident, the property was renovated and is now one of the “hidden gems of our neighborhood. It’s a great story, too.”