City to clean up new site

The few students who are lucky enough to catch the 59U bus may think of the industrial… The few students who are lucky enough to catch the 59U bus may think of the industrial heritage of the shopping centers they are going to. However, another site in Pittsburgh is going to join The Waterfront and other areas as part of a long list of redeveloped brownfields.

Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato and Kathleen McGinty, the secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, announced Sept. 1 that the former site of the American Electric Company in Manchester – a neighborhood on the city’s North Side – will receive a $275,000 Growing Greener II grant from Governor Ed Rendell.

A brownfield is a former industrial site that has not been used because it is seen as too polluted for commercial or residential uses.

Governor Rendell also designated the site for assistance from the Brownfield Action Team, which will expedite the approval of the site for cleaning and redevelopment.

According to Tom Hardy, executive director of the Manchester Citizen’s Corporation, cleanup of the site that was a former transistor factory entails primarily the removal of heavy metals.

The state grant will cover the entire cost of the removal of the pollutants. After the cleanup is complete, the Corporation will work with a developer to build detached housing units with a minimum of three bedrooms.

“This is a good opportunity for the neighborhood,” Hardy said of the Manchester development. “There’s been a greater interest in living in city neighborhoods lately, and we want to tap into that energy and interest.”

The houses will be built in a “neo-traditional” style, or one resembling the architecture of the surrounding neighborhood. The development will reconnect two sections of Juniata Street, which currently is interrupted by the brownfield.

It also will be bisected from north to south and east to west by two new alleyways. The units will have garages facing the alleys, some internal and some external, and will sell in the range of $200,000-$300,000.

The American Electric site joins several other vacant industrial lots in the city that have recently been redeveloped. Most recently, and notably, was the South Side Works.

According to the Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority, the former South Side Works of LTV Steel was developed in a series of phases between 1996 and 2004 into a mixed-use site featuring retailers such as Urban Outfitters and H’M, chain restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory and McCormick and Schmidt’s, and housing.

Also notable to this development was the reopening of the Hot Metal Bridge, connecting Second Avenue near Bates Street in Oakland to South 29th Street in the South Side Flats.

Though the bridge currently is accessible only to motor vehicles, a pedestrian walkway is planned.

In a vein more similar to that of the redevelopment of the American Electric site is Summerset at Frick Park. The site was formerly a dump for slag, a byproduct of the production of steel.

In conjunction with continuing efforts to remedy the pollution of the Nine Mile Run creek watershed, which runs through Frick Park, a “new urbanism” development of 710 homes was built adjacent to the park in the city’s Squirrel Hill and Swisshelm Park neighborhoods.

“New urbanism” is a school of urban planning emphasizing traditional neighborhood design, walkability, and mixing commercial, office and residential space.