New Collaboration to create the largest film production facilities outside of California

From The Post Gazette

"The best film and video production facility for movies outside Southern California will reside in Pittsburgh with the collaboration of a Strip District production studio, Carnegie Mellon University's entertainment technology program, Paramount Studio Group and the company that produced the digital imagery in the movie "Avatar," .

A big part of this project is an expansion of CMU's Entertainment Technology program, allowing students to take classes at the new studios in The Strip District. When completed, the studios will be the largest sound stage outside of LA.

Part of Historic Strip Produce Terminal To Be Taken Down

Plans are in the works by the owner of the iconic wholesale produce market on Smallman Street to tear down about a third of the building as part of a larger plan to better connect the Allegheny River waterfront.

It (Buncher) is seeking to tear down a section of the terminal between the 16th Street Bridge and 17th Street, or about 528 feet of the 1,478-foot-long building.

Even as it described the terminal as a "Pittsburgh icon," the URA argued that its length and unbroken nature "inhibits the development of the Allegheny River frontage."

"The combination of the terminal and the 16th Street Bridge creates barriers that limit redevelopment of the area to the 'gated community'-type project, and reduce the opportunity for public access to the river," it wrote in its application to the state.

"Removing a block of the produce terminal allows the riverfront connection, and allows the new development of the riverfront parcel the visual and physical connection to the rest of the city that will allow the new development the greatest chance of success."

Plans for the property include constructing a 75 unit residential building as well as offices and retail. The existing-Pittsburgh Public Market which now occupies the space would move to the remaining part of the building.

Generally, I strongly support the plan. People need to appreciate history while being honest about the current Strip which does not work very well for wholesalers (who originally depended on rail terminals) or support thriving retail beyond very limited hours.

Developing a more normal street grid and integrating the Strip better with the river and the Downtown will improve both by making the area more dense and accessible to pedestrians. When will Buncher start to do the same thing with the hideously ugly superblock buildings it owns on Liberty Ave?

Car Free Saturdays In The Strip? Worth Thinking About.

OK, I am at the start of this going to predict that this is not happening any time soon.

Laura/Lolly @ Reimagine An Urban Paradise, comes to Pittsburgh with a new perspective and I find myself referring to her posts because, she sees the city somewhat like I do and also because, there just aren't many people posting on these subjects at all here, let alone actively debating them.

She, like me was inspired and envious of New York's now very popular and successful move to turn close Broadway in Times and Herald Square to cars. Something I posted about at least once. She wonders if we couldn't do this on busy Saturdays along a stretch of Penn Ave in the Strip.

"If you’ve ever walked down this packed shopping district on Saturdays in Pittsburgh you’ve noticed how crowded every spot is. Traffic moves slowly because there are so many people and those cars could easily be diverted onto the parallel streets.

If they can move cars off the main street of America, we can do it on the main street of Pittsburgh."

Yes, there are strong similarities. Both Times Square and the Strip have hectic active shopping areas in which cars, vendors and people fight for space (although we all know at other hours the Strip can be quite dead). However, the differences are also very big. Closing these small areas to cars was the easy reward New York could reap for having a dense, much more transit oriented city.

Over 1.5 million people live in Manhattan, with likely at several hundred thousand within a 30 block walking distance of Times Square. Many, millions more fill it's midtown office and shopping districts almost all of whom use a form of transit other than cars. In fact, I think, the stats show that 90% of the people in Times Square on a work day got there through some other form of Transit, from Subway, LIRR (To 34TH, Penn Station) ; Metro North (To nearby Grand Central), PATH (To Penn Station) City Bus, Express Bus, Ferry, Amtrak or by walking. Even so, the remaining ten percent was taking the bulk of space. (Although in honesty, NYC would have traffic issues just from delivery and needed service vehicles on a busy weekday)Even if I'm off on these numbers I'm not way off.

Sadly, Pittsburgh is not in that position and most people shopping in the Strip likely drove there.

While I support the idea and the thinking behind it, I'm pretty concerned that a big dead space of parking would be required around the pedestrian shopping area. If it was popular, People might demand a huge permanent amount of parking. Well, that's sort of what they are doing now anyway. But we have to move away from and make the city work for city residents and businesses.

This is part of my response to Lolly.

"If one actually wants to make lots of progress here, a lot more details and meat have to be put on these bones.

What happened in NYC, came after a large consensus already existed among business and property owners that this might be OK for them. They know, their customers are not driving into Times Square. NY or at least Manhattan, has generally engaged in a series of policies which enhanced the benefits of density, and thus progressively maximized the use and value of it’s land. We have done very much the opposite.

We need to get beyond the green and traditional leftist moralising and talk about why moves like this are likely to not only improve the quality of life for city residents, but increase business, lower costs, and increase property values. Denser development that extracted more value from the land would also allow for decent city services with lower tax rates.

Did you experience last years snow? Any guess as to what it cost to plow all those remote hills? The whole situation was absurd, since it was so obvious what the problem was. Narrow streets were blocked by parked cars and couldn't be cleared. Telling people to get them off the street for even a few hours was too politically difficult. Meanwhile, much of the best flat land in the city, is wasted on stadiums, surface parking lots, or highways.

The previous car oriented policies have so clearly not worked. In spite of efforts to hide it, the difference between The South Side and The North Side should be obvious to all.

What exactly is Transit Oriented Development and why is it so smart for Pittsburgh? That’s what we need to talk about.

Still, one needs to be somewhat understanding of Pittsburgh’s history. These flat areas were the central sites of Pittsburgh’s industry and many people still equate them with jobs, jobs, jobs. Even though the number of good jobs in the few trucking depots and warehouses in the Strip today is not very significant. A lot of folks still think they should wait and a big new mill will open. (Even though modern steel mills don’t need many workers)

Also, Pittsburghers for the same reason saw most of these places as dirty and undesirable. Notice that houses become fancier and more elegant the further one gets from the old waterfront mill sites?

The North Side’s “Millionaire’s row is a partial exception because it began to develop after Pittsburgh was industrial, but before the truly giant mills came into being in the late 19TH Century."

One very good idea that might help the Strip while enhancing density and promoting pedestrian shopping and development would be a free or very low cost mini shuttle or bus circulator running from The Downtown through Lawrenceville. even if it only ran a few hour it would give people idea of what is possible.

New Grocery Solution Points to Larger City Woes (Or, Our Right to Grocery Stores at the Center of Sustainable Communities)

Yesterday, I read the surprising news that the Strip District grocery store, Right By Nature, has started a delivery service in order to address the lack of grocery stores available to Downtown and Hill District residents. Don't get me wrong, I find the action by Right By Nature very kind, in a very Pittsburgh way--they're stepping up to provide a service to help their neighbors. But as a city, aren't we all sufficiently ashamed of the Hill District's situation (as Vanessa German quipped in her show "Testify," "If you live in a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, you have to get on a bus to find a grocery store"), and as a city, isn't this a very outdated solution to an embarrassingly long-running problem (the Hill has gone decades without a real grocery store)?

When I say outdated, I'm talking about delivery service. I'm talking about individual cars on the road, and the oil we use to power those vehicles, and how that oil is getting more and more costly. I believe, and I'm not the only one, that the writing is on the wall for the car. No amount of electric power or corn oil is going to do; the car thing is just not sustainable for too much longer. We've got to start turning our cities into places of walkers and bikers and public transit riders.

The humane and green solution to this grocery problem is to provide grocery stores in neighborhoods. Period. Places we can each get to on foot, if we choose. But for that, we need to create and sustain neighborhoods that can support grocery stores, which brings me to my real fear for Pittsburgh: density. Will the city of Pittsburgh ever re-acquire enough density to do what cities do best--concentrate living and working and services in areas connected by real sidewalks, safe bike paths, and viable public transit? Just because we lost population in the steel industry downturn, doesn't mean we can afford to turn our city into a suburban carland indefinitely. Paul Krugman writes of a middle-class Berlin full of trains, bikes, and close local shopping, versus an "America stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas." What would it take to fill many more of Pittsburgh's beautiful old houses with residents, to make frequent, appealing light rail service reach many more outlying areas, to convince Southwestern Pa. to put less effort into maintaining the lifestyle of its suburbs and spend more effort to populate the energetic city those 'burbs revolve around?

Again, kudos to Right by Nature for their neighborly action. But in the larger picture, grocery delivery must be seen as a stop-gap solution to a problem of low-density, which threatens the long-term future of our city.