The Why of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh is the most livable city again, at least according to Places Rated. It's also been listed as number three in a list of cities of the future. I remember once a few years back being told by a fellow in the Bahamas that I was from the "future" when I told him I lived in San Francisco. Now San Francisco is only second most livable and doesn't even rank on the cities of the future list.

The rankings that place Pittsburgh at the top are actually pretty consistent. Pittsburgh has never ranked lower than 14 and been named "most-livable" twice. Just last year the Economist Intelligence Unit named Pittsburgh, tied with Cleveland, as the most livable.

So how do we explain the frequent response of "why" when local find out they have a visitor in their midst.

They know why, we don't.

I guess if Pittsburgh were a laundry detergent, the most popular would be the most sold. That's apparently not the case with cities though. It was only a few weeks ago the news came that some sixty thousand people voted with their feet and left Pittsburgh between 2000 and 2006. Had they stayed to see the rankings they might still be here. Despite last year's rankings, folks also left Cleveland.

Maybe they didn't know what they had.

While many are leaving, or dying, others are coming in. I see them all the time in the real estate industry. Folks from California, Maine, Florida, Maryland, New York and elsewhere, in numbers are looking at Pittsburgh. Just because the population numbers are going dowwn, doesn't mean tumbleweeds are going to be blowing along Grant Street. Its just that the number coming in isn't at a point where the tide will turn and result in a net increase yet.

Those coming in know the why of Pittsburgh. It's certainly got a look to it. Streets wind up and down green hillsides the sun rises over three rivers and shines on a cluster of steel and glass skyscrapers. Neighborhood streets and a downtown theater district bustle with activity. Housing is inexpensive and it has some of the best sports teams and cultural institutions in the world.

I stopped by a house on Troy Hill a friend (from Oregon) had bought. They were energetically tearing it apart. "This is great," my friend said. "Thanks." I told them Pittsburgh has a lot of neat stuff, like houses and infrastructure, it just needed more people with some energy.

They know what they have.

It's hard to keep that energy level when you've been here a few months or years, and that's our challenge. Sometimes folks who have been here for years look at the energetic newcomers and shake their heads. They know how it is and their quiet world is interrupted. Sometimes Pittsburghers ask "why" when they should be asking, "why not?"

Hey folks, we gotta believe, we gotta be welcoming, and we gotta change.

Each time I travel I am re-energized about Pittsburgh--I am reminded of the why of Pittsburgh. I'm writing this from Nashville, Tennessee. Its sunny here and the city has a lot of energy. There's no shortage of construction--the number of condos going up in downtown Nashville make the construction in downtown Pittsburgh look pale in comparison. Parts of the downtown are lively and there's a beautiful park along the Cumberland River. Still as I walked along Broadway (Nashville's Broadway), past the concert stage, Tootsie's Orchid Lounge and looked out at the General Jackson paddle boat on the Cumberland, I couldn't help but think experience lacked something compared to what I see leaving Heinz Hall and walk across the Roberto Clemente Bridge towards a late game at PNC Park. Even better are the nights when the symphony runs long and you can hear the boom of fireworks from inside Heinz Hall.

A few blocks from PNC Park and I'm in some of the best neighborhoods in most any city in the country. Row after row of Victorian and even civil-war era townhouses, brick and stone, a beautiful Art-Deco hospital, all surrounding a park bigger, even if less appreciated than Boston Commons. These are features the urban Nashville wannabees can't dream of having.

Just looking at data, all this may not have ever been seen by the folks who named our city most livable once again. Yet we're still #1!.

We don't always see what we have from inside. To us its just Pittsburgh. Its the tunnels and the bridges and the Steelers. Wake up! Pittsburgh really is a livable city, even the most livable city-- more than we could ever expect from a city of its size and cost is here and somehow it gains the recognition as most livable sometimes in spite of ourselves. They know the why of Pittsburgh. We need to rediscover it.

A little more on Allegheny CenterThe urban-renewal experienced by urban America from the 1950s onward is generally accepted today as failed policy. Where once urban streets were closed off to auto traffic and traffic loops and underground garages added, a new paradigm would bring back a street grid. Today “restoring the grid” is an often-heard catch phrase when taking about re-revitalizing urban areas.

Allegheny Center in Pittsburgh is one such place. In the 1960s, the “center” of a city once known as Allegheny was redeveloped. All but a few buildings were removed and replaced by apartment buildings, office towers and a retail mall. Allegheny Center was to be a city within a city.

The street grid was removed from Allegheny. Through-traffic was prohibited, instead directed onto a circle that swept around the center. The center then was a park-like space. Apartment residents and mall residents could access the mall, and keep their cars in lots on the outer-edges of the circle. Those who were not residents of Allegheny Center could access the retail mall either by walking into the park area or by parking in a garage located under the retail mall.

While Allegheny Center today is far from vacant, the city within a city is without retail. Most of that had closed by the early 1990s. By the turn of 21st Century talk began of opening the East-West axis in the center to vehicular traffic. More recently proposals to “restore the grid” have come forth. In the case of Allegheny Center, a full restoration of a grid would mean significant demolition of buildings that are occupied, generally attractive, in good repair and not a half-century old.


Original plans for the City of Allegheny show a checkerboard of sorts of squares placed some distance from the Allegheny River. The layout of Allegheny appeared to be a fresh breath of order in a chaotic landscape, especially when looking across the river to the chaotic street patterns of rival city Pittsburgh.

The center four squares of the thirty-six square grid were reserved for public use and included a park, a space that would come to be occupied by a neo-classical city hall. The idea of public use was strong and one of the squares seemed well-suited to Andrew Carnegie’s desire to construct the first public library in the United States. The fourth square would for many years be occupied by a market house.

In contrast to many of its eastern counterparts and cities along the Ohio River, Allegheny resembled a New England town, complete with a public square and public buildings at the center. It stood in contrast to the chaotic, commercial cities with irregular street grids and commerce and industry as their central focus.

In the 20th Century Allegheny grew to be more like neighboring Pittsburgh. More and more of the squares came to be occupied by commercial buildings and the density increased to the point to where any resemblance to a New England town was lost. Department stores, diners, theaters and other commercial enterprises served the needs of the growing city.

Today when nostalgic talk about “restoring the grid” is uttered, it’s the commercial Allegheny that’s referred to, not the spirit of the original city.

Yet as we see with retail development today, the places it occupies go in and out of fashion. Entering a department store our grandparents might have known is an anomaly. When city planners started looking at Allegheny in the 1950s, many of the stores had become vacant, underutilized and deteriorated. This is a normal process in the retail cycle. Likewise the mall that was to replace the commercial Allegheny Center existed for some decades before its time too had ended. We look at it today as a failure, yet the mall at Allegheny Center lasted longer than many of the strip mall businesses in our suburbs and longer than many of the businesses in our downtown—without the street grid. Its this portion of Allegheny Center that most needs attention rather than the entire complex.

That doesn’t in any way negate the value of the street grid. The parts of the Allegheny City Center grid designers wish to restore today are in fact still in place. The issue is not the grid exactly, but the facilitation of automobile traffic through the grid. Part of the grid is off limits after mall hours (the mall is now an office building) and that is indeed an impediment to the vitality of Allegheny City Center.

A testament to the value of such a grid design with central squares is the fact that remarkably, despite attempts of complete destruction by powerful forces, the central four “public” squares of Allegheny essentially exist today. More it should be added that the original plans for Allegheny did not provide for interior intersecting “streets”. Any sort of vehicle it appears would have had to go around the central four squares in a diamond pattern.

The original Carnegie Library building is still there. While the city hall was demolished when Allegheny was annexed by Pittsburgh, a planetarium was built in its place and now is occupied by the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. The square that was home to Diamond Park is still a park space, although the current design aesthetics are less than appealing to those with classical sensibilities. Sadly the space formerly occupied by the Market House is now partially occupied by an apartment building, but there is ample green space around the building to preserve some sense of it as a public space. The center of the space is a crossroads for pedestrians visiting the center, from apartment dwellers to visitors to the Children’s Museum, the adjoining New Hazlett Theater and the various office buildings.

Its not so important to "revive" the Allegheny City Center of any specific time period. While the retail portion needs work, it is important to recognize, however that the original Center of Allegheny for a large part is intact. It just needs some refining and reaching for its aesthetic roots.

Pittsburgh is a triumph of the better than average place. Excelling at all of the nine categories once again put Pittsburgh at the top of the Places Rated Almanac. It's the first time any city has been at the top twice, the first being 1985. Pittsburgh's worst ranking since 1981 has been 14th. The guide is traditionally published every four years. The last edition, however was eight years ago. San Francisco ranked number two and Philadelphia five.
MORE

I'd like to briefly respond to the Mayor's new efforts aimed at keeping young people in Pittsburgh. In its recent report the census bureau didn't mention young people leaving as a reason for our continued population loss since 2000. The Mayor is not the first person to see the bank robber and shoot the teller, however. For years we've been talking about ways to keep Pittsburghers from leaving when what we're missing compared to other cities is in-migration. Healthy young people move around and healthy cities have a constant flow of in and out migration. If you want to keep young Pittsburgher's here, you need a committee of one: a Fidel Castro-style dictator. If you want a healthy, living city we need to look outside ourselves and find ways to encourage in-migration as well as out-migration.

Finding Downtown Without Your Car A few years back my friend and I were walking around Pittsburgh’s Northside and I was describing everything that had been demolished. At that time the future of some late 19th Century buildings known as the Garden Theater block was even less certain than it is now. “It’s all that’s left of downtown (the earlier name for the Northside).” I said. It would seem a light went off in my friends mind. “That’s what’s wrong with the Northside,” he exclaimed, “It lost its downtown.”

A small theater once known as Carnegie Hall was the location for a lecture turned April revival about the future of the old center of Allegheny City. The theater, built by Andrew Carnegie, was almost filled—a large crowd for something as mundane as an urban planning lecture. Clearly there is a certain passion out there for the topic, and a yearning for the old days when Allegheny really had a center.

Throughout the presentation dramatic graphics showed original plan maps, the old days, urban renewal in the 1960s and present day Allegheny Center. Allegheny started with a grid centered by a public square and surrounded by a public commons. It would seem a plan that would produce a beautiful city, one with more form and grace than the neighboring city of Pittsburgh.

Not to be outdone, Pittsburgh would eliminate any competition when forcing not only annexation but eventually urban renewal on Allegheny. Today the result is a half-empty, uninspiring office mall, a quiet center, an unattractive and ignored public square and a wall that seems as much an attempt to keep Alleghenians in as to keep Pittsburghers out.

The presentation by architect Doug Suisman aimed to enliven Allegheny and remove the barriers that block the path that leads from Allegheny to Pittsburgh.

An idea that has been floating around for some time, Suisman reinforced the idea and modern popular notion of restoring the street grid and again creating the thirty-six original squares of Allegheny, bringing cars and foot traffic back into the center. Further, Suisman suggested cutting the wall—or in practical terms, removing a section of Allegheny Center Mall to allow Federal Street to connect from North to South. He also proposed adding infill buildings to bring back the density in Allegheny, rebuilding a market house and converting an abandoned library (Carnegie’s first) into “Allegheny Hall,” as well as restoring the name of Allegheny and street names.

Many of these ideas seem to have merit, and undoing urban-renewal projects is certainly the established paradigm these days. It’s also a paradigm I’m much more at home in than one of creating urban suburban atmospheres with plenty of parking.

Still, the ideas seemed to stem from a desire to restore the lost downtown as a separate, proud city in a nineteenth century context than a realization of what Allegheny is today.

First, today the idea of a “downtown” Allegheny is not nearly as important as a “center.” Second, the original “center” was a public square in days before streets were filled with automobiles, trucks and traffic. Restoring the center then need not include bringing automobile traffic into the center. Moreover, the original concept of the streets Suisman noted as being “four streets named Diamond,” are not unlike the traffic circle that surrounds the present-day Allegheny Center. So, instead of bringing traffic into the public square Suisman wants to restore, reinforce the notion of a “public” square where people can interact rather than drive through.

The notion of removing a section from Allegheny Center Mall is a good one. When walking from downtown there is no apparent way into the center of Allegheny and no direct physical way when the mall is closed. Again, the need is to have pedestrian access unrestricted and inviting. I question the need to invite and encourage vehicular traffic into the park-like setting.

Susiman noted that a good city is built block by block, lot by lot and has a diversity of interests. That’s entirely true, but present day Allegheny Center has no more potential for that than it does of again being a separate city. There far fewer owners of Allegheny Center today than there were squares in the original plan. Unless you raze everything and start from scratch as they did in the 1960s, there isn’t a way to restore that effect of having a multitude of stakeholders.


Restoring public transit service to the center of Allegheny was also a proposal. The photos all showed streetcar lines. Bringing streetcars into Allegheny Center would be an ideal. A historic streetcar line running on Federal from downtown or east-west on Ohio Street would indeed enliven the center, and all of the neighborhoods it traverses for that matter, but we don’t need to restore vehicular traffic to accomplish that.

Allegheny is not what it was in 1906 and attempts to restore it to that might not be any more successful at restoring it than renewal projects were at renewing it. In some ways in its present park-like atmosphere is more like Allegheny in the 1830s. Restoring Diamond Park, pedestrian access, some retail including a market house, the name Allegheny and even public transit are all laudable goals. Yet modern adaptations to it should recognize Allegheny for what it is now as much as any other time period. Adaptations need not necessarily include the 20th Century adaptation known as the motor car.