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Amazon primed to take all of former Sears Outlet space in Lawrenceville

David Paul Morris/Bloombwerg

Amazon primed to take all of former Sears Outlet space in Lawrenceville

Neighborhood groups concerned about impact of traffic, change in development plans

In Lawrenceville, Amazon is primed to go all in.

With business booming as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the e-commerce giant confirmed Wednesday that it will take all 260,000 square feet of space in the former Sears Outlet at 27 51st St.

It plans to use the space for a new delivery station, said spokesman Andre Woodson.

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“The new station will power Amazon’s last-mile capabilities to speed up deliveries for customers in the Pittsburgh area,” he wrote in an email. It is designed to “support the growing volume of customer orders.”

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Amazon hopes to open the station next year.

The plan represents a larger investment by Amazon in the city neighborhood than originally anticipated.

In September, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the online retailer was eyeing as much as 130,000 square feet in the warehouse, which is being redeveloped by San Francisco-based Spear Street Capital.

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The deal with Amazon also represents a change in direction for Spear Street, which had been planning to convert the warehouse that was used for decades to sell scratched and dented appliances into office and high-bay research and development space.

Spear Street officials could not be reached for comment.

But Lawrenceville community groups that negotiated community benefits with Spear Street based on plans for office and research and development space weren’t thrilled to hear that Amazon is moving in.

Lauren Connelly, executive director of the Lawrenceville Corp., said that she has worries about the amount of traffic an Amazon distribution center could generate in the densely packed neighborhood and how that would be managed.

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She also has questions about the size of the fleet and what the overall operation will look like. ‘We have concerns and we want to know exactly what is being proposed here,” she said.

Ms. Connelly said the community benefits agreement based on the original plan for the redevelopment included a riverfront trail, sidewalk improvements and a traffic mitigation plan designed to encourage tenants to use mass transit. She is hoping that stays in place.

Spear Street, she added, also agreed to commit $100,000 to make improvements to the intersection at Butler and 51st streets because of the traffic the new development would generate.

“We can only imagine that there will be a more significant impact with this being a distribution center,” she said.

Dave Breingan, executive director of Lawrenceville United, said the Amazon delivery station was news to him.

“We worked for years with Spear Street to ensure that community benefits were realized with a redevelopment on that site, from everything to a public riverfront space to meeting sustainability goals,” he said.

“Without knowing much more yet about what's being proposed, it would be very upsetting to see all that work apparently discarded without so much as a word to the community."

The Lawrenceville station will give Amazon a foothold in the city’s densely populated East End, as well as access to tech talent at the universities in nearby Oakland.

It represents the Seattle behemoth’s latest expansion in the Pittsburgh region, where it has been adding space since the city was a finalist for HQ2 sweepstakes two years ago.

Amazon opened a 1 million-square-foot distribution center in Findlay in September, where it employs nearly 1,000 people. It also is looking to hire hundreds of full- and part-time workers at a new delivery station in Coraopolis.

The company operates a sortation facility in the city’s Fairywood section, where it employs more than 500 people, and a warehouse in Aleppo. It is believed to be interested in another proposed distribution center in Churchill.

If that’s not enough, Amazon has a tech hub at SouthSide Works that involves work on its popular Alexa voice technology, machine translation and speech science.

Spear Street was expected to start renovations on the old Sears Outlet this fall.

For seven decades, the building was a Sears warehouse and distribution center after its construction in 1949. For many years, it served as an outlet to hawk dinged up appliances, making it a go-to place for bargain hunters.

Mark Belko: mbelko@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1262.

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First Published: December 10, 2020, 10:50 a.m.
Updated: December 10, 2020, 10:52 a.m.

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