Legend has it that an ex-newspaper pressman, in a bid to avoid ex-wives and bookies, once lived in the nooks and crannies of the former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette building on the Boulevard of the Allies for months at a time, frustrating attempts by managers to find him.
But if the current owner gets its way, living in the old five-story structure that once housed two daily newspapers in Downtown Pittsburgh could become the norm, not an oddity.
DiCicco Development Inc. is considering apartments as part of a mixed-use conversion that also could include office and retail. And it sounds like residential at this point is getting a serious look.
“The market clearly is stronger for multifamily development than speculative office, that is certain,” Sam DiCicco Jr., firm principal, said Monday in weighing potential reuses.
DiCicco bought the 200,000-square-foot building from the PG Publishing Co. for $13.25 million in December 2019 with initial plans to turn it into a Class A office property.
Included in the purchase of the 1.65-acre site was an adjacent lot that can accommodate a new tower of up to 400,000 square feet.
But the deal was made just months before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. The crisis sent employees to their homes to work and upended the Downtown office market, which has yet to recover.
Against that backdrop, more and more developers have been looking to convert older Downtown office buildings into apartments, including the owners of the iconic Gulf Tower on Grant Street and Three Gateway Center on Liberty Avenue.
Mr. DiCicco said his firm is still “waiting a bit longer” before committing to either one use or mix of uses.
“This is a timing question, not so much an either/or. It’s also a matter of speculative development versus preleasing,” he said, noting that if an office user makes a commitment, it could change the approach.
But he pointed out that market conditions also could “influence the decision to weight one use more heavily than another.”
The building floor plates, he said, are very large, about the same size as those in the 64-story U.S. Steel Tower, Pittsburgh’s tallest building. As a result, they could be used for a variety of purposes, from residential to retail or office.
In addition, the building’s “robust” superstructure is strong enough to support five more stories on top of it,” Mr. DiCicco said.
“Being on the city skyline, across from the park, and having excellent ingress/egress both by road and by public transportation position the property uniquely compared to others in and around the CBD [central business district],” he continued.
DiCicco has yet to set a timetable for redeveloping the building, which has been vacant since 2015, when the Post-Gazette moved its editorial operations and some business units to the North Shore.
“We will move as quickly, or as slowly as we must in response to the market forces. While performance of one asset class over another will inform our ultimate development strategy, influencing our timing at the moment is something a bit harder to measure, and that is the overall vibrancy of our city,” Mr. DiCicco said.
Should DiCicco end up converting the building, or at least part of it, to apartments, it will become part of a residential surge sweeping through the Golden Triangle.
In all, there are more than 1,500 units potentially in the pipeline. That’s on top of the 3,300 units that already exist in Downtown.
At the 44-story Gulf Tower, as many as 215 units are being proposed. At the 25-story Three Gateway Center, it’s more than 300.
Beyond that, the former GNC headquarters at Sixth Avenue and Wood Street is being converted into 254 units; a redevelopment that includes the YWCA building on Wood could yield as many as 300; and an old PPG warehouse on Fort Duquesne Boulevard will house 142.
On the Boulevard of the Allies, the former Post-Gazette building was originally constructed by Scripps-Howard, publisher of The Pittsburgh Press, in the 1920s for $4 million.
It sold both the newspaper and the building to the Post-Gazette in 1993 following an eight-month strike.
The building’s massive presses, which could be viewed by passersby on the boulevard, were dismantled in December 2016 after first being put in use in 1927. For decades, workers printed afternoon editions of the Press and the morning Post-Gazette at the location.
As part of any redevelopment, Greg Victor, CEO and founder of the International Free Expression Project, is hoping to use the first floor of the former Post-Gazette building as a hub for the organization.
Among the offerings, that space would feature art installations, educational experiences, arts performances, food and beverage booths, a maker space, readings, lectures, and film screenings.
First Published: October 11, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: October 11, 2022, 11:25 a.m.
