When a North Side resident posted on social media that the redevelopment plan for the last remaining chunk of the Garden Theater block had cleared its latest hurdle — last week’s approval by the city’s Planning Commission — one person commented, “I hope this is real.”
The commission’s decision was real, but the attitude reflects that of many North Siders: a pessimism honed by 13 years of setbacks. And that’s not even counting the blighted decades before the Urban Redevelopment Authority got the theater in a $1.1 million legal settlement.
The block is bordered by Federal and Reddour streets and North Avenue and Eloise Way.
The intersection of North and Federal is the most central and arguably most anchoring intersection on the North Side. Before urban renewal, Federal ran down the hill off Perrysville Avenue straight into Downtown, lined on both sides with commercial buildings.
When I moved to the North Side in 1990, I lived in Perry Hilltop and drove down Federal almost every day. Around the corner on North, the Garden Theater was showing porn films then. It was the only life in the block it shared with huge vacant buildings. Federal looked careworn then, with a gas station, lots of little storefronts, some in use. I remember a barber and a tax accountant.
Since then, that stretch of Federal has changed dramatically, with 40 townhouses, offices and clinics of the Allegheny Health Network, a parking garage and a branch of the Carnegie Library. The handful of surviving storefronts house food establishments.
All of that happened while the Garden block had the pulse of a hibernating mammoth. In the past five years, work on two buildings resulted in TREK Development and Q Development reviving the Bradberry Apartments on Reddour, and City of Asylum turning the Masonic Hall into Alphabet City.
The history of what has and hasn’t happened within the Garden Theater block follows a tortured road of switchbacks and potholes, and if you have the will to follow it into the weeds, you can explore with a few choice stories here, here and here.
To sum it up, several developers came and went, several potential tenant restaurants backed out, there were financing hitches, water line nightmares, legal challenges, appeals and revisions and, with the ensuing delays, three 19th-century buildings adjacent to the theater deteriorated further and further. A plan to save their facades and build anew behind them was scuttled for several reasons, including cost, public safety concerns and the expiration of tax-increment financing.
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Here’s the presentation of the new plan:
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Those three buildings were demolished last year, and now that corner of Federal and North is a grassy lot inside a chain-link fence.
TREK and Q now have cleared the zoning and planning process for their revised plan — a five-story building of 56 rental apartments and two street level commercial tenant spaces. Parking for residents has been secured in the garage behind the site.
The new building would be the same height as Alphabet City.
An additional six units would fill a refurbished townhouse duplex, the Morton House, on Federal Street.
“Without further challenges, we’re prepared to move forward in the first quarter of 2021,” said TREK’s founder and president, Bill Gatti. “This corner has to happen.”
That this corner has to happen is the almost epic yearning among most of my neighbors for something to fill that void. Even the big vacant buildings, once dignified Victorians, represented a void because, in their deteriorating condition, they were reminders of neglect and nothing happening.
The plan going forward in all its details can be seen here.
Several comments against the plan cited gentrification, as if the horse is still in that barn. Others had the odd notion that a new building would somehow displace people. At least one decried the plainness of the building.
Mr. Gatti said the architects from Perfido Weiskopf Wagstaff + Goettel chose the clean lines and beige masonry so that, as big as it is, it would not hog the spotlight from the historic buildings around it.
“Our designer made the decision so that the Garden Theater, the Morton House and the Masonic Building would pop,” he said.
I like the facade of the new design, the smooth window treatments and the fact it is not showy. In contrast to many new buildings, it looks dignified.
For too long, to too many people, that corner has been an indignity, a constant narrative of two steps back for one step forward. With the possibility that the entire block will soon be productive, many North Siders are having an “I hope this is real” moment.
Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com or 412-163-1626.
First Published: July 20, 2020, 10:15 a.m.
