Finding Allegheny: No Car Needed

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 19 th 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.

It's an idea that has been floating around for some time. Suisman reinforced 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 itself and its 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 with 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 should not include bringing automobile traffic into it. 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 with each other rather than just drive through.

The notion of removing a section from Allegheny Center Mall is a good one. When you are walking from downtown, you find no obvious way into the center of Allegheny, and no direct physical way at all 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 than renewal projects were at renewing it. In some ways 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 the good that remains in 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.

Eric Miller

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