The Waterfront

By Stacy Lee,
McKeesport Daily News

“When I see the word ‘flyover,’ I sizzle,” said Munhall Mayor Raymond Bodnar. “Whether it be Duquesne no matter where it is McKeesport. It’s not because I begrudge anybody.”

The mayor has been writing letters requesting the 26-foot-wide East flyover bridge in and out of the Waterfront be widened for the past nine years.

He said the East flyover bridge in Munhall was on the PennDOT and Southwest Pennsylvania Commission agendas, among others, to be widened in the early part of the decade and the project never materialized.

The SPC is the region’s forum that plans and prioritizes the use of state and federal transportation funds designated to a 10-county region around Pittsburgh.

“This has been nine years for me for crying out loud,” Bodnar said. “There is no money for it. It gets put off every year because other projects have a higher priority. The Rankin Bridge took priority along with the Homestead Grays Bridge.”

Bodnar, who also serves as Steel Valley Council of Governments president, said there are only two ways into the Waterfront from Route 837.

“If something happens to the Amity Street entrance in Homestead, you have real problems down there,” he said. “For instance, when one of the cars with hazardous materials derailed down there last year.”

Bodnar said the Route 837 area, including the Rankin Bridge, the East flyover bridge and Ravine Street, is the site of much congestion.

[ Full story available at: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/dailynewsmckeesport/s_701620.html ]

Last link in Great Allegheny Passage

By Jon Schmitz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Allegheny County and Sandcastle Waterpark are expected to announce an agreement within days that will allow completion of the last missing piece of a biking and hiking trail linking Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

“I really expect we’ll have a formal announcement in the next couple days,” said James Judy, vice president of operations for Palace Entertainment, owner of the park.

“I believe that is probably going to be the case,” agreed county spokesman Kevin Evanto.

The deal would cap years of negotiations aimed at finding a way to accommodate the trail on the park’s narrow strip of land between a railroad line and the Monongahela River.

The roughly one-mile stretch is the last link in the 150-mile Great Allegheny Passage from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Md., where it connects to the C&O Towpath to Washington.

When all is complete, it will be possible to bike about 335 continuous, mostly flat miles from Pittsburgh to the nation’s capital without interference from motorized traffic.

The former owners of Sandcastle for years resisted efforts to build the trail through the park, saying there wasn’t enough room.

“The next time you visit Sandcastle take a close look at the tight access road and try to visualize a 10-foot-wide trail running between the road and the railroad tracks. I hope you will conclude that not having the available land wide enough for a trail does not make us stubborn,” said Peter McAneny, then-president of Kennywood Entertainment, in a 2008 letter to the Post-Gazette.

[ Full story available at: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10194/1072356-455.stm?cmpid=HBEHTML#ixzz0tZOYFJWt ]

By Karamagi Rujumba
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In a field of knee-high grass behind the hulking frame of what is left of Carrie Furnace — an expanse of blast furnaces that once produced as much as 1,200 tons of iron per day for the former Homestead Works of U.S. Steel mill — sits a rusted torpedo car.

The cylindrical container made of steel, together with hundreds more, was at one time an indispensable tool in the steel producing days of the Mon Valley. Back when massive steel factories still churned plumes of smoke over much of the region, torpedo cars didn’t sit rusting away.

They were used to treat and transport iron via a hot metal rail bridge that runs across half of the Carrie Furnace site in Rankin and Swissvale, over the Monongahela River, and into Homestead where it was made into steel.

That era is long gone, but Allegheny County, which in 2005 bought the 168-acre land parcel where the Carrie Furnace had operated for 102 years, is in the final stages of environmental cleanup and expects to start marketing the land for redevelopment this year.

[ Full article available at: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09138/970906-56.stm ]

By David Green
Morning Edition

Betty Esper spent 36 years working at U.S. Steel's Homestead Works. The mill closed in the 1980s. A few years later, Esper began her second career as Homestead's mayor. Photo (c) David Green/NPR

Some of the hardest-hit communities in this recession are the towns and cities that have lost jobs in the automobile industry — or worse, saw an entire auto plant close.

It’s a predicament the steel towns around Pittsburgh know well. They had to search for new identities after the steel industry buckled in the 1980s.

During a recent visit to the Steel City, I sought out some of the people who brought Pittsburgh through its hardest times to see if there were any lessons to learn.

From Industrial Mill To Waterfront Shopping

In the Pittsburgh suburb of Homestead, I found longtime Mayor Betty Esper. She spent three decades working in U.S. Steel’s massive Homestead Works, a sprawling mill across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh that shut down in 1986. She was elected mayor several years after the mill closed.

[ Full story available at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102457292 ]

By Maria Sciullo
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Representatives from several Steel Valley communities got a preview of a proposed high-tech surveillance system this afternoon at the Waterfront.

Megapixel cameras mounted at key locations throughout the retail complex, which covers Homestead, West Homestead and Munhall, would be able to record and feed video to police stations.

The computerized program will not only be able to scan car license plates, but alert the police should it read a plate number already in the authorities’ database of “known” offenders. Thanks to improved computerized imaging, faces and other details on the images will be much clearer than shot by standard analog cameras.

[ Full story available at: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09014/941703-100.stm ]