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Thursday, November 04, 1999 By Diana Nelson Jones
A man is grieving in my neighborhood. His pain is palpable, and it's on a theme that's compelling me almost to distraction at this point in Pittsburgh's evolution: Art and its destruction. I tell myself, if you write about it enough, you may have some impact. Supposedly, the pen is mighty.
Charles Moore hopes the same is true of the lead pencil. He has been using it with a passion more resolute than mine, though till now, only some people in our neighborhood know what he has done. I visit him at the home of a friend of his, where there is table space for his drawings, on Alpine, a street people tell me not to walk on.
"I thought if I drew these buildings while they were still here, it might make a difference," he says, shaking his head in defeat before he gets the words out. Ten beautiful, perfect pencil renderings of doomed Federal Street Victorians lie over the dining table. Moore has a catch in his voice; he's pretty sure these drawings will be the only preservation of Federal Street.
"They are using policies from the '60s that didn't work then," he says. "Tearing down historic architecture does not improve neighborhoods. Renovating historic architecture does."
Moore is a security guard at the R.J. Casey Industrial Park in Manchester. In 1978, he got in on Mayor Richard Caliguiri's "great house sale," paying $100 for an abandoned brick on Jacksonia Street. With a $31,500 loan, he restored it.
This summer, when the first in a row of houses near Hemlock, No. 1326, was torn down, Moore took time off from work to devote his days to preservation. Thieves had started to strip the house beside it. He took his art tablet and a chair to the sidewalks and began drawing for the first time in about 30 years. "I wasn't sure I could still do it.
"A lot of kids came by. They said they'd like to draw, too. Someone came by and said this is not a safe area. A couple of prostitutes came by and talked to me. One wanted me to draw her eye."
Blueprints for the proposed development, Federal Hill, describe Federal Street as the main corridor that links the city to northern suburbs. This is fairly ridiculous, considering Interstate 279 has already done that. Federal Street begets a pretty hapless link to the suburbs -- the winding, stoplight-infested Perrysville Avenue.
What Federal Street might have been was a historic district. The city sweeps in to signify its importance just in time for the inevitable property declension brought on by years of utter disregard. By contrast, the stable, proprietary gentrification of the adjacent Mexican War Streets has taken well over 20 years to "develop," and it's still developing.
"My hope now would be that they might save 1401 and 1334," Moore says. "They could attach the new houses to them going north so the historic elements would lead."
He points to his drawings: "This one has stained glass behind the boards. This one has glazed terra cotta inside the door. This one has white marble fireplaces.
"They're tearing this one down right now. That window is gone." He painted that window bright yellow, as if a great light were shining from it.
When I leave Moore, I follow Alpine back to Arch, past guys on stoops who mutter what might be a greeting. Up ahead, I run into Randy Gilson, our neighborhood god of flowering and painting public spaces. He is renovating two houses, with plans for a coffee house.
Randy's exuberance is almost too much for one man. He hugs people he sees. He buys truckloads of flowers and plants them throughout the neighborhood in the spring.
"Don't you love the neighborhood?" he asked me. "Isn't it cool?"
"Yes, I love it," I tell him. "But I'm warned not to walk on some of the streets."
"We have to walk on all the streets," he said firmly. "We have to know them, live them, love them, socialize on them, plant on them, paint them. Otherwise we lose them."
Diana Nelson Jones receives e-mail at djones@post-gazette.com.
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