This town ain't big enough for two arenas. Pittsburgh is going broke. What it needs most are more people. That means residents. Not tourists. Not sports fans or concert-goers here for the night. Residents.
So if a new arena is needed in this city -- and that case has yet to be made -- the last thing we'd want is a spare. We'd need to get the Mellon Arena out of the way so homes and offices could be built in the heart of the region. The phenomenal success of Crawford Square, the townhouse development that went up just east of the arena in the 1990s, could be replicated.
Prime real estate could be used to bolster the tax base at the heart of the region. Thousands of new residents would not need a parkway to get to work. The Hill District would reconnect with the Golden Triangle.
That's preservation, Pittsburgh.
Preservation Pittsburgh doesn't see it that way, though. Nor does Pittsburgh History & Landmarks. They are so enamored of a 40-year-old building that they want it preserved forever, and so nominated it this week for city historic designation.
Now, I kind of like the ol' Igloo myself. I remember a Bob Dylan concert there a decade ago when the roof opened to the night sky, and nobody needed a weatherman to tell which way the wind blew.
But the roof hasn't opened in years, and the Pittsburgh Penguins aren't stargazers anyway. Owner Mario Lemieux wants what the Steelers and Pirates got so recently: more luxury boxes to lure rich folks, and a little more space to sell a bit more schlock to a few more of the rest of us.
A new arena is far from a lock.
It's hard to see how the Penguins can reap much more. Ticket prices are already high. The team already has its own arena. Besides, the city has a Denver boot of a lease, strong enough to have survived a bankruptcy. The implied threat of leaving town, always there in any negotiation, is a tough one to make here. Where's the better hockey town?
The Sports and Exhibition Authority is broadly interpreting its three-year-old agreement with the Penguins to "endeavor to complete" a financing plan for a new arena by the end of next month. The authority is also looking at the possibility of renovating the Igloo.
Even if the preservationists' point is moot, it's still out there. Rob Pfaffman, a local architect and board member of Preservation Pittsburgh, says that's partly the point. Preservationists seek to lift the conversational threshold about what's best for our city.
Inspired by the Italian cities he knew as a student, which were built on the ruins of Roman towns, Pfaffman says, "The best cities are the ones that transform themselves rather than revolutionize themselves."
So Pfaffman suggests finding another use for a 17,000-seat arena, such as housing or retail. That this has never happened before in the United States does not deter him, but it does make him the new whipping boy on sports talk radio, giving Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy a few hours' break.
Pfaffman is a bright and thoughtful guy, and his monologues on the organic nature of cities are poetic. He points out that the arena itself was built for light opera, not ice hockey. But at the end of the day, giving Mellon Arena historic status would make Pittsburgh less organic, not more so, because it would hamper the community from deciding freely what to do with a critical site.
Given the hurdles before a building gets historic status -- the Historic Review Commission, the Planning Commission and City Council -- it's hard to imagine the nomination getting through. So this may have been more of a gift to column writers and talk show hosts than anything, like the proposal 30-odd years ago to convert Forbes Field into apartments, classrooms, a restaurant and such.
"If we can't come up with a good reuse," Pfaffman said, "then we might have to look at demolition. We shouldn't justify keeping a building purely for the sake of keeping that building."
Bingo. Pittsburgh has plenty of "once was" plaques already. If we keep Mellon Arena around, it needs to be as the place you go to see sporting events, concerts and Kermit the Frog. If it's no longer that, its purpose would be gone while it stands on one of the best pieces of developable urban real estate in the country.
Use it or lose it.
Brian O'Neill's e-mail address is boneill@post-gazette.com.
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