Several weeks ago, I saw a sign. It was a leaflet on a storefront on East Ohio Street on the North Side, inviting one and all to a masquerade ball at the old Allegheny Social Club. The club, its name so proudly carved in stone, is all the more forlorn for having been vacant for so many years.
The party was an event of the project FLUX.
We got there early, before the shuttle buses began unloading people from neighborhood restaurants, but the place was buzzing from the start, spilling onto the sidewalk, young and young-like people with happy, upturned faces walking past trench-faced old locals frowning from behind curtained windows.
Jon and I went as ourselves, but the event was transforming. What masqueraded as an almost-Halloween party was really a gathering to celebrate the creative impulse that is charging a cluster of groups in the city. GroundZero, a parent of FLUX, is one of them. FLUX parties are held somewhat regularly, somewhat randomly, at urban sites in transition. The old social club, after years of neglect, is soon to be the new location of Photo Antiquities, a museum of 19th-century Pittsburgh-area photography.
The building was infused that night with care and life and energy, and it is so worthy of all three.
In the basement, I signed my name and number on a sign-up sheet to volunteer on behalf of the Skinny Building, a Downtown building in flux. Unaware of what I might be getting into, I carried home a leaflet and called Al Kovacik, whose name was on it.
I have walked past the Skinny Building on the corner of Forbes Avenue and Wood Street Downtown hundreds of times without knowing it was a building at all. If I had thought about it, I would have figured it was part of the Roberts 'Jewelers building.
At street level, all you see is the hideous orange and green facade of a 7-Eleven. If you look up, though, you can see that the Skinny is distinct. In most cases, you have to look up to see what, along this corridor, was worth fighting for in the backlash against the city's Fifth-and-Forbes development plan.
A group that includes 7-Eleven owns the Skinny, but if ownership could ever come from the heart, Al Kovacik would own it.
Al is an architect in the city of Pittsburgh's engineering department, but in his spare time, he, a friend named Pat Clark and a group of college students doing community service are cleaning and restoring it, preparing for its hoped-for state of grace -- an art gallery for pedestrians.
The Skinny is only as wide as Al's outstretched arms. As he stood with one palm on one wall and the other palm on the other wall, he proclaimed, beaming, "It's six feet wide," the way one might say "He's six pounds," about one's new baby.
The building, which was a deli some 50 years ago but whose history is otherwise sketchy, will be 100-years old next year. The Skinny's advocates have been displaying art and posters in the many windows that look down on a row of street vendors along Forbes Avenue. They have New Year's Eve plans for the building as well.
Al's fantasy is to own the Skinny, live in it and create a world within for the world without, "an art gallery turned inside out." It might not be such a fantasy. He loves the building, and Pittsburgh has an underrated population of youthful adult activists who want to see it and other buildings in flux live up to their potential.
GroundZero is one of a half dozen groups of energetic young adults who can see the resplendent potential in the city and are committed to uncovering it.
I hope they are at least as dogged as the old bevy of powermongering cronies and crooks who have been entrenched here for too long..
GroundZero's commitment to projects like the Skinny Building grew out of its original mission -- to work for a better plan for Fifth and Forbes, the corridor the group labeled "ground zero." Wisely, Mayor Murphy called on the group to help plan alternatives.
My fantasy is that we can somehow overcome our old, trench-faced back-scratchers who, when they want change, want it to be ordinary and homogenized. God help the young people, whom many say we don't have, do the things many say we can't do. As GroundZero's activists say of Pittsburgh, "Just shake and stir -- the ingredients are already there."
Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post- gazette.com and 412.263.1626.
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