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Editorial: On the riverfront A panel will seek a coherent vision of development Saturday, July 03, 1999
Pittsburgh's rivers, its genesis, are also the keys to its future. That much has been agreed upon for years, by everyone from Mayor Murphy, who made transformation of the city's vacant, littered riverbanks a keystone of his race for office almost six years ago, to this newspaper, which long has advocated the need for coherent, creative planning for Pittsburgh's greatest assets.
It thus should come as no surprise that we welcome the formation of the Riverlife Task Force, which is primarily composed of private riverfront property owners, business and civic leaders, as a positive step in the right direction.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Editor John G. Craig Jr. will co-chair the 33-member panel along with Alcoa Chairman Paul O'Neill.
The task force will be charged with developing a vision for the overall use of the riverfronts that can serve as a guide for those in the public sector who will be making important decisions involving riverfronts in years to come.
After many years of being an important player in the city's industrial history, Pittsburgh's riverfronts were allowed to fall into disrepair, with pollution, industrial waste, discarded junk and just plain neglect making them unsightly and unusable.
The second problem flows from the first. Instead of seizing the opportunity to develop a plan to effectively reuse that land once it fell into disrepair, Pittsburgh dragged its feet.
Thus it comes to the "save our rivers" movement late while other cities such as Baltimore have rushed ahead, coming up with beautiful, tourism-generating waterfronts that have been acclaimed all over the world.
What little planning and development there has been has occurred in piecemeal fashion. Despite that, some projects along the rivers fortunately turned out well, such as the Alcoa world headquarters and the stunning world-class design for the convention center expansion.
The success of the convention center design in particular is due to the fact that for once, there was a coherent vision, some clearly stated goals and an intensive planning process.
Thus, it validates the direction that the region is moving in with the new task force - thinking about what it's doing, taking time to plan and to formulate an overall vision, and thereby coming up with more pleasing results.
But none of this should gloss over the challenges facing the task force. It is not clear, for example, how the task force's efforts will meld with all of the other studies and developments now under way. There is supposed to be an overall plan being prepared for the North Shore parcels between the two stadiums, although little has been said about it of late.
There also is a riverfront development plan that was released by the City Planning Department last year. Presumably it covers much of the same kind of territory that would be taken up by the new task force. And the city only recently completed a Downtown Development Plan, which refers to some riverfront parcels, too.
Will the recommendations of all of these plans conflict? And how will those differences be resolved - and by whom? And will the task force's deliberations affect the timetable for some river-related projects that are under way or in the works?
Those reservations and concerns aside, the task force should get dialogue and activity started that could result in an end product long desired by everyone: a vital, attractive riverfront that is the envy of cities everywhere.
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