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Places: City's riverfronts could form another gateway to the west
Saturday, May 27, 2000 By Patricia Lowry
Forget, for a moment, the Point. Alex Krieger wants Pittsburgh to consider the Y.
The Y -- Krieger's name for the riverfront area bounded by the Fort Pitt, Fort Duquesne and West End bridges -- should be the focus of any plan to transform the city's riverfronts, Krieger argues. The Point would be a piece of the action, not the whole show.
"The central basin is really unattended-to," Krieger said in an interview this week. "It's beautifully defined by the three bridges. The next century of Pittsburgh should deal with this as an identification," an opportunity for place-making on an international scale.
Krieger is the Cambridge, Mass., architect commissioned by the Pittsburgh Riverlife Task Force to come up with signature ideas for the riverfront. Here's one: Krieger envisions 15 tall light towers "spacializing" the central basin -- "something that connects you in a Pavlovian way to Pittsburgh."
This would, of course, be something more than your standard lollipop light pole -- a structure unique to the city, and one that could evoke its history.
This is simplicity itself. By day and by night, the light towers would line the rivers and define their union and, if so interpreted, call attention to the role of the Forks of the Ohio as the gateway to the west.
Y oh Y, I've often wondered, have we so long let St. Louis hog the gateway limelight? In the 1750s, the French and English were battling for control of the Point a decade before St. Louis was founded because they knew the land was the key to European settlement of the interior. When it began in earnest, keel-boat and flatboat building became early industries on the Mon, in 1777.
Patricia Lowry is the Post-Gazette architecture critic. Her e-mail address is plowry@post-gazette.com
Between 1811 and 1835, 304 steamboats were built in Pittsburgh out of a total of 684 boats on all of the western rivers. The first steamboat to reach St. Louis -- the Zebulon M. Pike -- didn't arrive until 1817. Odds are the Pike was even built in Pittsburgh.
Whatever Krieger does here should celebrate the city's unique place in history. How far back do we go? What story do we want to tell? How do we communicate that story with physical structure and how do we interpret it? Before Krieger's team gets too far along, that's a dialogue Pittsburgh should have.
Krieger also envisions the riverfronts beyond the Y in a kind of conversation with each other, each relating to the opposite shore -- like the South Side and the Mon Wharf.
"We're going to press the city to think more boldly about the Mon Wharf, even though it's only 40 feet wide," Krieger said. He also wants the Station Square Sheraton (and its future addition) not to turn its back on the river, and he has some thoughts about how that can be achieved.
Krieger didn't mention most of his ideas when he spoke briefly to about 250 members of the city's architecture and art communities on a Task Force-sponsored river cruise Wednesday evening. Instead, near the end of the cruise, he invited architects to talk to him about theirs.
"We want to refocus your attention on the very confluence of the rivers and make them truly extraordinary," Krieger told the group. "We encourage you to tell us how we might transform this."
Although the event didn't promise -- or deliver -- a dialogue, architects grumbled into their Chardonnays about the missed opportunity for a mini-charette as they listened to Mayor Murphy's familiar Al-Mon-O pep talk. These was, after all, a gathering of some of the city's best, brightest and most up to speed, not a boatload of conventioneers.
In recent weeks, Krieger's team had gotten its feet wet by quick-crafting a plan for the North Shore. He proposed sinking Gen. Robinson Street beneath, rather than running it above, the entrance to the plaza in front of the Steelers stadium and pulling it back from the river, creating a broader area of parkland.
Krieger's plan had a hurry-up-and-do-something quality about it, and it wasn't as detailed or well-thought-out as EDAW's planned North Shore park, which evokes the old Pennsylvania Canal for a block and a half perpendicular to the river.
Designed with much citizen input, EDAW's park incorporates several other suggestions also gleaned from public meetings. The design offers a bit of this and a bit of that, but because there isn't enough of any single element, it provides little in the way of high-drama, high-impact place-making. Charleston, S.C.'s, Waterfront Park also has a sequence of varied, pleasantly innocuous spaces, but it is made memorable by bronze maps showing the city's evolution. Some aspects of EDAW's park likewise should have a sui generis character.
Because the EDAW park is so far along, Krieger was able to effect only a modest change: The road will hug the stadium more closely and jog to the north to capture a little more land for a block-long section of the park, in front of a new amphitheater to be owned by the Steelers. Over the next six to 12 months, he and the Task Force will focus on the North Shore's street environment. It must be top-notch if these human-scale streets and their amenities are to hold their own against the mammoth highway that divides them.
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