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Artistic gamble on Penn Avenue A Friendship-Garfield coalition is trying to encourage artists to buy or lease buildings on a 10-block stretch. Monday, December 14, 1998 By Dan Fitzpatrick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
From the windows of her second-floor dance studio in Friendship, Nicole Allison can see Penn Avenue wind quietly through the East End.
Storefronts and parking spaces sit empty. Buildings sag under years of neglect. Drug dealers and prostitutes wait for the evening.
Allison's studio, though, is whirling and twirling. Wooden studs stand from floor to ceiling, awaiting plasterboard. Construction workers move around, preparing for the January opening of Allison's Visionary Performing Arts Academy. Allison plans to teach jazz, tap, ballet, modern dance and African-American dance history to adults and children.
The move to Penn Avenue was a "huge risk," said Allison, a soft-spoken 25-year-old who left a dance program in the Hill District to start this, her first business.
She had no money and little business experience. Even so, Allison is the type of person neighborhood organizers want to attract to Penn Avenue.
The Penn Avenue Arts Initiative, a collaboration of Bloomfield-Garfield Corp. and Friendship Development Associates, is trying to encourage artists to buy or lease buildings on a 10-block stretch of Penn Avenue, renovate them and use them for studios, storefronts or lofts.
Artists can dip into a $150,000 fund for loans and grants. An anonymous foundation provided the money. The Penn Avenue Arts Initiative also provides technical assistance, helping people find bank loans and city development funds.
The goal is to draw from hundreds of artists who live in the East End and connect the neighborhoods of Friendship and Garfield together in a "zipper district" on Penn, their dividing line. The idea is to create a funky, alternative section of Pittsburgh akin to Boston's Jamaica Plain New York's SoHo and Washington, D.C.'s Adam's Morgan -- big-city neighborhoods where artists are able to flourish inexpensively.
Allison, for example, received a $15,000 loan and a $2,600 grant to renovate a 3,900-square-foot space above a tattoo parlor and a hair salon. She will lease the studio for $565 a month.
But can culture save Penn Avenue?
Fifty years ago, the street bulged with bakeries, bars, butchers, pharmacies and shops.
A mix of German, Italian, African-American and Irish people worked at the nearby foundries in Lawrenceville, lived in row houses and met on Penn Avenue for talk, food and action.
Even in its heyday, Penn was a tough, "brass knuckles" avenue, said neighborhood activist Rick Swartz, whose father owned a variety store on Penn that doubled as a gambling parlor.
Gangs from Morningside and Garfield would meet on Penn for a street fight, West Side Story-style. Local boxers lived in the neighborhood. A tough ex-mayor, David Lawrence, spent windy summer days on Kite Hill, a two-block walk from Penn.
When the jobs disappeared and people fled for the suburbs, Penn Avenue went the way of countless main streets across the United States, with plywood and metal bars replacing store windows and front doors.
Drugs, prostitution and other crime increased. By the 1980s, first-floor storefronts on Penn from Mathilda Street to Negley Avenue were 50 percent vacant.
Recasting Penn Avenue as an artists' promenade, though, is a roll of the dice. The neighborhood is taking a chance with speculative entrepreneurs instead of national chains.
But that's the idea.
"We don't want a Starbucks," said Becky Mingo, executive director of the Friendship Development Associates. "A Starbucks is too normal."
In some ways, Penn was making the transformation to artistic incubator naturally. For years now, the 10-block area from Mathilda to Negley has boasted two bookends of creativity in Dance Alloy, a local dance troupe, and the Upstairs Theater.
The Upstairs Theater Theatre closed recently, but the Penn Avenue Theater quickly replaced it.
Park Place Studios, a group that builds theater sets, is on Penn, and Judy Penzer painted "The Bride of Penn Avenue" mural on a building near Graham.
The idea of a coordinated arts district gained steam in 1993, when gallery owner Jack Hutchings purchased a dilapidated building at 4931 Penn for $30,000. He spent $90,000 of his own money converting the first floor to an art gallery and the second floor to a loft, where he lives. He put a patio on the roof, where he can see Oakland on a clear day.
Hutchings also purchased the buildings on either side of 4931 Penn. He is converting one of them to a furniture store and loft space.
On the same block, Robin and Frank Richardson converted a building into office space for their business, City Finishes. The Richardsons let the Penn Avenue Arts groups use their second floor as a workshop for neighborhood children, who filled the rooms with drawings and poems. Across the street, developer Eve Picker is redoing a two-story building she purchased for $7,500 into work and living space for artists.
The next block over, ceramic artist and painter Sigrid Shafagh now works in a Victorian home at 5018 Penn that she purchased and restored with the help of a local bank and the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative.
Neighborhood businesses like what they see.
"I am game for trying anything," said Lou Spinelli, manager and co-owner of Armstrong Auto Body, a Penn Avenue fixture since the 1930s.
Carl Kirschbaum manages Carl's TV, a shop that sits near Winbiddle Street and Penn. "Bringing any new business here is good," he said. As for artists, "it's a great idea," he said. "If it works, hooray."
Eventually, backers of the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative hope to enlarge the district to include East Liberty and other nearby neighborhoods. One obvious link is to the new artists' lofts in the Artists and Cities' Constantine Pontiac Building.
The Penn Avenue organizers "want to think bigger about how this idea can galvanize the East End," said Rob Stephany, a development coordinator for Bloomfield-Garfield Corp.
The hope is that people will think of Penn Avenue as the new Carson Street, only hipper. Expect to see impromptu jazz sessions, community arts festivals, more murals and poetry readings.
"It really is a perception thing," said Hutchings, the owner of Garfield Artworks.
Penn Avenue is "a much nicer area than it sounds."
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