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Developers plan Hill District office building with shops
Tuesday, March 30, 1999 By Dan Fitzpatrick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Two black developers want to build a new Hill District office building at the pivotal Lower Hill intersection of Center Avenue and Dinwiddie Street.
Irvin and Janicee Williams, owners of a financial services company in the Hill, are negotiating for a plot of land between the Hill House community center and the vacant New Granada Theater, once an entertainment spot for such jazz greats as Billy Eckstine and Erroll Garner. Across the street from the office building site are the new AUBA Triangle Shops, a collection of small stores that rose from the ashes of the Phoenix Hill shopping center.
If built, the Williams' building would rise three stories, span 30,000 square feet and cost $2.7 million. Retail shops would go on the first floor. Called One Hope Square, it would be the second and largest development venture thus far for the Williamses, who in 1997 built and leased a 15,000-square-foot office building at 1801-15 Centre Ave. called Williams Square. Among the tenants there are the Minority Enterprise Corp. and the Keystone Venture Capital Fund.
Williams Square, which cost $1.3 million, is a block west of the One Hope Square site and next door to the Crawford Square housing development, which has brought several hundred new homeowners and renters to this once-depressed neighborhood. Almost half of the money for that project came from the city's Urban Redevelopment Authority. Janicee Williams, the lead developer on the Williams' second project, would like help from the URA on One Hope Square, too.
Janicee and Irvin Williams, both of whom grew up in the Hill, would supplement any money from the URA with bank loans and their own money.
"We will do whatever it takes to make this project work," said Janicee Williams. With Williams Square, they received help from Dollar Bank and the Community Loan Fund of Southwestern Pennsylvania. The Hill Community Development Corp. was also a partner.
The preferred site for the new office building is now a lot dotted with an auto body shop and a variety store. Janicee Williams, who has been talking to landowners since November, hopes to gain control of the site within the next few weeks and break ground this summer. If not, she and her husband are also eyeing an empty lot further east on Centre Avenue surrounded by an old hotel, barber shops and a drug store.
But Janicee Williams said the preferred Centre and Dinwiddie site would be an easier sell, with tenants able to see Downtown skyscrapers such as USX Tower, One Oxford Centre and One Mellon Bank Center. She wants to fill the first floor of One Hope Square with stores that sell shoes or clothing that people in the Hill now have to buy elsewhere.
"Our mission is to bring something back to our community," she said.
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