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Wednesday, August 07, 2002

By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Scotch Bottom may rise again.

	Lisa Kunst Vavro, of the neighborhood group Hazelwood Initiative, speaks with Ray Gindroz of Urban Design Associates during a tour of the old LTV site in Hazelwood yesterday. At left is Bob Cornell of Colliers Penn, the company handling the sale of the property for LTV. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

In the early 20th century, Scotch Bottom was a bustling residential section of Hazelwood, wedged between Second and Hazelwood avenues and the Monongahela River, said Lisa Kunst Vavro, a leader of Hazelwood Initiative, a neighborhood group.

But in the 1940s, that section was taken over by a steel mill in Hazelwood and later became part of LTV Steel's coke-making operation site. The houses were razed and Scotch Bottom became a parking lot for workers at the mill.

But now that four foundations and a regional development group are close to becoming the new owners of the sprawling industrial tract along the river, Scotch Bottom could be turned back into a residential area, Vavro said yesterday during a tour of the 178-acre parcel.

The Regional Industrial Development Corp., which has redeveloped old mill sites in Duquesne and McKeesport, is working with the Heinz Endowments and the Benedum, Richard King Mellon and McCune foundations to buy the LTV site for $10 million.

"The foundations have joined together in this unusual effort to set a national standard for brownfield development," said Maxwell King, executive director of the Heinz Endowments. A brownfield development is one that reuses a former industrial site.

The plan is to turn the long stretch of riverside property into a mixed-use development that would include housing, commercial buildings, offices, public parks and marinas and, perhaps, light industries.

King and RIDC President Frank Brooks Robinson took news reporters and photographers on a tour yesterday of the old mill, which LTV shut down in 1998.

U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Youngstown, Ohio, still must approve the land sale because LTV filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2000. Robinson says he's hoping a closing on the sale can be held within 60 days.

After more than two years of discussions with LTV, Robinson said, "we are delighted to move forward to consider the future of this strategic riverfront site," which offers a view of Downtown buildings two miles downstream.

So far, the state Department of Environmental Protection has certified the land as being free enough of industrial pollutants to be used for nonresidential purposes.

LTV has been cleaning the site, as well as taking down some old mill buildings there. Some buildings will be left standing and remodeled to house offices or restaurants. Further remediation of the land will be necessary before housing can be built, Robinson said.

Vavro said the Scotch Bottom area should be able to accommodate housing now because it was never used for heavy industrial purposes. She noted that there already are homes farther to the east, between Second Avenue and the river.

A planning committee that counts among its members city and foundation officials, Hazelwood residents and architects from UDA, a local firm, will be involved in coming up with new uses for the site, Robinson said.

The city will have to approve zoning changes before anything new can be built. He hopes to have some definite plans for the land within several months.

One question that must be answered is whether the proposed northern leg of the Mon-Fayette Expressway will traverse the Hazelwood site.

City Councilman Bob O'Connor, an expressway supporter, said the highway could be situated closer to Second Avenue -- and to the existing railroad tracks nearby -- so as not to be a major detriment to reusing the land along the river.

O'Connor said he didn't want the expressway to cut off the riverside land from the Second Avenue commercial area the way railroad tracks in Homestead cut off the new Waterfront development from that town's older business district along Eighth Avenue.

The eastern portion of the former LTV site in Hazelwood is wide, with a lot of land between the proposed highway and the river. The western portion of the site, closer to the Hot Metal Bridge, is much more narrow.

There isn't much land between Second Avenue and the river, and the sound of cars whizzing by on the Mon-Fayette Expressway would be hard to mask from nearby buildings.

The northern leg of the expressway would enter Hazelwood from Braddock and Duquesne to the east. It would be the northern end of a 65-mile highway stretching through the Mon Valley down to West Virginia. About half of the expressway is already built.

Robinson said that some "mitigation measures" must be taken to shield the Hazelwood neighborhood from the negative effects of the proposed expressway. One such measure, he said, would be to "depress" the highway about 25 feet below grade, with "covers" such as park land or parking lots at grade level. This would allow people and cars to get from Second Avenue by traveling over the new highway to reach the portion of the land closest to the river.

But Vavro said she was still opposed to building the highway.

"I feel it will sever [the new development on the old mill site] from the rest of the Hazelwood community," she said.

Putting a four-lane highway through Hazelwood, terminating at an interchange with the Parkway East at Bates Street, would dump 34,000 additional cars a day onto the parkway, which is overloaded now, she said.

Tom Barnes can be reached at tbarnes@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1548.