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Schenley Plaza
Ninety years ago, Schenley Plaza was a gully, St. Pierre's Ravine, that separated the new Carnegie Institute from the even newer Forbes Field. Linking these two major civic amenities was the elegant stone arch of Bellefield Bridge, which carried the continuation of Bigelow Boulevard toward the Park just at the point where the Schenley Memorial Fountain now rises. Even though the Bridge was grand, there was the feeling that it did not provide a sufficiently impressive entrance to the Park, and with the decision in 1911 to place a monument to Mary Schenley somewhere in this area, the idea grew that a great public square was what was needed. Accordingly, the Ravine was filled, burying the Bellefield Bridge, which sleeps now beneath the Fountain, and a national competition was held for proposals for the site. By the time of the competition deadline, 45 entries had been received, and in June of 1915, the submission of Horace Wells Sellers and H. Bartol Register, both of Philadelphia, was declared the winner. The designers' vision gave Pittsburgh its finest example of the superb public spaces so characteristic of the City Beautiful movement. The winning design underwent some modifications even before completion, a stage not reached until the early 1920s, when there is evidence that the essential multiple rows of trees had still not been planted. At that point the Garden Club of Allegheny County intervened and secured the services of James L. Greenleaf, one of the nation's foremost landscape architects and sometime president of the American Society of Landscape Architects. It was he who gave us the splendid stands of sycamores that define the Plaza's east and west flanks and that remain the space's most salient design feature. The large, rather amorphous area that stretches between Pitt's Hillman Library and the Carnegie Public Library along the south side of Forbes Avenue is still officially called Schenley Plaza, but it has lost almost all of the elements that once did indeed distinguish it as a plaza, i.e., a great, articulated, public space. The site is now more easily identified as a parking lot, and, indeed, students refer to it as just that, unmindful or unknowing of the erstwhile intention for this space. Demands to accommodate more and more cars, both moving and parked, have gradually obliterated the coherent ordering of the ground surface. Materials have been altered, scale and proportion changed, and with that, the urbane character of the Plaza itself has grown mean and tarnished. The sycamores have been slowly dying of disease and age, and the space itself has lost its character through the removal of dead trees and the planting of other, inappropriate material. The function of the Plaza as the great hub and point of reference for Bellefield and its once glorious Civic Center has all but disappeared. We tend to think of the original Plaza as the link between the Park and Oakland, whether one travels along the Forbes -Fifth corridor or along Bigelow Boulevard. This sequence is essentially north-south in its orientation, yet the Plaza also can be understood as the defining junction, on an east-west axis, between the commercial and residential portions of Oakland and the institutional, monumental image of Bellefield proper. The Plaza could again fulfill its intended role. Redesigned in a way that revives and revises Sellers' and Register's plan, a new Plaza could once again serve as the main entrance to Schenley Park, itself restored in the years to come to something like its original richness. The new Plaza can become the means of giving definition and cohesion to the motley group of buildings and functions that has grown up around it and can recover both its beauty and its centrality in what remains an essential, Pittsburgh-defining neighborhood. The revival of the Plaza according to the accompanying plans would provide a renewed and useable public space for the people of Oakland while still accommodating the need for short-term parking. The broad spaces underneath the restored groves of trees on either side of the Plaza would be provided with flexible seating, food kiosks and other amenities to allow the Plaza to function as a "people place" as well as a great visual signature piece for the Oakland/Bellefield district.
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