This 1960 photograph shows the area that could become a new town center for East Liberty, with East Liberty Presbyterian Church at its heart. The tall office building at the corner of Penn and Highland avenues, next to the Highland Building, has been replaced by a PNC Bank branch. Click photo for a map, from the development guidelines, which shows East Liberty Square comprising the streets and buildings surrounding the church. Clockwise from the top, the streets are Penn, Highland, Baum and Whitfield. Drawing courtesy and copyright Rothschild Doyno Architects.

Back in the day, the East Liberty Carnegie Library was a beacon that beckoned us to cross dangerous terrain -- the urine-scented tunnel under the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks -- and rewarded us with a magnificent Neoclassical building stacked with the more daring adventures of Nancy Drew, Sue Barton and the Hardy Boys, all waiting to be checked out and devoured.

Some of the neighborhood fellas walked to work at Nabisco -- cracker packers, we called them -- then took their sweethearts to a movie at the Liberty Theatre, where a gigantic American flag made of red, white and blue light bulbs waved on the facade.

All gone.

But let us not cry again over spilt buildings and the sweet, vanished aromas of chocolate chip cookies. There is a new vibrancy in East Liberty, fed by new shops, restaurants and businesses, new sources of investment capital and new collaborations among community groups. There is a new plan to guide development, one that identifies the roles of East Liberty's main streets and reinforces connections to its adjacent communities. It also suggests the creation of East Liberty Square, evoking a town square around East Liberty Presbyterian Church.

The plan is the polar opposite and final undoing of the 1960s urban renewal, which turned the business district's peripheral streets into a four-and-more-lane noose called Penn Circle and bracketed Penn Avenue, remade into a pedestrian mall, with poverty. The town square concept, which suggests creating a plaza in front of the church along Penn Avenue, is an exciting opportunity but one that also raises a caution flag, even though there is no intention to close the street or prohibit traffic.

The retail strategy is to continue to strengthen the edges of the business district and work toward and within the center, building on two established customer bases -- the hip-hop shops around Penn and Highland and the design businesses that have staked out the 6000 block of Centre Avenue.

New money, new stores

From the arched windows on the sixth floor of the Liberty Building, which the indomitable Eve Picker is renovating into airy live/work lofts, you can see just how close East Liberty is to Shadyside and Highland Park. But at street level, when the graffiti-covered security gates roll down over Penn Avenue storefronts at nightfall, it can seem a world away from Shadyside's still-bustling Walnut Street and the leafy residential enclaves of Highland Park.

That is changing.

On Baum Boulevard across from the church, the Shadow Lounge's coffeehouse atmosphere and diverse music and art performances are bringing a dynamic mix of people of all ages, races and incomes that, at night, spills onto the sidewalk. Around the corner, on Highland, the Red Room Cafe and the Ethiopian restaurant Abay also are drawing an eclectic crowd.

It is, in part, a natural, market-driven expansion; after all, Walnut Street's retail, arts and entertainment district already had spread to two other Shadyside shopping districts along Ellsworth and Highland avenues, in the kind of slow, organic evolution that is especially welcome because it is seen as sustainable.

Bill Wade, Post-Gazette A Virgil Cantini work, "Joy of Life," sits outside East Liberty Presbyterian Church on South Whitfield Street. In a development plan for East Liberty, the church is the focal point of a plaza that is home to shops, restaurants, outdoor cafes, public art and entertainment. Click photo for larger image.

But the leap across the Highland Avenue Bridge was helped along with a clever bit of financial engineering called the East End Growth Fund, which supported the Whole Foods market project with loans and a recoverable grant. Whole Foods has gotten people from all over the city and suburbs back into the habit of coming to East Liberty, once the state's third-largest shopping and entertainment district.

A project of the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh and the Local Initiatives Support Corp., the East End Growth Fund has invested more than $5 million in loans and recoverable grants to proj-ects since 2001. The figure includes more than $1.2 million raised from local foundations, which leveraged almost $4 million in additional funds from National LISC. The fund's East Liberty investments include a $428,745 loan to Picker and her Liberty Building partners.

It also supported the new development plan, which is a series of guidelines commissioned by East Liberty Development Inc. (with funding and technical support from the Community Design Center) and produced by Rothschild Doyno Architects and Brean Associates. Shaped in community meetings and now under review by the city Planning Commission, the document would allow growth to happen in a positive and predictable way, benefiting the entire neighborhood rather than just a single developer or business.

A regional Main Street

"This is where Centre and Penn converge," says Rob Stephany, standing at the intersection of two of the city's main arteries, "and there's no there there."

Stephany, ELDI's director of real estate, is just yards from where the Liberty Theatre stood on the edge of the railroad tracks. Behind him is the Penn Circle high-rise; across Penn Avenue are the Port Authority transit station and the former Kingsley Center building, just about where the H.J. Hays stationery store, with its blue-haired saleswomen, and the Cameraphone Theater, with its blue movies, used to be.

Stephany, who grew up in the North Hills and later lived in the East End, wants to see signs of retail life again at the eastern gateway to the East Liberty shopping district. A Target store where the Penn Circle high-rise now stands would be ideal, Stephany said, and serve as one national retail anchor, along with another on the block bounded by Penn, Beatty, Euclid and Ansley, where half of the East Mall high-rise now sits.

Two of the high-rises -- Liberty Park and East Mall -- should be demolished early next year; the still-occupied Penn Circle high-rise won't come down for several more years, until new, human-scale, mixed-income housing, designed by UDA Architects for the land between the Liberty Park high-rise and East Liberty Boulevard, is complete.

The development plan envisions Penn Avenue's return to prominence as a regional main street, with offices and apartments above first-floor shops and restaurants. While rumors persist of Wal-Mart's interest in the Nabisco site, Stephany believes "a Wal-Mart just outside the district would suck the life out of it."

On the opposite corner, ELDI and developer Steve Mosites have an agreement to purchase the former Kingsley Center building. Erected as a temporary, one-story location for Mellon Bank when its monumental, Neoclassical building was demolished, the concrete block structure has spent several decades looking as if it's wearing its innards on the outside. The development plan calls for a three- to seven-story, mixed-use transportation center on its site with adjacent structured parking, developed with the Port Authority.

Just seven minutes from Downtown on the busway, "It's a wonderful location for some kind of headquarters or back offices," said Stephany, acknowledging the soft market in the next breath. "The most important thing is that it create a sense of entry into the district."

Centre Avenue would be extended to Washington Boulevard via a renamed, two-way Penn Circle and Negley Run Boulevard and attract shoppers from Aspinwall and Fox Chapel to a Target and to the design shops in the 6000 block of Centre. The Penn-Centre intersection and Penn Circle's conversion to two-way traffic there is scheduled for construction in 2006-'07.

Baum Boulevard, building on existing development like the Spinning Plate artists' lofts, would showcase art and technology. Broad Street, which recently lost two nuisance bars and gained two child-care centers, would become a neighborhood main street. Highland Avenue, meanwhile, would be the "East End connector," linking Shady-side to East Liberty with small shops and restaurants.

A square with roots

At the heart of the district is East Liberty Presbyterian Church, which architect Ken Doyno, who wrote the development guidelines, sees playing a role similar to the European cathedral -- the focal point of a plaza that is home to shops, restaurants, outdoor cafes, public art and entertainment.

"The big idea is to have the area around the church feel more like a piazza that you go through rather than a building that you drive past," Doyno said. "The center -- the church -- has the sculptural architecture, which is an incredible testament to those who preceded us here in Pittsburgh, and the outer perimeter has the activity of the here and now -- the community."

But there are challenges, says Andrew Moss, the architect who was hired to create a vision plan for the new town center, to be called East Liberty Square.

"The doors to the sanctuary are locked during the day, while in Europe the doors are open all day. And the bell tower would be a tourist attraction," offering views of town and country. And while the church contributes to the spiritual and social life of the community, "retail likes to have stores on either side of the street."

The square, perhaps demarcated with special paving, would extend from the church to the facades of the buildings that surround it, with parking on both sides of the street, an improvement. Curbs might be replaced with bollards. Moss also envisions a plaza along Penn Avenue in front of the church, with seating, sculpture and a fountain. If that sounds a lot like what was installed in the 1960s, at least no one is talking about closing that section of Penn Avenue to traffic and parking.

Moss said one idea, however, is to narrow the five-lane street to four -- two lanes with parking on both sides -- to gain space for the plaza. But any talk of narrowing Penn Avenue should be greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism and an aspirin: Keeping your main artery open and flowing freely, after all, was the prime lesson of the failed pedestrian mall.

At a meeting last Thursday evening at the church, Moss and Stephany presented the East Liberty Square concept to about 20 stakeholders from the surrounding buildings, kicking off a collaborative process that could result in a plan by Thanksgiving. Moss said that while the square concept was well-received, some thought the plaza should be one of the last pieces to be realized.

"It really is important that the entire four blocks around the church be the public space," he said. "One of the main challenges is to have all of these property owners manage to develop and improve their properties with some sense of cohesiveness and quality."

A Pittsburgh native who moved here from Denver to open a local branch of Semple Brown Architects, in which he is a partner, Moss will develop the plan at his new office a block away, on the first floor of the Liberty Building, which he moved into last Friday.

On the edge of the square, interior designer Pat Navarro is wrapping up the renovation of a two-story building he purchased about 15 months ago at 5935 Baum Blvd., next to the library. In March, he moved his office and 10 employees there from rented space on Walnut Street. The former novelty shop will house a reception, conference and gallery space on the first floor, where Navarro plans to stage occasional design-related exhibits.

On the facade, he'll incorporate a large, terra cotta medallion of a laurel-wreathed head that his father, contractor Pat Navarro, rescued from the demolition contractor when the Liberty Theatre was taken down.

Piece by piece, East Liberty is coming back.