Someone driving down Lysle Boulevard past McKeesport's Locust Street garage might not look twice at the nondescript and under-used four-story structure.

But the city garage has caught the eye of officials of the Regional Industrial Development Corp. of Southwestern Pennsylvania, the group in charge of redeveloping the old National Tube steel mill site, also on Lysle, the city's main thoroughfare.

RIDC officials are talking with the city about buying the garage and using it for parking for businesses going in the old steel mill site, McKeesport Manager Dennis Pittman said.

"RIDC wants a first right," he said. "We have had some inquiries from [other] developers who might be interested as well. One guy wanted to turn it into a storage facility."

No price range has been made public, but Pittman admitted "one guy talked about offering us $100,000 for it as is."

The former steel manufacturing facility, which in its heyday in the 1950s employed around 10,000 people, sat rusting and silent after the mills closed. But in recent years, RIDC has helped bring in a number of smaller businesses and more than thousand people work there.

Tenants include EchoStar, a satellite dish provider; Huckenstein Inc., a manufacturer of heating and air conditioning systems; Camp Hill, a steel pipe manufacturer; Steel City Products, a wholesale distributor of food products; Genesis Environmental, which serves the medical industry; and Maglev Inc. A new building, Total Marine Solutions, a company which sells and repairs boats, just opened.

Pittman said some other developers were interested in using the garage as a park-n-ride facility. The garage is two blocks from the Lysle Boulevard Port Authority station.

The 420-space garage built in the bustling 1950s to accommodate shoppers and downtown workers is no longer used for vehicles. It is used only by renters who store their boats there off season. The future of the garage was the subject of discussion during a council workshop earlier this month.

Pittman pointed out that refurbishing the concrete garage, which is in need of some repair, could be a good investment. And, he said, it's is in the best interest of the city to get it up and running.

Pittman said the 47-year-old city garage would be expensive to build today. "There are just no comparables. Structurally, even if you needed to resurface the driving lanes, it'd still be worth it," he said.