John Beale, Post-Gazette From left to right, Nancy Fitzgerald, Carole Walsh, Mary Beth Steisslinger, and Darrell Rapp work on proposals for plans for the entrance to Frick Park during a meeting Saturday at the Center for Creative Play. Click photo for larger image.

Friends of the Nine Mile Run Watershed welcomed a world-renowned firm from Uberlingen, Germany, to a two-day workshop at the Center for Creative Play in Swissvale over the weekend, and a standing-room crowd turned out.

Atelier Dreiseitl, a design firm that specializes in landscaping with water, has joined Cahill Associates of West Chester, Chester County, and Rolf Sauer & Partners of Philadelphia to propose aesthetic and sustainable solutions to erosion and pollution now plaguing Nine Mile Run.

Called the Regent Square Gateway Project, the proposal would address the problems of excess run-off that floods sewers, making the stream a health hazard where it empties near the Frick Park portal, behind the Center for Creative Play on South Braddock Avenue in Swissvale.

Designers presented ideas to more than 130 people Friday night, and before the crowd disbanded, Marijke Hecht of the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association said, "Let these ideas rattle around in your head tonight, maybe in your dreams."

The designers returned Saturday morning, to much the same crowd, for the public comment phase of the project. They were asked for their ideas on what they want the landscape on and around the center property to look like years from now. All seemed inspired to believe that storm-water management can be a beautiful thing.

The area proposed for landscaping includes the play center, which is in a former Foodland at the Parkway East's westbound entry ramp at Edgewood-Swissvale, its concrete parking lots, retaining wall and hillside, and an old brick road rutted with trolley tracks that lies between the building and the highway ramp.

The area carries down to a chain-link fence with a sign that reads "Welcome to Frick Park" and culvert that brings Nine Mile Run to daylight.

The groups settled into an hour of creative play, filling a dozen tables, looking over maps, making lists, uncapping markers, listening and talking, chins in hands, gesturing and drawing, leaning into each other, rethinking and enhancing.

"Remember, the key thing is to reduce the storm water that gets in the sewage system," Herbert Dreiseitl said. "We want the water to soak in the way it did before we showed up on the Earth. Your fantasy and creativity are required."

The 12 groups delivered, beautifying the ugly concrete retaining walls with waterfalls; creating water-noise sculptures near the parkway; using the trolley tracks to frame a water canal with greenery all around; and adding a footbridge, pedestrian bridges over roads, a vegetation-covered roof and a way to get up to it.

To divert water, they specified use of porous asphalt, rain catchers, water sculptures, pools, canals in stepped-down formations and lots of greenery.

Most of the groups agreed that the Frick Park entrance should be highlighted.

At one point, table five's members were leaning together as if in a huddle. Seth Wilberding, a graduate student in landscape architecture at Penn State University, was half lying on the table, his teeth pressed into his bottom lip and his eyes ablaze. He is writing his thesis on the topic of the artistic expression of storm-water management.

"As soon as I heard he was coming," he said, meaning Herbert Dreiseitl, "I and a colleague jumped in the car and came to Pittsburgh."

"The energy in this room is fantastic," said Darrell Rapp, an engineer who lives in Regent Square. "The key thing will be to keep the momentum. This is a long process."

The Atelier Dreiseitl firm designed Potsdamer Platz in a high-density space in Berlin, gave Chicago City Hall a green -- vegetation-covered -- roof, turned an industrial area in Portland, Ore., into a park, and has designed water playgrounds and water sculptures throughout Europe.

The Nine Mile newsletter calls this collection of designers "a veritable dream team."

The dream has been brewing for more than a decade, said Jon Danzak, a board member of the watershed association.

"So many people say, 'What'll happen in six months?' but it takes a longer perspective."

The watershed association, which formed in 2001, has installed 500 free rain barrels in the communities within the watershed, including Wilkinsburg, Swissvale, Edgewood and Regent Square.

Its members hold stream and park cleanup days and community sessions to share conservation techniques and ideas. Numerous foundations have funded work on the Regent Square Gateway Project.

Mr. Dreiseitl said his firm will have a preliminary plan ready -- based on the renderings of the community and consultations with the other design groups -- by spring or summer.

"I hope to see you all back here then," he said.