Community Design Center of Pittsburgh: 17 years of seeding grass-roots growth

Design center stimulates successes in city neighborhoods

Monday, December 26, 2005

Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette photos Facilities manager Duane Hessler walks past the location inside the Union Project -- a community center in a once-vacant church at Negley and Stanton avenues -- that will become a coffee shop.

By Diana Nelson Jones, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In many tales of grass-roots gumption, the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh turns up early in the telling.

From East Liberty to the South Side, from Larimer to the North Side, the design center has taken chances for 17 years, granting $12,000 here, $18,000 there, for preliminary planning on ideas for which most money bags would not open so early, if at all.

The rewards have been rich, both in building investment and building community.

The Union Project, at Negley and Stanton avenues, received $12,000 to start the redesign of an old, vacant church four years ago. Some 1,600 volunteers later, this year Union Project raised a $3 million capital and operating budget.

The Quiet Storm Coffeehouse, on the Penn Avenue border of Friendship and Garfield, entered its fourth year in October as a transformative fixture at a dicey intersection, in property that a grant from the design center helped renovate.

An unlikely collaboration of residents and addicts in what some call East Liberty, others Garfield, attracted an $18,000 design center grant to renovate a dilapidated building into apartments for mothers trying to overcome addictions. A program of the Sojourner House, the MOMS apartments took its first residents in 2004, and one has joined the Negley Place Neighborhood Association's block watch.

Many recipients describe the design center as the catalyst they could not have made it without.

"They're really good at leverage, really good at helping a neighborhood articulate its vision," said Ernie Hogan of East Liberty Development Inc.

"They've been a great friend and asset to us," said Rick Belloli of the South Side Local Development Co., for which the design center has provided many grants and pro-bono architectural help over the years.


	Facilities Manager Duane Hessler examines a stained glass window crafted in one of the classes at the Union Project. Click photo for larger image.

"I love them," said Norma Raiff of Sojourner House.

The CDCP, as it is known now, started in the 1960s as a group of volunteer architects and VISTA workers. In 1988, it became the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh. Since then, its design fund has granted $850,000, which has generated $73 million in additional investment, said design-fund manager Jason Vrabel, one of six employees.

Design Center money comes from public and private sources.

Many projects the design center funds don't get built or implemented, he said, but they're not flops.

"There is almost always real value in community building, developing a common vision, developing a better understanding of the role of design, etc."

The obvious success of big money following a small grant does not supersede the impact of a Quiet Storm, said Mr. Vrabel.

"It was just a little coffee shop at first, but it has radically changed the dynamics in that part of Penn Avenue," the corner with Graham Street. "It became a great place to see bands, where families can go during the day and also a great meeting space. It has stabilized that corner." Of the nuisance bar across the street, the Horoscope Lounge, he said, "It is a better place now because of the Quiet Storm."

Quiet Storm owner Jill MacDowell said, "We're getting by. We're now operating as a restaurant with good coffee."

The local chapter of ONE, the Campaign to make Poverty History, has held meetings there, and a group of knitters meets every Monday at 7:30 p.m.

"The private market is not functioning fully in these kinds of areas," said Mr. Vrabel. "We take pride in the fact that our money is often the first money in and at high risk."

The Union Project in a former church where East Liberty meets Highland Park became one of the design center's happiest surprises, he said.

"We had this group of kids sitting in front of us, with no track record, new to Pittsburgh. They seemed earnest but. ... Well, we debated it and decided to fund it and it's one of the things we are most happy about. They have achieved everything on their own since."

Jessica King, the Union Project director, was one of a group of young adults in the Mennonite Urban Corps, a one-year service program.

"We lived in a house up Stanton Avenue and we'd catch our buses in front of this abandoned church," she said.

"We started talking more creatively about what we might do with it, like blue-sky dreaming."

With help from the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation, the group got into the building and is now paying back a $125,000 loan. They have gotten help from various foundations, but the CDCP gave them the first grant to hire a renovation design planner.

The next daunting challenge was the condition of the stained-glass windows.

They couldn't afford to restore them, so they collected some instructors and offered classes in stained-glass restoration on site. More than 150 people paid for the training and restored the church's windows in the process.

"They took a million-dollar problem and turned it into a fund-raiser," said Mr. Vrabel.

The Union Project has become a community center, with space for artists, offices and meeting rooms for community builders and people of faith, classrooms and performance space, said Ms. King. A cafe in partnership with Peabody High School is in the works, as are enterprises that include a production pottery business to train East End youths and a stained-glass restoration business.

"It's growing in a grass-roots way," said Ms. King. "We're committed to the neighborhood, and we're starting to feel the results."

On the South Side, design center money helped townhouse planning take off 10 years ago at 11th and Bingham streets and stimulated the 32-townhouse New Birmingham development in 1994.

"Their grant made $4.5 million worth of development possible," said Mr. Belloli. More recently, the CDCP funded a viability study of a 64-acre wooded expanse between the South Side and South Side Slopes as a park.

A 15-year-old block watch group where East Liberty and Garfield meet, the Negley Place Neighborhood Alliance, was desperately seeking a remedy for two blighted properties on Hays Street when they found one that resonated eight years ago.

Gary Cirrincione, vice president of the alliance, called Norma Raiff at the Sojourner House, a six-month residential rehab program for women with mental illness and substance addiction.

She remembers being shocked.

"He said, 'I'd like to meet you for coffee.' I knew him from nothing," she said. "The Negley Place neighborhood told us that as part of their economic redevelopment strategy, and as a way to stabilize a deteriorating neighborhood, they were inviting us in. I said I'd never heard of anything like this. 'You mean the neighbors want us?' "

"We had addictive people in the neighborhood already, and they were out of control," said Mr. Cirrincione. "Sojourner House had, and still has, an extraordinary reputation, and a well-run program like that does have a place in our urban context."

The neighborhood's need dovetailed with Sojourner House's desire to expand its mission into more permanent housing for women with children.

The solution for everyone was the two eyesores on Hays Street.

East Liberty Development Inc. tapped the design center for seed money for renovation plans. MOMS occupied one of the houses last year, now with six residents, and the second house is set to be restored to livability for more.

"The MOMS project is an asset and a credit to the neighborhood," said Mr. Cirrincione.

"We hosted a community block party," said Ms. Raiff, "and we had musicians playing from the balconies."

The most imminent result from a CDCP grant is Lawrenceville's master plan, in its final editing phase. It started with a $12,259 planning grant early this year, and the design center gave technical assistance through the year. Community meetings brought together multiple groups from three wards to discuss land use, small business development, riverfront use, neighborhood portals and transportation.

Other projects of the CDCP design fund have included:

A $17,000 grant for the reuse of five Victorian homes on Mellon Street in East Liberty that helped leverage a grant from the Restore America initiative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.