Interior designer Bill Volbrecht, Ron King, architect Jill Flannery Joyce and Joe Edelstein stand across from 3801 Penn Ave., in Lawrenceville, one of the building projects of Wylie Holdings. Below is how 3801 Penn Ave. looked before. Click photo for larger image.
Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette photos Click photo for larger image.

From the open window of his black SUV, Joe Edelstein blows a kiss to a school crossing guard as he cruises along Butler Street on a balmy spring afternoon. She returns it, then flings her arms open wide, as if to say, "Glad to see you on this gorgeous day!"

For Edelstein, it's a big, O'Connorish, I-love-this-town gesture. Still, nobody would call him the mayor of Lawrenceville, an honorific reserved for helpful old neighborhood men in baggy pants who make it their business to know everybody else's. Edelstein is too young and too muscular, and, besides, his clothes fit too well.

But as business manager of Wylie Holdings, LP, Edelstein, a former investment banker, and the firm's partners -- including his brother-in-law Ron King, who serves as property and construction manager -- are making a big difference in Lawrenceville, where they have restored and renovated about 25 buildings over the past four years. The crossing guard lives next to one of them.

One wall of Wylie's Butler Street office holds a grid of framed photographs of their building projects and the awards the firm has won for them, mostly from Pittsburgh's Historic Review Commission. On May 5, they'll pick up three more, including one for the three-story building at the corner of Penn Avenue and 38th Street.

"It was an architecturally important building that was almost beyond salvage," Edelstein said. And it was one they really wanted to get their hands on because before moving their office to Butler Street, it was catty-corner from its graffiti-plagued, boarded-up storefront. Above it, open windows turned the upper floors into pigeon lofts. Today, each is a bright, spacious, one-bedroom apartment filled with natural light.

		Commission to give out Preservation Awards May 5

Most of their preservation projects are on Butler Street and Penn Avenue, and 17 are corner buildings.

"Corner buildings are the most visible, and you can kind of work from them," Edelstein said. "We're trying to spur development activity by others as well, and by doing corners you can have more of an impact. That's the most rewarding part of this -- seeing scaffolding that belongs to somebody else."

Just around the corner from 3801 Penn, along 38th Street, Wylie spurred more of its own development by buying three contiguous row houses and converting them into a single rental unit with an integral garage. The storefront has a new life, too. In August, Sandy Simon moved her pottery-painting business, Kiln-N-Time, from the South Side, where she offers individual studio time and also hosts group workshops and parties. And when the neighborhood kids, mostly from Woolslair Elementary School, get their report cards, those with good grades and perfect attendance can and do come to the shop and paint a piece of pottery for free.

Lawrenceville architect Jill Flannery Joyce designed the facade for 3801 Penn, as she has for all 10 of the firm's projects that have won awards from the Historic Review Commission. (Civil engineer Bill Volbrecht, who also has an interior design degree, does Wylie's interiors.) Joyce, who works for other developers in the neighborhood, has won 27 awards from the commission. Wylie is one of a handful of small firms that are helping to change the face of Lawrenceville.

"I think it represents probably the best neighborhood to invest in," Edelstein said. "When we first started, we had investments in a lot of East End neighborhoods, and Lawrenceville showed more market improvement." And, he adds, "the building stock is very good."

He credits the Lawrenceville Corp.'s Lisa Pilewski with sparking their interest in preservation projects by introducing them to the Urban Redevelopment Authority's Streetface Program, which provides no-interest loans for facade restorations. The annual repayments are forgiven, so long as the project stays in compliance.

Edelstein says the firm targets underused and abandoned buildings.

The most challenging aspect of the business is that while "we have pretty good political leadership in this neighborhood," Edelstein said, "the city operations are pretty cumbersome, and there's not always good communication among departments."

He was sorry to lose a red brick church on McCandless Street that he'd been trying to buy for three years. It lost the upper part of its facade during the June 2002 microburst; now the city is demolishing it.

"It was certainly a building worth saving," he said. "It's very difficult to gain control of a building with an owner who's MIA, and that was the case with that situation."

It was also the case with 3801 Penn Ave., but there, persistence paid off with a project that soon will be added to what Edelstein calls the office's "wall of fame."

In his own office, there's a soulful photograph of the enormous head of Wylie himself, one of the family's Great Danes in whose memory the firm was named. Wylie may be in dog heaven, but his namesake is making a name for him in Lawrenceville.

Detail of 3801 Penn Ave., in Lawrenceville, one of the building projects of Wylie Holdings.