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Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette Workers attach a new wooden steeple to the Riverview Chapel Shelter in Perry North yesterday. Click photo for larger image. |
While accompanying the mayor at the raising of a wooden steeple at the reconstructed Riverview Chapel Shelter in Perry North, county Chief Executive Dan Onorato said they are "weeks" away from announcing a plan to collaborate on their parks.
"My view is that the four regional [parks] in the city and the nine regionals in the county, it's really one big park system," Mr. Onorato said. "We're looking at how we work together going forward on these deferred capital costs" for maintenance that has been postponed over the years.
He said there are "several different ways" the city and county could pool parks resources, and that there's been no final decision on which to pursue.
Mr. Ravenstahl said the county will likely join with the city and the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, which raises money and acts as a steward to city parks. He said the emerging collaboration is "really the byproduct of how much success we've had in our city parks," which the county wants to emulate.
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An artist's rendering of the Riverview Chapel Shelter restoration project. Click photo for larger image. |
The Chapel Shelter in Riverview Park, for instance, was a termite-ridden, graffiti-strewn relic, slated for demolition a few years ago. The nonprofit conservancy took up its cause, brought the Eden Hall Foundation, Pittsburgh Foundation and Buhl Foundation checkbooks to the table, and got state Rep. Don Walko to find $225,000 in state funds.
The total bill for the renovated shelter and 4.5 acres of surrounding landscaping is $1.2 million, of which $419,000 came from the city's share of the 1 percent Regional Asset District sales tax. The foundations gave $567,000.
"It seems like every different event that I'm at, there's some sort of private-public partnership, and we have to continue to do that, because the city of Pittsburgh financially isn't what it once was," the mayor said.
Currently in the raw plywood stage, the shelter will return next year to its former role as what Mr. Walko called "a great setting for neighborhood functions, for family functions and for political functions."
The shelter is the descendant of Watson Presbyterian Church, which was built in the 1800s at the park's entrance. After a new church was built, elements of Watson Presbyterian's design were incorporated into a shelter in the park.
In the 1950s, though, some of those features, including the steeple and dormers, were removed.
They are back now, giving the shelter a feel that architect Ellis Schmidlapp called "carpenter gothic." His firm, Landmarks Design Associates, designed the shelter.
In Schenley Park, the mayor ceremonially helped complete a 40-foot-long, 11-foot-wide, 30-ton metal bridge across the newly rubberized Schenley Oval track.
The bridge will allow the city to truck 6,000 tons of rock into the center of the oval without damaging it. That way the city can lay the foundation for a new, regulation soccer field, said Duane Ashley, city director of community initiatives.
The track-and-field project also costs $1.2 million, Mr. Ashley said, which the city is covering with a combination of state grants, RAD funding and a $200,000 contribution from the Pittsburgh Public Schools, which will use the track.
Mr. Ravenstahl said he's also interested in continuing past mayors' efforts to link parks and greenways in the city's southern neighborhoods into a continuous park.
"I'd be committed to working with all of the South Hills communities to make that happen," said the mayor.
"We'd have to obviously expand the ability to get RAD dollars to that park. Right now we can only use them on the four regional parks. It's something that we can discuss with the RAD board."
