Friendship Development Associates will break ground today on three townhouses to fill a corner lot that the nonprofit has owned and tried to develop for nine years.

At Penn Avenue and Gross Street in Bloomfield, it is in the target area of the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative, a 10-year-old incubator partnership between Friendship Development and Bloomfield-Garfield Corp. Their revitalization plan was to catalyze development by stocking the corridor from South Mathilda Street to Negley Avenue with artists and arts organizations.

In that time, more than 40 artists, galleries and arts organizations have claimed once-blighted buildings. The street scene is more artsy and less vice-ridden. Several large additions to the corridor include The Children's Home and the Pittsburgh Housing Authority's Fairmount Apartments.

The project is estimated to cost $800,000. The Urban Redevelopment Authority contributed $162,000, and the balance comes from the Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development, the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh and an anonymous donor.

Team Construction of the South Side is the contractor, and Hammer-Mann Designwerks, a Friendship firm, designed the plan.