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Displays out at Gateway Center City ban means no more signs or holiday creches Tuesday, March 16, 1999 By Timothy McNulty, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The Murphy administration plans to ban all signs and displays from Gateway Center, including the creche put there for the last three Christmases.
The decision, by Solicitor Jacqueline R. Morrow, will snuff out an 8-foot-high wooden sign put in the grassy Stanwix Street triangle Downtown last month by a local political action committee. The black and white sign by the Pittsburgh Area New Direction Alternative, or PANDA, asks: "Will the last person leaving Pittsburgh please turn out the lights?"
The decision will have little effect on the city's most visible creche, however, as organizers from the Christian Leaders Fellowship have planned to find a new site for it this year as part of a giant year 2000 observation.
Last month, the city initially refused to let PANDA erect its sign but relented after complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union. If the city allowed religious groups to put displays there, the ACLU reasoned, the site was a "designated public forum" and other groups had a right to use it.
PANDA was allowed to erect the sign Feb. 22. Morrow said yesterday that the sign would be allowed to stay up for one month, or through Monday, which is the same amount of time the Christian Leaders Fellowship was given to display its creche last year.
After the sign is gone, no displays will be permitted at the site, which is owned by the city but maintained by Trizec Hahn Office Properties, the Toronto-based real estate firm that runs Gateway Center.
Within the next two weeks, Morrow said, she will ask City Council to sell the site and get it out of the city's hair for good. She did not say who the site would be sold to or how, and Trizec Hahn officials did not return phone calls.
The sign was erected by PANDA founder David Tessitor, who is running for county executive. The group's literature says PANDA is looking for people to run for office this year and provide an alternative to the status quo in the city and Allegheny County, "which has been leading the region into decline for the past several decades."
Tessitor said the sign wasn't erected until Feb. 25, so he won't take it down until 31 days later, or March 28. He said sale of the site would likely be held up for months in public hearings, and that he would ask the city each month to keep the sign up before a sale is finalized.
"This is an attempt to prevent free speech, because [the sign] is something [the city] doesn't want to hear," Tessitor said yesterday.
In a letter to Morrow in February, the executive director of the Pittsburgh chapter of the ACLU, Witold "Vic" Walczak, said he would go to federal court if the city tried to remove the sign.
Walczak is out of town and other ACLU lawyers will have to study Morrow's decision, said Michael Louik, chairman of the Pittsburgh ACLU's legal committee.
"Is it a decision based on the content of a message [the city] didn't like, or is it something else? We'll have to study that," Louik said.
In a legal memo sent to City Council March 3, Morrow said the Gateway Center site is a designated public forum, which is defined as a site opened "by the public as a place for expressive activity." It's different from a "traditional public forum" such as a sidewalk or city park, Morrow wrote, and unlike a public sidewalk, the city is not required to indefinitely open the site up for free expression.
So on Monday the site will be closed.
"The government didn't have an obligation to provide it," Morrow said yesterday of the site. "Now nobody gets to use it."
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