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Mountain to reach new heights A tour of Nine Mile Run Greenway Project revealed plans for plant life and housing development. Monday, May 10, 1999 By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Staring up at a 200-foot-high mountain of ugly gray slag near the Monongahela River, Tim Collins told a group of hikers, "That is the challenge, and that is the opportunity."
Collins, a Carnegie Mellon University researcher, is one of the leaders of a three-year effort to turn 100 acres of gravely moonscape between Squirrel Hill and Swisshelm Park into the largest new "wilderness park" in any city in America.
It's called the Nine Mile Run Greenway Project, which Collins, of Carnegie Mellon's Studio for Creative Inquiry, is spearheading along with John Stephen, co-founder of Friends of the Riverfront.
Other participants include the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Civil and Environmental Consultants, plus community groups, environmental organizations, the Heinz Endowments, the city Planning Department and the Urban Redevelopment Authority.
Collins and Stephen led a walking tour yesterday of the lower portion of the site that includes a total of 250 acres and stretches nearly a mile from the southern end of Frick Park to the Mon River. The site, now owned by the URA, is where tons and tons of slag, the waste product from area steel mills, were dumped for decades earlier this century.
Nearly every day from the 1920s to the early 1970s, dozens of trainloads -- later, truck loads -- of slag were dumped along Nine Mile Run, creating steep sides along the stream that winds its way through Frick Park and empties into the Mon below Duck Hollow, a tiny city neighborhood that's tucked away east of the Homestead High Level Bridge. The man-made mountains of slag are 20 stories high, Collins said.
The challenge now is to turn the barren gray piles of industrial waste into an attractive urban setting. Because of the beauty and the difficulties involved, Collins called the area "a little slice of heaven and hell."
Greenway Project officials plan to create 25 to 30 "test plots" around the slag area. They will try to grow various types of plants and trees to see which ones fare best.
About 25 East End residents and environmentalists went on yesterday's tour to see firsthand the difficulties involved with creating the new open green space which, when finished in several years, will enlarge Frick Park and link it with the Mon River.
"I'm a neighbor and I want to know what is happening in [Frick] Park," said Patricia Brown, a white-haired, 60-something woman who used to live in Regent Square and now lives in Swissvale. She was on yesterday's walk along Nine Mile Run with her daughter, Casey Brown, who still lives in Regent Square and whose back yard abuts Frick Park.
The 100 or so acres of planned urban parkland is an accompaniment to a major new housing development that will be built atop the massive pile of slag. The housing is to be called Summerset at Frick Park, and is to be built over the next 10 years. Construction is to start next spring.
Eventually, Summerset is to include 713 units in three groupings, two on the Squirrel Hill side of the slag heap and one on the Swisshelm Park side. There will be single-family detached units, town houses and apartments.
The city Planning Commission last week gave approval to start grading the slag later this month on the first section of housing, which will look down on the Parkway East at the eastern end of the Squirrel Hill Tunnel.
But what Collins, Stephen and other Greenway Project promoters are focusing on is the Nine Mile Run stream valley and the slopes leading up to the hilltops where the houses will be built.
Nature has already started to reclaim some of the slag, with cottonwood and pin oak trees and various bushes and grasses invading some parts of the slag hillside and the stream valley.
"The greenery has begun to regenerate," Stephen said. "We want to develop this into a new public space and accelerate the regeneration process."
It's not just plants. Birds such as Baltimore orioles and mockingbirds have begun making nests in some of the taller trees, Collins said. The giant swallowtail butterfly has begun showing up again, along with deer, wild turkeys, muskrats, beavers, raccoons and foxes.
The hikers on yesterday's tour were distressed to learn that a major new elevated highway, the Mon Fayette Expressway, is likely to be built along the Mon. They feared that a noisy highway will defeat the purpose of rehabitation by birds and animals.
Fish are beginning to live in Nine Mile Run again, although it is still polluted by defective and overloaded sewer systems in the East End and nearby suburbs.
"The ecosystem is coming back, though the stream is in tough shape," Collins said. He said the stream drops 80 feet as it descends from Braddock Avenue to the Mon River. This drop allows the water to be aerated with oxygen, which helps lessen the pollution, but additional cleanup measures are still needed.
Another concern is the continued dumping of trash in the stream valley. Bald tires, an old refrigerator, paint cans and other trash were visible along the trail that leads from Commercial Avenue down to the river.
The Carnegie Mellon group is still working with community groups on what the area eventually should look like but the goals, so far, include ridding the stream of sewage, "making the area interesting" with wildlife and plants, and doing all this at an affordable price tag that still hasn't been determined.
The work done so far has been funded with a $250,000 grant from the Heinz Endowments. The Army Corps of Engineers is considering a $6 million improvement to stop erosion along the Nine Mile Run stream, but only if city officials stop the sewage from entering the watershed, Collins said.
"We are shooting for a complex visual environment, a diverse wildlife experience, an open space that is sustainable ecologically, culturally and economically, something people will support and protect, a rural wilderness type of experience like the interior of Frick Park," Collins said.
Slag presents a challenge, Collins said, because it's a porous material that doesn't hold the water that vegetation needs to grow. Topsoil will have to be brought in, and some of the steep hillsides made more level for grasses to grow. The idea, Collins said, is to have the grasses attract various insects, which will then attract various birds.
It hasn't been determined whether the area should be more passive, where people would simply walk and admire the flora and fauna, or more active with boat ramps, a paved parking lot where the stream enters the Mon, and a recreational fishing area in Frick Park.
He hopes to have various options on what the slag heap should look like ready to present to community groups by July, and then have a recommendation on how the urban park should be developed to give to city officials by the year's end.
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