A 4-mile stretch of Saw Mill Run Boulevard exemplifies what years of neglect can do
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Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette photos
An abandoned trailer sits in a lot filled with debris and trash next to concrete silos from a bygone era along a blighted section of Route 51 in the Overbrook section of Pittsburgh.Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh's entrance through the Fort Pitt Tunnel might be the Cinderella of first impressions, but more than 13,000 inbound drivers daily are more familiar with one of the ugly stepsisters.
Wallace Merrell, a resident of Overbrook, stands in front of an old piano soundboard on the side of the Pittsburgh Piano Restoration Building on Saw Mill Run Boulevard.Click photo for larger image.
Slideshow: Blight for sore eyes
A billboard promoting late Pittsburgh Mayor Bob O'Connor's "LET'S REDD UP PITTSBURGH" program with a picture of current Mayor Luke Ravenstahl is in front of a rundown trailer park amid Saw Mill Run and its blighted Route 51 between Overbrook and Brookline in Pittsburgh.Click photo for larger image.
Like many highways, Route 51 is a design-free mishmash of malls, strip malls, box stores, auto-service lots, beer stores, tanning salons, roadside bars and disappearing sidewalks, hardly a glass slipper contender.
But when it arrives in the city from Whitehall as Saw Mill Run Boulevard, the four-mile stretch to the Liberty Tunnels is so degraded that it could be a parody of blight: A boarded-up window, weathered gray, isn't bad enough; the board is shredded, revealing a glass-block window grid with some of the blocks punched.
Many lots are apocalyptic, with piles of concrete chunks and piles of garbage, each one competing for awfulness with the one before.
This stretch of road has taken generations of post-industrial abuse, a sad fate for a highway that started its journey in 1928 as a piece of the county's "City Beautiful" bond issue.
Abandoned buildings are falling apart, graffiti and weeds are rampant, fences are mangled, hulks of cars and loose tires plague auto service lots, broken vegetation hangs from hillsides and hillsides have drifted onto sidewalks.
Directly behind a "Redd-Up Pittsburgh" billboard that shows a confidently smiling Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, five beat-up trailers and rusted sheets of corrugated metal sit at the top of a hill. The whole lot of it seems to verge on a plunge into Saw Mill Run, along with the trash that is strewn over the slope.
The city-owned former Overbrook fire station is another collection site. For months, a trash pile and broken items have sat at the rear of the building: A broken sideboard, a lawn mower minus the handle, chunks of turf, bricks, plywood, the rusted lid of an oil drum, a shredded thing that might have been a carpet, beer and soda cans and a garden rake.
Absence of outrage
Wallace Merrell, a fire safety engineer who served on the city's building-code board under Mayor Richard S. Caliguiri, said that, on his commute from and to Whitehall every day, he wonders, "Where is the community's sense of outrage? Why does the civic and business leadership endure such decline and decay?"
To these obvious questions, the answers are layered.
The dominant businesses are in auto service, and beaters and loose tires go with the territory. People in the neighborhoods on both sides, primarily Overbrook and Brookline, say neither claims the boulevard. They say it's a traffic snarl they find ways to avoid and a nightmare of bureaucratic entities. It has state and city jurisdictions, different borough governments, a variety of legislative and senatorial districts and several ZIP codes.
"The way the topography is, it's in a valley, and the slope areas are uninhabitable," said Keith Knecht, of Brookline, a member of the nonprofit South Pittsburgh Development Co. "After you've lived here awhile, you figure out all these little shortcuts to avoid getting on it.
"It is an orphan road."
People usually complain about conditions where they live, and residential properties are few on Saw Mill Run Boulevard.
Guy Costa, director of the Department of Public Works, said the city and PennDOT's interpretations of their responsibilities along the roadway have been a running issue for years. Public Works is responsible for maintaining the lights, sweeping and snow removal, he said. The state says its jurisdiction stops at each curb line, which leaves the litter collection to no one or private property owners.
The city's enforcement of code violations is spotty. For one thing, people have to complain. When they do, enforcement often depends on finding owners who haven't been around for years.
Ron Graziano, director of the Bureau of Building Inspection, said the area "is littered daily," but that complaints are not common. "We go out there, but we don't always know where one property starts and the other ends, so we have to come back to the office and sit down with maps and try to find out lot and block" boundaries.
Up and down the corridor, merchants say the masses of vacant Levitske Brothers real estate are the single biggest obstacle to improvement. The Levitske name is on for-sale signs up and down the boulevard. One of the largest, the former Country Belle Dairy, has sat vacant and boarded up for decades.
The for-sale sign includes the offer "will subdivide," but the sign has faded and is almost unreadable. Smaller buildings that were part of the dairy, recessed behind empty parking lots, are covered with graffiti.
Low on everyone's list
Fran Accamando, a longtime advocate in Overbrook, said the city and Overbrook discussed converting the dairy into a multi-neighborhood fire department in the 1980s, but the Levitskes wanted too much money.
Calls to the Levitske real estate offices were not returned.
"We have cited them over the years," Mr. Graziano said. "If a building stays sealed, we don't bother anybody. They're blighted, yes, but if they're not open to vandals," they don't pose a threat.
Ms. Accamando said Overbrook's Community Council "fought for years to have [Saw Mill Run Boulevard] cleaned up. It was never high on anyone's priority list. It's a dividing line" for neighborhoods, boroughs and electoral districts, she said. "It's always been a nightmare trying to get all the different entities on the same page."
Flooding has been an issue in stretches of Route 51, which, she said, might explain why some parts of the road have not attracted lasting investment.
On a recent tour in his car, Mr. Merrell pulled into a gravel lot and yanked back a clump of weeds to reveal a faded fire hydrant near the former U.S. Army Reserve Center.
It's the first property one sees heading outbound on Route 51 just after the Liberty Tunnels. The massive one-story red brick compound sits boarded up on a weedy lot the size of a football field.
A city building inspector would have cited it recently for an open door and a missing window if the city knew where to send the citation. "It's owned by the federal government," Mr. Graziano said. "We need a person's name" to cite.
Mr. Merrell calls the reserve center "the temple of neglect" and said he didn't understand how property owners, especially the U.S. government, could get away with letting properties erode.
Tony De Joseph, owner of Advance Signs, said a previous owner of the company tried to buy the reserve center and that he, too, inquired about it.
"It was too complicated," he said. "I thought I was making progress, but [the deal] broke down."
Over the years, a few people have championed the corridor.
"A lot of things have gotten done," Ms. Accamando said, citing the Overbrook Senior Center on Dartmore Street and achievements of the Saw Mill Run Task Force, which she helped start in the early 1980s. Representatives of PennDOT, the Port Authority, the Army Corps of Engineers and the city joined her and other Overbrook residents to clean up Saw Mill Run.
"We got Alcosan to adopt the Saw Mill Run interceptor to clean sewage from the creek," she said. "It had been divided among many municipalities before. Once they did that, we pushed for them to put a parallel line to take the overflow. That was done, and it was important.
"Of course, it's something you can't see."
First Published January 14, 2007 12:00 am
