Reinventing Lawrenceville took time and effort
Second of two parts.
Nancy Noszka gave 12 of the best years of her life to the neighborhood she grew up in, only to get water thrown in her face, spit on and physically attacked when she directed the nonprofit Lawrenceville Development Corp. through the 1990s.
“I used to eat, sleep and drink Lawrenceville,” she said, recalling meetings, vision studies, planning sessions, bickering and outright fights. “Those were long hard days.”
They were long hard days during which Lawrenceville’s tide began turning from a post-industrial working-class neighborhood riddled with blight, vacancy and crime. Today, the once-dingy neighborhood is teeming with hipsters and street trees. Housing prices of $30,000 20 years ago are through the roof, with some listings in the $700,000-to-$800,000 range.
Lawrenceville may be overachieving at this point, but the goal in the early 1990s was to reverse a scary trend. The Lawrenceville Development Corp. —
Development also bought the adjacent stable and public bathhouse buildings, renovated them and found tenants. It encouraged Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Engineering Consortium to move into a warehouse below the 40th Street Bridge in 1994.
At that point, there weren’t many lunch spots for people in Lawrenceville to walk to. The robotics crew ate most days at the Nova Cafe on Butler Street. They ate meatloaf and gravy with fries and wore the smell of onion rings back to work. The Nova Cafe moved to Millvale 11 years ago.
“We started out focusing on Doughboy Square and bought all the historic buildings we could,” said Ms. Noszka. “I remember trying to recruit restaurants. They said, ‘I can’t do enough business there.’
“Now look at it,” she said, over breakfast in a packed and noisy Cocoa Cafe in Lower Lawrenceville, one of dozens of eateries there. “It has gone beyond what I ever thought it would be.”
Demolition queen
In 1993, the Lawrenceville Development Corp. and the Urban Redevelopment Authority planned a townhouse complex near Doughboy Square on Penn Avenue. They met with nearby property owners and made offers.
“One woman willingly sold her property to us for $11,000 in 1994, but when we paid $45,000 for a lot that was 20 times larger, she thought we had stiffed her,” Ms. Noszka said. “She complained to the city, and the URA gave her the appraised value, $13,000, plus interest.
“At an event later, she walked up and threw a drink in my face.”
Former state Sen. Jim Ferlo recalled it differently: “I think the woman spit on her.”
“That was a different incident,” Ms. Noszka said. “I was spit on another time, too.”
When the townhouse development was built, an alley on which people had been parking illegally was converted into parking for townhouse residents. An angry resident confronted her, screaming, and pushed her, she said.
The first townhouse sold for $50,000. They sell for $250,000 and up now.
On her recent visit, Ms. Noszka carried a box of old photographs, the “before” pictures. She fingered the slumping dormer of a late 19th-century brick building, one in a row of look-alikes along Penn Avenue where apartments are being built now.
“We demolished these,” she said. “The preservationists called me the demolition queen. But we saved buildings, too, and began recruiting artists and creative people. We started the 16:62 Design Zone, branding Penn Avenue from the 16th to 62nd street bridges as an art and design destination.
“It was an incubator without walls.”
Blue-collar stronghold
In the city’s industrial heyday, Lawrenceville was a blue-collar stronghold. Industries stretched along the Allegheny River from the 6th Ward up to the 10th. Houses stayed in the same families for generations.
When industry began slumping, so did much of the real estate. Like in so many areas, people abandoned their homes.
The Lawrenceville Development Corp. got its nonprofit status in 1985 and Mr. Ferlo began working with its staff, directing millions in state funds. Other early investors included the Hillman Foundation, Mellon Bank and the URA.
Asked why he thinks Lawrenceville has had such success, Mr. Ferlo credited “sophisticated community groups and grassroots efforts” from the mid-’80s on. He also cited the tasteful and historically sensitive renovations of several key developers who attracted strong retail to Lower and Central Lawrenceville.
Upper Lawrenceville, known by long-timers as the 10th Ward, was the last to shift, but with the market on the march, it was just a matter of time. The average Joe might find an affordable home there today, but he had better hurry.
Bob “Corny” Cornelia, who is retired, lived in the 10th Ward until 2003. When his wife could no longer climb steps, they bought a ranch house in Shaler.
“I let my house go for $40,000,” he said. “I could have got a lot more if I had fixed it up, and they say it would go for $300,000 today. New people are all right, though. Better than leaving houses to go empty.”
One day this summer over breakfast at Nied’s Hotel, a bar and restaurant near his old home that’s know for its fried fish sandwich, Mr. Cornelia said he comes back to Lawrenceville “all the time. I been coming to Nied’s since I was a kid” in the ’40s.
In those days, he said, “we had lots of characters. This one guy, Haystack Calhoun, who was 700 pounds, took up two stools and hung over each one. One time he ate 27 fish sandwiches and drank one and a half gallons of buttermilk. That’s the kind of characters we used to have.”
Mr. Cornelia worked for the Deitch Co., which recycled scrap metal in Sharpsburg. An injury in 1998 forced him to retire.
“When there was a shooting nearby, in ’96, I started a block watch, me and Jimmy Murray, the funeral director,” he said. “Things were rough in this area. A lot of stealing, a lot of drugs. We worked with the police, went to court. It’s still not perfect, but crime is down. The guys tell me when they hear something. They sit on their porches.”
Crime is indeed down. City police records show crime fell from 1,556 incidents in 2005 to 376 this year. The only categories of crime with numbers higher now than in 2005 are public intoxication, fraud and embezzlement — all in the single digits.
“A lot of people bailed when there were gunshots and more Section 8” than there is today, said Tom Simonic, who lives on Keystone Street in the 10th Ward with his wife, Kathy. “Most people on my street are third and fourth generation, but a lot of people we knew have moved to Shaler and Verona.
“I bought my house 38 years ago for $40,000,” he said. “One day [this year], there was an open house on my block, and I thought I’d walk over.”
He said he was curious to see it because another house nearby had sold for $280,000.
Mr. Simonic worked as a mechanic assembler and shipper before retiring. He grew up on the river side of Butler Street.
“They called it the other side of the tracks, even though it was on this side of the tracks,” he said, “We thought up here [the hillside south of Butler] was where the rich people lived. We’d walk up here and they’d look at us like, ‘What are you kids doing here?’
“It’s funny to think of that now,” he said, reminded that the neighborhood these days is teeming with newly arrived young people. “We sit on our porch and see all sorts of people walking by, and I think, ‘Where have you come from?’ ”