The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Sharpsburg residents cautiously embrace revival
SHARPSBURG, PA. » Sharpsburg used to be the place where everybody knew your nickname. There were Strats, Gooch, Mooch, Toots, Chick, Fish, Mutt, Bear Hands, Half-ear and Jumpy the dog catcher. Carl Gatto was always Sunny.
“Because he’s bright,” said Albert Perry, the longtime housing inspector, shooting a grin at Mr. Gatto one afternoon as the two men sat with Mr. Gatto’s wife, Audrey, and her cousin, Greg Domian, under the Gattos’ gazebo.
“Some of these people are still around,” Ms. Gatto said.
Nostalgia aside, the gazebo friends, whose ages range from 61 to 92, were more eager to talk about what’s coming around — real estate prices, DeepLocal’s move from the Strip District, plans to beautify Main Street, riverfront development and what’s on tap.
At Brother Tom’s Bakery, lunching on a bowl of stuffed cabbage soup, Charles “Chaz” Smith said not everyone is pumped: “People my age, and I’m 63, say, ‘It’s a fad. It’ll never last,’ “he said. “I’m like, ‘Why not give it a chance?’
A waitress came over to see how everything was, and Smith asked what she thought of the new blue lamp posts.
“They’re all right,” she said, her expression saying they’re really not.
“That was the old high school color,” he said. “Royal blue and white.”
A former antiques dealer, Smith is collecting input for a community plan for the Sharpsburg Neighborhood Organization. He said the waitress isn’t the only one reluctant to brighten at the new hue of Main Street’s once-black lamp posts. This town spent so long in a postindustrial funk that some people still think the other shoe will drop anytime.
“Change is a tough thing here,” he said. “But I see a new beginning.”
Two new craft breweries — Dancing Gnome and Hitchhiker — have attracted swarms of people, mostly young, mostly from elsewhere, without a single police call, said borough manager Bill Rossey.
DeepLocal, a marketing and tech innovator whose clients include Google, is tripling its office space and doubling its fabrication potential in a move to Sharpsburg later this year. “We wanted to stay as close to the city as we could,” said DeepLocal founder Nathan Martin, “and we wanted a neighborhood where a lot of change is happening.” A blend of old and new If Riverfront 47 is built along the Allegheny River, mostly in Sharpsburg, it will be the borough’s largest new construction in decades. The Mosites Co. and Allegheny Development Partners propose 47 acres of mixed use, including housing and a riverfront trail connection between Aspinwall and Etna.
Before it closed at the site in the 1990s, Azcon Scrap Corp. was the borough’s biggest taxpayer, so Sharpsburg is eager to see the land returned to the tax rolls, Rossey said.
The project depends on $3 million from the state to widen 19th Street into the site, and Aspinwall still has to settle on a second entrance. Mosites is discussing with the state a possible third one near the Highland Park Bridge, said Chris Minnerly, a Mosites architect.
Like its Allegheny River neighbor Millvale, Sharpsburg is already seeing housing prices jump. Under the gazebo, the talk turned to real estate.