Proposed housing stirs ire of some residents

Riverfront park would get new entry

Aspinwall Riverfront Park is having growing pains.

The 10-acre site opened last September, five years after the first Boy Scout gave his lawn-mowing money to a fund that 3,000 people joined to buy a marina and the land around it.

A $250,000 county grant and similarly large foundation gifts made up the bulk of the $2.3 million purchase price, but the sale of lemonade and T-shirts, penny jars and proceeds from lawn mowing, a rubber ducky race and pet parade made for a Norman Rockwell story about a can-do community effort.

A more complicated next step has turned some residents against the park’s visionary and its most tireless fundraiser.

Susan Crookston has come under fire from several residents for proposing an access road through a piece of the park to 47 adjacent acres that she and her husband Currie Crookston purchased two years ago.

When the mile-and-a-half-long scrap yard came up for sale, Ms. Crookston asked the park’s board to buy it. The park is owned by the nonprofit Allegheny Riverfront Park Inc., whose board consists of people who helped establish the park.

“The board didn’t have funds to develop it or to take the financial risk,” said Chip Burke, a board member and chairman of the board of the Grable Foundation.

Ms. Crookston then lobbied foundations and environmental nonprofits to buy it, with the intention of expanding the park, but no one wanted to take the risk.

The Crookstons did. They paid a nonrefundable deposit of $50,000 toward a $5.3 million asking price, unsure whether, as a brownfield, it could be developed, but they did it in order to secure a public connection to the river and the riverfront trail, Ms. Crookston said, adding, “The mission of the park has always been to catalyze trail extension.”

The cost required some return on their investment, though. They chose the Mosites Co. to create a residential development on part of the land. Mosites is now the majority owner of the 47 acres.

Mark Minnerly, Mosites’ director of real estate, said the project will take “multiple years” because there are two other municipalities to deal with, Sharpsburg and O’Hara, and a railroad line as a site constraint. But the environmental report indicates that soil