Meg Cheever poised to retire from parks group she founded
Meg Cheever moved to Pittsburgh from Boston in 1975 to work for a law firm. From there, she became general counsel for WQED, then publisher of Pittsburgh Magazine. While her job changed, one thing that never did was her concern for Schenley Park.
It wasn’t the only run-down city park. They all were. But it was the one near her home.
In 1996, she persuaded a few friends to stand with her as the Schenley Park Conservancy, which swiftly transformed into the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. Twenty-one years later, Ms. Cheever is into the final year of a job she created when she went home one day, six months after naming the little group, and told her husband, George, “I think this will succeed if it has a full-time commitment. I’d like to quit my job and run it. And he said, ‘OK, honey.’ ”
Ms. Cheever plans to step down next March as the group’s president and CEO.
Her full-time commitment has resulted since the late 1990s in almost $100 million in capital fundraising that restored, renovated and repaired entrances, trails, eroded hillsides, buildings, monuments, fountains, habitats, views, watersheds and the reputation of the city’s parks, starting with the four largest at the time and branching into projects in 22 today.
“It took us three years to claw our way to having salaries,” she said during a recent interview and walk in Frick Park.
According to the nonprofit’s most recent tax filing, Ms. Cheever earned a base salary of nearly $198,000 in 2015.
The first word everyone who knows Ms. Cheever says when asked how she got from “OK, honey” to $100 million and a staff of 35 is “tenacity.”
“Like a terrier,” said her first employee, Linda Blythe Everhart. “You are not going to get that bone out of her mouth.”
When Darla Cravotta was then-Mayor Tom Murphy’s neighborhood policy coordinator, she said she recalled sitting “in Tom’s office with [Ms. Cheever] and I remember her persistence and passion. She had tenacity.”
“Meg talked to us about creating a conservancy to focus on raising the quality of park maintenance, and we embraced the idea,” Mr. Murphy said. “At the time, the city was barely able to maintain the parks. It has been an effective partnership since, and what they’ve done is remarkable.”
Ms. Cheever started with people she knew whose talents she needed, drawing consultants from other cities, including Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the Meg Cheever of New York City’s Central Park in the late 1970s. Attorney Marlee Myers helped the conservancy get its nonprofit status pro bono. Ms. Cheever tapped Ms. Everhart, a producer she knew at WQED, to be her number two.
“Maybe I was the director of education or public relations,” Ms. Everhart said. “But there were only two of us, so we did everything.”
One board member gave them an office at the University of Pittsburgh, where there was room for only two people to sit on borrowed furniture.
They took a used slide projector around “to do dog and pony shows” for potential funders, Ms. Everhart said. The slides showed broken benches, rusted railings, eroded steps, mud beds that had been fountains, a derelict visitor’s center at Schenley Park, a ragtag chapel in Riverview Park.
“We chuckled about the days when someone had to stand up in the office once we hired a secretary,” Ms. Everhart said. “So it delights me to see mind-boggling numbers like $100 million. I think the difference between the legacy of really visionary leaders and other leaders is that they achieve things that you can’t imagine the world without.”
Since 1998, the conservancy and the city have been partners, and in two cases — Mellon Square in Downtown and the Frick Environmental Center in Frick Park — the conservancy is the managing partner.
The conservancy began taking on more roles in parks 10 years ago. Pittsburgh’s parks are supported in various ways. The city gets Regional Asset District money for its five largest parks and activates funding from the trust Henry Clay Frick established for Frick Park. The conservancy relies on fundraising for operating costs and capital projects, as well as in-kind services from the city.
For its first projects, the conservancy picked two that would show results pretty quickly in visible spots: the Reynolds Avenue gatehouse in Frick Park and the Schenley Park visitors center. The gatehouse was first, a $433,000 project that removed a previous roof repair in asphalt and brought back historic tiles.
“We unboarded the windows and replaced them, we cleaned the brick, fixed the bluestone walkway, put in curb cuts, planted 63 trees and shrubs,” Ms. Cheever said. “It was a small project but it gave the signal: We’re starting.”
Now, Ms. Cheever said, as a national search is being contemplated for a replacement, she is confident that the conservancy’s momentum has made the position she is vacating attractive “for someone to step in and speed the work into more parks. I think the park system’s time has come.”
Meg Cheever's full-time commitment has resulted since the late 1990s in almost $100 million in capital fundraising that restored, renovated and repaired the landscape — and the reputation — of the city’s parks.