Death by Wrecking Ball

Pittsburgh and the politics of eminent domain.

Bill Steigerwald from the June 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

"It's amazing," Bonnie says. "Someone can pay a mortgage and pay taxes on a building they think they own, and all of a sudden the city can come in and decide they can claim your building. I think it's a disgrace."

The city's plan offends the district's shoppers as well as its shop owners, adding a current of racial politics to the issue. If you visit the National Record Mart, G.C. Murphy, or Revco Drugs, you'll find the racial mix is about 50-50. The window displays at Bradley's Book Cellar always include the latest books by black authors. The Card Center carries the entire Mahogany line of greeting cards to serve its black customers.

At Headgear, about 70 percent of the customers are black. They are Fifth Avenue regulars like James Hill, a tall, dapper, 32-year-oldclotheshorse who lives in the city and rarely shops at suburban malls. When I met him, the radio ad salesman was wearing about $900 worth of clothing, most of which he bought at Fifth Avenue thread shops like Mo-Gear, a short walk or bus ride from his apartment.

Hill says the mayor's plan to attract choice high-end retailers like Nordstrom (which will reportedly demand upwards of $40 million in city money before it comes) and Lord & Taylor (which has already gotten $12 million of city dough) makes no sense. "There is no reason to take away something that has been here and is a tradition," he says. "You don't have to have totally upscale. It means you only want one kind of person downtown. That is discrimination against the underclass."

Unfortunately, neither the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People nor black councilman Sala Udin has stood up for the black victims of City Hall's plan. Udin's district includes downtown Pittsburgh and several of the neighborhoods its black shoppers live in. Asked why he and other minority leaders aren't raising a fuss about the plan's racial implications, Udin hints that it's "a racist misconception" and "stereotypical" to assume that black people want to shop at jewel and wig shops but not at Nord-strom or J. Crew.

Udin says he's willing to risk the mayor's plan, as long as the process is slow and "responsible" and includes as much input as possible from all corners of the public. As for eminent domain, Udin "dislikes displacing one private interest for another private interest." But he also thinks "there are times when the city has to move forward in the public interest."

In its bulldozing simplicity and arrogant certainty, the city's redevelopment scheme sounds suspiciously like the urban renewal disasters of the '50s and '60s. Since 1950, the local Urban Redevelopment Authority has leveled more than 1,500 acres of land. Any Pittsburgher over 40 can name the three poor and/or black neighborhoods that the bulldozers revitalized nearly to death: the Lower Hill District, East Liberty Circle, Allegheny Center. Urban renewal reduced hundreds of acres of these once-vital communities to sterile concrete wastelands, a condition that remains four decades later.

Less well-known projects have damaged nearly 70 acres at the tip of the Golden Triangle. In what are known locally as Renaissances I and II, City Hall and its mostly Republican friends in the area's corporate power structure erected modern office plazas, such as Gateway Center, and city-block-eating monoliths, such as Fifth Avenue Place. They look great on postcards and when Pittsburgh's muscular skyline appears on Monday Night Football. But they also turned huge chunks of organic city into artificial office parks devoid of human street life and retail commerce. History-drenched blocks filled with priceless old buildings were destroyed, along with railroad tracks and warehouses. Hotels, restaurants, scores of small businesses, and hundreds of residences were wiped out.

What's more, the Golden Triangle's streets were ripped up or blocked off for several years in the early '80s while the authorities built the T, the city's absurd three-stop subway and suburban light-rail system. Patty Maloney, whose family has owned several greeting card shops downtown for nearly five decades, claims that the turmoil caused by subway construction was what finally killed off downtown shopping. Stores that once stayed open until 8 or 9 p.m. started closing at 5 or 6.

The Maloneys have spent their lives playing dodgeball with City Hall's demolition experts. Four years ago, for instance, one of their stores was forced to move from Fifth Avenue, where it had been for 38 years, to a building they bought on Wood Street, a road that intersects both Fifth and Forbes. The shop was one of seven booted to make way for a $78 million Lazarus store that City Hall built as a virtual gift for its owners, Federated Department Stores. (Federated got $48 million in public funds, plus a secret sweetheart rent deal based on future sales for the store. This, City Hall hoped, would jump-start Fifth Avenue's retail rejuvenation.) So the Maloneys spent $350,000 refurbishing their new property--and now it's doomed by the Fifth and Forbes plan.

Many of the property owners on Fifth and Forbes are happy to sell out to the city. After all, property values have jumped since the city's plans were announced. These owners will be getting their just compensation, and most will be happy to settle.

But Maloney won't. She's leading a new organization of doomed businesses that has commissioned a gentler plan to spruce up the district without blowing everything up. Nor will landlord Gerald Schiller voluntarily sell out. The Schillers bought three buildings on the corner of Forbes and Wood more than 30 years ago as a long-term investment. The rental income from the buildings, which are now paid off, was to provide them with a stream of annuities and money for college educations. The money they'll get if they're forced to sell won't begin to provide that kind of financial security.

Mayor Murphy hopes he won't actually have to use the city's powers of eminent domain to get the Kleins, the Maloneys, and the rest to move. Usually, he gets his way just by threatening to bring in the law. That's what he did last year to try to force the Pittsburgh Wool Co. to sell its land to H.J. Heinz Co., so Heinz could expand its large warehouse and distribution center (and so the mayor could take credit for keeping about 1,200 jobs here). He's threatened eminent domain proceedings so often, in fact, that he's attracted the ire of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which doesn't usually concern itself with Pittsburgh's local politics. And it's worked: In his seven years in office, Murphy has had to pull the trigger only once. (In that case, the victim was an adult movie theater that mounted a stiff First Amendment defense. The court battle continues to this day.)

How does the city get away with this? In large part, it's because Pennsylvania's courts have consistently allowed local governments to give private property to other private entities, as long as it's part of an effort to eradicate "blight." And the courts generally trust the judgment of the local authorities when it comes to what qualifies for that designation. As broadly defined by the state's 1945 redevelopment law, blight is essentially in the eye of the beholder: It can be everything from dilapidated buildings to inadequately planned streets to substandard lot sizes. In the last half-century, Pittsburgh has declared virtually the entire downtown blighted.

Bill Robinson, the state legislator who represents downtown Pittsburgh, is pushing a bill that would amend the redevelopment law to include "a more precise definition of blight." His carefully worded amendment includes the sentence, "In no event may private real property acquired by an authority through eminent domain proceedings be sold, leased or otherwise transferred to a private person."