God save Pittsburgh's Market Square from the planners
For decades city officials and its planners have been destroying, remaking and destroying its famous downtown square of commerce with their bad ideas. Here they go again.
The city of Pittsburgh and its 'planners' never learn.
They've been destroying and remaking and destroying the vitality and safety of Pittsburgh's Market Square for decades with bad designs, lax policing and too many rules and permit requirements for businesses.
Today, still crushed by the effects of the lockdowns and rife with suburbanite-scaring shootings and stabbings, both downtown Pittsburgh and Market Square are places ordinary people are again loath to go to eat or play at night.
But the non-learners in charge of the city have another brilliant 'revitalization' idea they're pushing: make the Square -- which in one iteration in the 1980s had hundreds of public buses cutting through its heart every day -- off limits to cars.
Here are the reality-challenged details of the new plan:
I used to work near the Square in the 1990s and saw it almost every day. Cristina Rouvalis, photographer John Beale and I produced a big 'Day in the life of...' feature about the Square for the Post-Gazette in 1999.
And here is the op-ed piece I wrote about Market Square in 2004. https://archive.triblive.com/news/saving-market-square/
In 2009 the city did a 'refresh' that cost $5 million, removed the roads from its middle and got rid of the bus traffic. But apparently it's time for the expert planners to do some tinkering again.
This was the teaser on Page 1 of the Post-Gazette.
These are the pages from the Magazine section:
These images should be readable.
A Day in the life of Market Square, 1999
In August of 2004, based on my many trips through Market Square over the years, I wrote this op-ed for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that urged the city to save the Square by leaving it alone.
Saving Market Square
Pittsburgh Trib
Market Square looked like it does every morning — shabby and sad.
As always, its corners, low walls and outdoor tables were thinly peopled by its permanent citizenry -- a downscale but friendly circus of about 60 homeless people, residents of Downtown housing shelters and various urban misfits, crazies and street characters.
The square's denizens are 99.3 percent harmless. But their looks, manners and antics not only terrify the average suburban housewife, they can make veteran Downtown office workers nervous.
Last Wednesday morning at 10, as usual, the pigeons outnumbered humans. A few business people and joggers cut through the quiet space. No troublemaking do-gooders from Mt. Lebanon or the University of Steubenville were serving free croissants and cafe latte to the all-day residents.
Empty Port Authority bus after empty bus - are there any other kind? - rumbled through the center of the shady grid of sidewalks and streets and bounced down Forbes Avenue's rutted, bus-warped brick surface.
Market Square, once the pounding heart of Pittsburgh commerce and briefly a hotspot of Downtown nightlife, is not dead yet -- just still slowly dying. It's rimmed by a dozen fairly healthy brick-and-mortar retailers like Starbuck's, Nicholas Coffee and the historic Oyster House.
But except for a few newspaper peddlers, Paul Coultas, the fresh fruit and ice-ball guy, is the only vendor who's been intrepid and persistent enough to acquire one of five licenses the city sidewalk bureaucrats have stingily allowed here.
It's easy to see why Coultas is the lone (legal) sidewalk entrepreneur. Based on a quick skim of the city's ordinance regulating vendors and peddlers, it's easier -- and probably cheaper -- to get a permit to build a nuclear power plant Downtown than to sell pretzels on a city sidewalk.
Nothing new. Like Downtown, Market Square's glory days as a Mecca of free enterprise and social entertainment for the whole family are long gone, largely because the Square's open public space has been owned, operated and abused by the city for four decades.
It is city bureaucrats, planners and political hacks who have decimated real estate values, smothered street commerce and permitted the decline of civilized social behavior in, on and around Market Square, not cruel market forces or unfixable social problems.
City Hall controls everything on the square.
You need lawyers, money, connections and years of hearings just to get the city's permission to sell fresh vegetables, to put tables in front of your pizza shop, to fix your property's facade or to hold noontime music events.
Meanwhile, City Hall political hacks are too chicken to police the square's feral citizenry, who have turned it into their own 24/7 party room and permanently crowded out/scared off the civilized — i.e., sober people with money and jobs.
Actually, Market Square wasn't too wild last Wednesday. It wasn't obvious who the drug dealers were. I didn't see any open boozing, hear any X-rated ranting or see any punching or hair-pulling among the street people.
But I wasn't fooled. I know Market Square is doomed and will be as long the city continues to own and control it. The only way to save it is to deed it over to the Market Square Merchants Association, PPG or the Pittsburgh Chapter of Homeless People, Inc.
It doesn't matter. Anyone but City Hall. It'll never happen, but the only way Market Square will ever become a thriving, comfortable public place again is if it becomes private.