Nearly 300 structures identified as historic by Pittsburgh are gone, most of them the result of neglect by the city and their owners

Twenty-five years ago the city of Pittsburgh completed its first, and still only, street-by-street historic survey.

In the end, after public meetings to review the proposed register, the city staff created a list of 1,889 individual structures and 15 newly identified historic districts with hundreds more buildings within them.

Address: 212 and 214 Boulevard of the Allies, Downtown Status: Razed Significance: These were among the last pre-Civil War buildings left Downtown. History: Former bordello, bar, then restaurant. Story and video

Some of the buildings they identified were well-known architectural touchstones, but most were little known beyond their neighborhoods.

As a result, the list includes the majestic, granite-clad Art Deco Pitt Stadium in North Oakland, as well as the Modern Frederick Scheibler-designed, six-unit brick row house that lent character to an otherwise typical Pittsburgh block in Lincoln-Lemington, and the colorful Queen Anne clapboard home that quietly graced the corner where Grandview Avenue meets the P.J. McCardle Roadway in Mt. Washington.

Two of the historic districts identified included one of the last intact pieces of the Hill District commercial strip in the 1800 block of Webster Avenue, as well as the cozy, stone-clad Queen Anne rowhouses of the 200 block of Dinwiddie Street in Crawford-Roberts.

Though the register did not give any of them historic protection, it declared that those four buildings and two historic districts — and all the other structures the register identified — were “significant” to the city and that “that these neighborhoods and buildings should be preserved intact, and treated sensitively in the planning and execution of public and private development projects.”

Despite the work that went into it and the unanimous adoption of the register in 1994 as a formal document by the city’s historic review commission, planning commission and city council, that direction was never fulfilled. All four of those buildings are gone, and so many buildings in those two historic districts are now gone that they likely would never be granted formal historic protection again.

And that’s just a small slice of the devastation.

City of Pittsburgh 1984 Pittsburgh Register of Historic Places identified 1,889 individual structures:

Buildings

Bridges

Walls

Memorials To date 299 of those structures are gone. Existing No longer in existence

A Post-Gazette investigation found that 299 of those structures are gone, or nearly 16% of the individual structures identified — with many more likely to fall in the near future.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said John DeSantis, the Pittsburgh preservationist who came up with the idea for the register when he was chair of the Historic Review Commission in 1990. “Especially when you consider this: Every single building — no exception — on that list was on that list for a reason: architectural, historic, added because something happened there, or a historically important figure lived there, or it was a great work of engineering.”

The loss of register-listed buildings is endemic of an even larger loss of similar structures across the city. Those losses have changed the character of the neighborhoods, from the destruction of individual Queen Anne row houses that have left gap-toothed grins along Homewood’s streets, to the loss of dozens of grand, Perrysville Avenue Colonial, Italianate and Romanesque homes on the North Side, to the demolition of dozens of distinctive, pre-1900 commercial buildings Downtown that have slowly diluted the living history of the city’s most visited neighborhood.

“If out of a city of [110,000] structures, you are going to say there are a couple thousand here that we really need to keep, it should be our collective ability to do that,” said Mr. DeSantis. “And shame on us that we did not.”

BUILDINGS LOST TO NEGLECT

So who or what is responsible for all that architectural carnage?

Forty-two of the 299 buildings that have been taken down were demolished to make way for a new development, primarily in the city’s major commercial neighborhoods in Downtown, Oakland and East Liberty.

That count could rise. The city’s recent commercial revitalization, particularly Downtown, has put a dozen more register-listed buildings in the eye of the wrecking ball to make way for possible new developments.

Some of those proposed demolitions have been hotly debated, including a group of register-listed buildings near the Boulevard of the Allies and Market Street owned by the Troiani family. Two of the last pre-Civil War buildings remaining Downtown — at 212 and 214 Boulevard of the Allies — were demolished in June. The family is seeking to tear down another register building on the same block that used to be home to Froggy’s bar.

Address: 300 and 320 Lafayette Ave., Fineview Status: One renovated, one condemned Significance: Both homes are in an intact block, mostly of Queen Anne architecture, from the 1870s. Story and video

Some losses of register buildings belonged to universities. The University of Pittsburgh has taken down seven of the buildings in the register, including Pitt Stadium, in Oakland. Carnegie Mellon University has torn down one Queen Anne-style home and bought three others listed in the register in the small, residential neighborhood east of South Craig Street near Forbes Avenue, a move that residents believe will lead to their demise as well. Point Park has taken down two buildings Downtown and has demolished the old Playhouse building in Oakland.

But the biggest culprit in the loss of buildings has been neglect, first by the former building owners who abandoned them and — more important — the city of Pittsburgh.

Through five different mayoral administrations — from Sophie Masloff to current mayor Bill Peduto — since the register was adopted, the city has allowed many buildings on the list to slowly deteriorate to the point where they had to be torn down because they have become a hazard; many after the city bought them for back taxes and allowed them to deteriorate even further.

Pittsburgh lags behind in historic designation In a National Trust for Historic Preservation survey of 50 American cities in 2016, it found that on average cities had designated 4.3 percent of their buildings as historic. But Pittsburgh, which had the fourth most buildings older than 1940 in the survey, had barely half the average amount of buildings designated as historic with just 2.3 percent. Percentage of buildings designated historic in Pittsburgh compared to selected cities: Source: National Trust for Historic Preservation report, The Atlas of ReUrbanism | James Hilston/Post-Gazette

No one owned more demolished buildings on the register’s list when they were torn down than the city of Pittsburgh over the last 25 years, with 29 buildings. The Urban Redevelopment Authority, a branch of city government, took down nine other buildings in the register, and the city Housing Authority three more, bringing the total to 41 buildings on the list that were taken down by the city or a city-related agency that owned them.

The city also took down at least another 40 buildings it did not own because absentee owners had allowed the buildings to become so unsafe that the city determined they had become a public health risk.

The city may have taken down many other buildings it did not own. Because of decades of problems with its paper-based demolition records, the city could not provide demolition-related documents — including notices of demolition liens — for 117 demolished buildings, or 40% of the buildings in the register that are now gone.

“We’re losing neighborhoods because of the city’s past administrations’ approach to blight. Regardless if it’s historic or not, we’re losing neighborhoods,” said Ernie Hogan, Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group executive director and former chair of the city’s Historic Review Commission.

Some of those demolished buildings that the city has no permits for may very well have been taken down without a permit, said Maura Kennedy, the city’s director of Permits, Licenses and Inspections.

“Unfortunately that’s true” that buildings are sometimes taken down without a permit, said Ms. Kennedy, who was brought to Pittsburgh to oversee modernization of the department, after she did similar work in Philadelphia.

Mr. Hogan said when he was on the Historic Review Commission, he once helped stop the demolition of a home in the Manchester Historic District after the demolition operator failed to take out a permit. He said he got a phone call from a concerned neighbor as equipment was about to start tearing the home down.

The fact that a permit is not taken out is not only dangerous — city inspectors ensure that utilities are properly turned off and asbestos and other possible hazardous issues are dealt with before demolition is allowed — it also removes one significant barrier from a historic building being torn down.

Even though many of the demolitions with no permits may not have been prevented, historic advocates say it is often a formal demolition request that gets neighbors to finally take an interest in a historic property, sometimes preventing its destruction.

A FAMILIAR STORY

While some of the buildings on the list fell despite a public outcry — such as the Brashear Factory in Perry South or St. Nicholas Church in Troy Hill — most were torn down as quietly as they existed, without a single objection.

The all-too-common pattern: The longtime owner died or had to move and stopped paying property taxes; the home couldn’t be sold and became abandoned; after a decade or more of no maintenance the home deteriorated; eventually a neighbor complained to the city or council representative about the deterioration or open front door; the city issued a series of violations to the absent owner that escalated into a condemnation order, meaning no one could live in it; with no response over a couple of years, the home’s condition got so dangerous that the city paid to have the building torn down.

Address: 102 33rd St., Strip District Status: For sale Significance: May have been steel magnate Andrew Carnegie's first office building. Story and video

“We’re familiar with the story,” said Arthur Ziegler, president of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, which has rehabilitated buildings that were in similar shape before PHLF rescued them. “You let a building go, it goes.”

Of the 299 structures and buildings in the register that are now gone, at least 110 were behind on tax payments when they were torn down. Most of those were likely torn down by the city.

Falling behind on taxes, then, serves as something of an early-warning sign for a building’s potential demolition.

Historic buildings that have been destroyed

Of the 1,595 structures remaining from the original register list, 70 are at least two years behind on taxes. Another 47 already have been condemned.

Buildings from the register have been lost across the city. But the destruction is concentrated in two types of neighborhoods: Struggling communities such as Hazelwood, Homewood, Perry South and Allentown that were hit hardest with the decline of the steel industry; and dynamic commercial areas in neighborhoods such as Downtown, Oakland and East Liberty that have seen major players bring big money and big ideas in, often at the expense of older buildings.

One insidious problem with demolishing buildings in struggling neighborhoods where so many register buildings were torn down, said Mr. DeSantis, is that the lots they stood on tend to stay vacant.

“It’s bad enough when important buildings are destroyed in order to be replaced by the latest big box store or the latest fast food joint,” he said. “It’s even worse in some ways when they are simply neglected to the point of collapse, then demolished and a vacant weed lot replaces them. And a vacant weed lot will remain a vacant weed lot forever. We don’t typically see those vacant lots get rebuilt as anything, let along something constructive to the community.”

Of the 299 register structures that have been taken down, 128 remain vacant lots, some of them decades after demolition. The overwhelming majority of the structures — at least 60% — were taken down by the city.

Mr. Hogan said he blames the city for a policy that makes demolition “the cheapest solution to the city” in eliminating “blight” when it’s faced with a deteriorating building.

“Although it’s really not eliminating blight,” he said, “it’s eliminating a structure when they demo something. Because just like they didn’t have the resources to take care of the vacant building and board it and mow the grass, they don’t have the resources once they demolish the building to take care of the vacant lot.”

Lots staying vacant can happen even to sites of well-known buildings in dynamic neighborhoods, such as the Syria Mosque in Oakland, which was demolished in 1991 but remains a parking lot nearly three decades later, and an even more recent loss.

“That’s what drives people mad about the Civic Arena site,” Matthew Craig, executive director of Young Preservationists Association of Pittsburgh, an advocacy group, said of the demolition of the arena in 2010. “All these years later, it’s still just a parking lot. So I do think that those are parts that make people feel kind of ripped off.”

Download data The database of historic structures can be downloaded in these formats (click to download): MS Excel [204.5K] (for personal viewing) SQL [417K] (for databases) JSON [692K] (for programming) CSV [382K] (for databases)

The city currently has more than 1,500 buildings on its condemnation list, more than half of them listed since Jan.1, 2018.

Ms. Kennedy said the city is trying to be thoughtful with its demolitions.

“The city is in no way looking to demolish every structure on the condemnation list,” she said. “We really want to preserve the community fabric of our neighborhoods. Demolition can definitely be a safety solution. It can also detract from that fabric. So we definitely want to be strategic in the demolitions that we do as a city.”

REGISTER WAS SHELVED

Mr. DeSantis said he was trying to be strategic, too, when he proposed the register in 1990.

After a series of raucous public debates over historic nominations in the city in the late 1980s, Mr. DeSantis said he realized that the city had set itself up for conflict because it had very few historic districts and individually designated buildings. But preservation-minded citizens quickly would nominate worthy buildings or parts of neighborhoods if they heard a developer was considering demolition to make way for new structures.

Address: 1100 and 1200 blocks of Voskamp Street, Spring Garden Status: Some houses have been demolished. Significance: 1870s and 1880s Italianate homes along a street laid out in 1860. Story and video

“The thing that developers feared the most was finding a good site, planning a project, buying the land, and then all of the sudden getting what the developers viewed as radical, zealot preservationists coming along and nominating their property for historic designation and all of the sudden throwing a monkey wrench into the developers plans,” he said.

Mr. DeSantis and the commission hoped the register would, essentially, warn developers whether a building had historic merit.

The effort was led by the city’s historic planner at the time, the late Mike Eversmeyer, who died in 2009, and then-senior preservation planner Lauren Uhl, who is now the Heinz History Center’s museum project manager.

“When I came to Pittsburgh [in 1986] I was stunned how beautiful the buildings were,” she said. “But no one seemed to care about them. They were so concerned with the loss of the steel mills.”

Mr. DeSantis hoped the register would be used as a guide — by city planners, building inspectors, developers, homeowners, preservationists and others — to prevent the kind of squabbles that led to preservation battles in the past.

But he acknowledges that the register rarely was used as it was intended “and it began gathering dust on the shelf.”

Not one of more than 40 owners of demolished and remaining buildings in the register contacted by the Post-Gazette had ever been told that their buildings were included on the list. Several said it would have made a difference in determining whether to tear a building down or not.

“I did ask if it was on some historic register because if it was, I wouldn’t want to buy it,” said Ron Samsone, who bought and tore down in 2016 a register-listed, Queen Anne-style home that sat at the corner of Grandview Avenue and McArdle Roadway to make way for a new, modern home for him and his family. “I did get some assurances that it was not on some preservation list.”

Much to some preservationists’ chagrin, the commission in 1994 did not propose any city historic designations with the list, or even varying levels of protection to the buildings and historic districts on the list.

“We didn’t do a levels-of-protection for a reason: At least if it was on the list we felt that that was a sufficient statement that there was historic value of some sort,” Mr. DeSantis said.

Because it has largely been forgotten, some preservationists downplay the register’s value to the city.

The city’s preservation planner, Sarah Quinn, said the register “was just one of many surveys that have been done by the city and it’s just one point in time.”

There have been other surveys by the city. But they have all involved a more generalized search by taking suggestions from community leaders, or cataloging prominent public buildings like schools or churches. The register remains the only time in the city’s history that it has gone street-by-street to look at every single structure.

“The register stood as a document of what is significant in our community that we are not protecting,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It’s time for us to start protecting it... . How much more are we willing to throw on the fire until nothing is left?”

Sean D. Hamill: shamill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2579 or Twitter: @SeanDHamill.