BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

We will have to keep our eyes on this to ensure they don't just close the connection. My guess is that they will want to keep it open. I was under the impression that the school was still in operation though. Are there multiple buildings or is this the last year?

Edit...read the whole story.

Reizenstein, on the Shadyside-Larimer border, was long known as Reizenstein Middle School and now is home of Pittsburgh Obama 6-12, which will move to the Peabody building in East Liberty next fall.

I wonder what will close first and move there - a business at the southside works, or a business at the waterfront?

Ah yes, the new-retail-means-jobs fallacy. There are never jobs created when a new mall/store/stripmall opens. Jobs merely move. The difference now is that they are moving back into the city, from the suburbs.

I thought they were having a hard enough time filling 1.0?

Stu, before you even consider if there is a new job you need to consider the value of that low paying job to begin with.

There's very little retail to speak of proposed for this development. It's almost all office and residential. Bakery Square I's office space is fully leased, apparently, even if the retail has plenty of vacancies.

and theoretically, more residential will help push filling up the retail

Into it. Better than a derelict building left to rot any day.

In the 80's and 90's it frustrated me that Mayor Murphy kept giving stores multimillion dollar tax breaks to move downtown (Like, IIRC, HUNDREDS of millions in tax breaks) only to have the businesses move out the instant the tax breaks expired.

The same money could have probaly quadrupled the number of residents downtown. That number is currently optimistically estimated at 5000, but considerably fewer in the 1980's.

Murphy reputedly made money investing in real estate in Cranberry Township. While he was mayor.

i suppose you meant the other grey haired irishman former mayor, murphy

Yes, I meant Murphy - I went back and changed it, but not fast enough!

Mick,

Although there's plenty to suggest you're right about the flaws of Murphy's development strategy (and actually those department stores were given money in the form of loans the repayment of which was based on sales levels they never came close to achieving), I'd be pretty surprised if there were more people living Downtown in the 80s than there are now. Where are you getting that information? If there were more, I'd curious to know where they actually lived, since many of today's residential conversions were still offices then.

AFAIK the most people are in Allegheny Ctr, Washington Square (across from the arena), Point Park & AIP dorms, the Roosevelt, the old Penn RR station, the bldg at Lib/7thSt (with the red dome roof), and FtDuqBlvd/7th. Somehow doesn't add up to 5,000 people, though.

I wonder if they're including the units across the 9th St Br. That would add a couple hundred, easily.

@Tim Schooley.

I said there were considerably fewer people in the 1980's, not fewer *than* in the 1980's.

Since there were fewer people there, a small number of people moving in would make a big difference.

AT the same time, they cut down night-time bus service downtown - which eliminated a lot of people who would be out on the streets - most of them honest working people just looking for a way to get home..

Mick - or honest, hardworking people looking to (legally) spend some of their earnings on liesure and entertainment... which also doesn't much exist down there after 6PM. Other than the "cultural district". So even if you live in the burbs, the only way to enjoy things in the evenings downtown is to drive.

I went to Reizenstein when it was a middle school. Never learned how to spell the name, or anything about the person. It was functionally obsolete the second it was built. The thing has no real walls, just movable partitions in bright primary colors. Like some kind of bad Crayola/Frank Lloyd Wright trip. At least the place always smelled like sugar cookies.

Sorry Mick....I misread your post. Yeah, nobody will miss the Reizenstein building. I seem to recall the head of the URA describing the architecture of the school as "prison nomenclature."