East Liberty (Pittsburgh) - Renewed Growth

Renewed Growth

In the three decades following 1980, East Liberty has slowly regained its status as a market destination for shoppers.

In 1979, Mellon Bank and other businesses created a nonprofit community development corporation, East Liberty Development, Inc. (ELDI). In the fifteen years following its founding, ELDI focused on rehabilitating some of the East Liberty’s historic commercial spaces. These included the Regent Theater (now called the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater) and Motor Square Garden.

ELDI’s rehabilitation projects were time-consuming, and they did not make the neighborhood the destination for shoppers that it had formerly been. For example, ELDI and the Massaro Corporation recreated the Motor Square Garden building as an indoor mall in 1988, but consumers did not respond. The American Automobile Association bought the building in bankruptcy court in 1991 and now uses it as office space.

In addition to its moderately successful property rehabilitation efforts during the 1980s, ELDI was able to remove the failed pedestrian mall on Penn Avenue and return that thoroughfare to its traditional use as a two-way street. These successes set the stage for a large and somewhat controversial series of developments in the late 1990s and 2000s.

Between 1996 and 2006, ELDI and the City of Pittsburgh worked to attract new “big box” retailers to East Liberty and to remove the 20-story housing projects that surrounded the neighborhood. First, ELDI and the City used tax increment financing to lure two national retailers to the neighborhood: Home Depot and Whole Foods. Both of these stores thrived, and their success convinced small local merchants and other national retailers to invest in the neighborhood. Second, after a complex and time-consuming set of transactions, two of the three housing projects that visually barricaded the neighborhood were demolished in 2005, and the third was demolished in May 2009.

Because these efforts involved resettling the largely African-American population of East Liberty’s housing projects and attracting several high-end retailers, ELDI and the City have been criticized for acting as agents of gentrification. Some of these concerns have been assuaged by new mixed-income residential developments which have begun to replace the demolished housing projects, as the new developments provide arguably nicer and safer accommodations for some of the projects’ former residents.

By 2009, East Liberty more closely resembled the busy commercial neighborhood of 1959 than the struggling ghetto of 1979. Merchants continue to invest in the neighborhood, and outside observers consider it to be fully rehabilitated.

In 2010, the New York Times published an article about the revival of East Liberty, and cited the presence of a Google office as a sign of the neighborhood's success.

In 2011, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an article entitled "The trend toward shared working areas arrives" which describes the creation of The Beauty Shoppe, East Liberty's first Coworking space. The space is owned by East Liberty Development Inc and currently houses several start ups and small businesses. The first business tenant was Thinktiv, Inc., a venture accelerator. Thinktiv was part of The Beauty Shoppe redevelopment effort alongside East Liberty Development Inc. and Edile, a real estate development firm.

In 2012, VIA Pittsburgh--the collective that hosts an internationally acclaimed audio/visual festival each October--acquired its first venue, 6119 (sixty-one nineteen), in East Liberty, courtesy of the ELDI. East Liberty also houses a wide array of Pittsburgh's unique restaurants and bars including: Verde Mexican Kitchen & Cantina, Salt of the Earth (NaCl), Pig and Chicken, BRGR, Plum, Waffle Shop, Conflict Kitchen (An eatery that serves food ethnic to a nation that the United States is currently in a conflict with), Spoon, Ava, and Paris 66, in addition to other eateries and local favorites. The Highland Building hi-rise is currently being converted into luxurious apartments through Walnut Capital, a local real estate company that also owns part of Bakery Square.