Volume 29 No. 1
February 2013
118-year-old St. Nicholas building demolished By Kelsey Shea
Photo courtesy Preserve Croatian Heritage Foundation
After a long battle to save the church, Northside community groups, the Urban Redevelopment Authortiy and the Preserve Croatian Heritage Foundation were sad to see the St. Nicholas Church building reduced to a pile of bricks.
Deutschtown debates future of historic row house buildings By Kelsey Shea Two row houses that might be the oldest buildings Deutschtown sparked a debate between neighborhood residents and the buildings’ owner. In early December, October Development and building owner Al DePasquale appeared before the Historic Review Commission asking for a demolition permit to tear down the two buildings on Foreland Street that date back to the 1830s and suffer from mold, rot and structural problems. Members of East Allegheny Community Council also attended
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the HRC meeting to oppose the demolition plans due to the historic significance of the buildings. The two row homes are located at 406 and 408 Foreland St. and are vacant, but they may date back to before the Civil War and are a unique glimpse at what Deutschtown looked like before the Industrial Revolution. The Allegheny County website reports that the houses were built around 1850, though local house historian Carol Peterson believes certain features of the house indicate that they were built closer
See Foreland, page 12
-News briefs 4 STORIES, COLUMNS, -Troy Hill sign 5 FEATURES & MORE -MWS historic district expansion 6
After a long, hard-fought battle between community groups and the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese, the historic St. Nicholas church building along Route 28 is gone. Trucks and construction equipment placed in Troy Hill on January 10 were the first signs that the historic St. Nicholas Church building’s fate was sealed, and the 118-year-old building was reduced to rubble within three days. After they were issued a certificate of economic hardship, the Pittsburgh Catholic Dioceses tore the vacant building down, despite the efforts of Northside community groups and the Preserve Croatian Heritage Foundation, who wanted to save the church, which they believe may have been the first Croatian parish in America. The diocese turned down two offers made on the property in favor of demolition, one from the Northside Leadership Conference and one from the Urban Redevelopment Authority. The NSLC the Preserve Croatian Heritage Foundation were interested in purchasing the church and turning it into a Croatian immigrant museum and made an offer of $1 to purchase and restore the church, which the diocese said was suffering from structural problems. Studies estimated that the museum would have drawn over 50,000 people to the Northside each year. The diocese turned down the offer from the NSLC. In January, the URA made a last ditch effort to save the church and made an offer of $300,000 for the building plus any addition costs necessary to cancel the demolition.
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"More important than the amount that was offered was that we would have been willing to work with them to save the church," said Yarone Zober, chairman of the URA. The diocese rejected both the URA's offer and the NSLC’s offer before tearing down the building on Saturday, January 12. In a guest column in the PostGazette, entitled “Why St. Nicholas Church had to go,” Bishop David Zubik wrote that his fear of the building collapsing onto Route 28 kept him up at night and the church could not be saved. Mark Fatla, executive director of the NSLC, then wrote a rebuttal to this claim in a later Post-Gazette column. “Five experts, including an engineer, an architect and a contractor intimately familiar with the building countered this opinion, and the city's Historic Review Commission rejected it,” wrote Fatla. “No threat to the public was ever identified by the city's Building Inspection Department, city police or PennDOT, and no restrictions on Route 28 traffic were instituted to protect the public from the structure.” The diocese currently has no plan for the land, but hopes to sell it, possibly to The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation who plans to widen that stretch of Route 28 in the spring of 2014. "Recent changes to the Diocese’s property may give PennDOT the opportunity to evaluate potential improvements to the current design," said James Struzzi of PennDOT. "As a first step PennDOT is revisiting the eligibility of the property to
See St. Nicholas, page 15
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