Park Place Blog

Last night, Hosanna House, Action Housing, and the Community Design Center held a meeting regarding a development proposal for Peebles Square. Peebles Square is the area bordered by Penn, Trenton, Peebles and South- with large parcels of abandoned and vacant property.

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City Council has decided to delay any decision on rezoning Park Place residences to accommodate Walgreens. The stated intention being that Walgreens should be working more closely with the community to try and address the issues brought forth by the many community members who showed up at the public hearing. To that end, Twanda Carlisle promised to initiate and facilitate continued discussions with representatives from the community organization.

We have been contacted by other community organizations outside of Pittsburgh who saw this site and shared similar stories. (see http://northwestcarrollton.com/2006/07/16/other-neighborhoods-struggle/)

One such site (see http://b.rox.com/archives/2006/07/14/886/) shows the struggle being faced by a community group in New Orleans, who pointed me to this site showing photos where Walgreens leased (but did not build) a big-box style store built in an urban environment, but left it vacant. The empty store is being blamed for contributing to local neighborhood blight. Notice the protest signs there are protesting the inappropriateness of allowing suburban style stores in urban neighborhoods. While Walgreens did not develop this particular building, it is still an example of why it is important to design appropriately for the location, using urban designs for urban sites.
Walgreens is looking to build similar “one size fits all” stores in other part of New Orleans (as well and here in Park Place.)

[Thanks to jgpyke’s comment and corrections. Original posting has been modified to correct the mistatement that the building pictured was constructed for Walgreens specifcially.]

The Pittsburgh Business Times has written an article about the conflict surrounding attempts to shoe-horn big-box style suburban stores into urban Local Neighborhood Commercial (LNC) districts. They point to the Park Place rezoning issue with Walgreens as a prime example.

see it at:
http://pittsburgh.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stories/2006/07/10/focus3.html

The GPPNA will meet to announce the outcome of the 2006 board elections and review the committee sign-ups from the survey and kick-off meeting. We will also cover board business related to updating organizational documents, and processes.

This meeting is open to the public.

Basement of the Waverly Church at the corner of Forbes and South Braddock at 7:00pm.

GPPNA must receive ballots and registration forms from all those community members wishing to vote in the 2006 board by Monday July 10th. See http://www.parkplaceblog.com/about/ for links to the forms and address for submission.