Walnut Capital and local leaders celebrated the groundbreaking for a new 1.5-mile stretch of road behind Bakery Square Thursday. This is the start of an effort to connect the development with the Homewood and Larimer neighborhoods, but only a small part of the overall funding has been secured.
There are three phases. In the first phase, half of the road will be built behind Bakery Square. Once funding is in place for the second phase, the other half of the road would connect East Liberty Boulevard to Fifth Avenue behind Bakery Square.
And then, in the third phase, the plan is for a $25 million bridge that would cross over the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway into Larimer.
Local leaders, including County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and Mayor Ed Gainey, said the road and bridge would connect the revitalization and prosperity of the East End to the communities of Larimer and Homewood.
“What is the best way to help commuter communities grow and thrive?” said Gregg Perelman, the CEO of Walnut Capital. “Create connections so that people can safely and easily get to grocery stores, jobs and community hubs.”
But in the meantime, the new road would relieve congestion for workers at Bakery Square, Perelman said. “We still have a couple thousand people every day here,” he said. “And we need an easier way for people to get here other than driving down the Penn Avenue access corridor.”
Pittsburgh City Councilor Ricky Burgess said he remembered that Bakery Square was an area his parents told him to avoid when he was a child. The new road is part of a much larger path to bringing neighborhoods together and expanding the local prosperity into Larimer, Homewood and even Wilkinsburg, Burgess said.
“And because of its pivotal nature, it is absolutely essential for the Black community for this to be successful in this small road,” he said.
Timeline and cost
The first phase is expected to be finished before the end of the year, but there is no timeline yet for the second phase. According to Walnut Capital, the project took years to come to fruition because of the complicated legal status of the railway and the need to get access to additional land from Pittsburgh Regional Transit.
About $1.2 million of the construction cost is covered by tax revenue from Bakery Square, a Transit Revitalization and Investment District.
The rest of the initial funding, $1.75 million, comes from the state through the Department of Community and Economic Development. State Sen. Jay Costa said that it was important that local leaders and state representatives all supported the project since there is so much competition for these funds.
County Executive Rich Fitzgerald pointed out that he, Costa and Mayor Ed Gainey all grew up within a few blocks of the new road in different directions. And the continued growth of Bakery Square, which he said generated $4 million in tax revenue, symbolizes the region’s growing prosperity.
Mayor Ed Gainey praised Walnut Capital for its work at Bakery Square, saying that it has become a diverse hangout on Saturday nights. And he said the developer had been a trustworthy partner on the Oakland Crossings development, one of the first major development announcements of his administration.
“A lot of times, we're not paying attention to when developers keep their word and what makes them good partners,” he said.
Scott Bricker, the executive director of Bike Pittsburgh, said the new road could be another piece of a larger bike network. When he was brought in a few years ago, he said, there were no bike lanes in the plans. But now, the renderings call for eight feet of protected bike lanes that could be part of a network that eventually could protect bikers all the way to downtown.
“That would be a game-changing network for biking,” he said.
Gregg Perelman, the CEO of Walnut Capital, said the idea for the pedestrian bridge came partly from listening to resident desires through the Larimer Consensus Group. The residents “told us loud and clear that it's about time to connect one side of the tracks with the other,” he said.
Right now, he said, “The cement walls of the busway, the railroad tracks behind us, have served as a visible economic blockade” separating minority neighborhoods.
This third phase “is a bigger step,” Perelman said. “Hopefully, we'll secure funding we need soon, and it will culminate in a larger celebration someday.”
