Category: default || By jt3y

Like Anne Frank, writing in her diary that people are basically good as she hears the boots tromping up the stairs to the attic, I keep looking for signs of hope.

For instance, I read Ann Belser's story (which took up most of three pages in the Post-Gazette on Sunday, and I thought, "Well, at least the pictures are nice":

It's not so much the high-profile crimes, those that draw the television cameras and are splashed across the news, that erode the quality of life in areas like McKeesport. It's the day-to-day hassles of gangs of young people in the street, punctuated with shots that may hit no one, that grind the residents down.

This year has been a busy one for the department. In just the first two months of this summer, McKeesport police answered 5,725 calls and made 596 arrests. During the first seven months of this year, the 60-member department answered 18,333 calls, which is already 4,738 more than all of the calls answered last year. McKeesport is not among the highest crime communities in Pennsylvania; it is among a group of towns and neighborhoods that have persistent levels of both nonviolent and violent crime.

Belser didn't pull many punches in describing the current "state of the union" in Allegheny County's second city. How (or why) could she? We who live and work in Our Fair City or its suburbs know what's going on, and the people who Belser talked to told her the straight truth.

So why did I feel some optimism after I finished the story, besides the pretty photos from Martha Rial? Because it shows that people haven't given up yet. Not the 15-year-old girl from Midtown Towers who's trying to make the honor roll and her mother; not the man from Sumac Street who's coaching the Little Tigers; not the police who've stepped up patrols or Mayor Brewster, who's committed to eliminating blight by demolishing abandoned buildings and clearing vacant lots.

About the only thing in Belser's story which I can fault was the headline: "Taking Its Toll: Anxiety over crime, social problems, wears down McKeesport." I didn't see that people were "worn down"; on the contrary they're fighting back. I'll concede, however, that they're anxious. I know I am. (Contrary to popular belief, reporters don't write headlines, and sometimes the people who do don't read much of the story.)

Nothing worthwhile ever comes easy, and reversing the city's fortunes is not going to be easy. The fact that so many people are willing to make the effort, and are unwilling to allow criminals and absentee landlords to do whatever they want to whomever they want, is reason for optimism, and those people deserve our support and gratitude.

And then there was Pat Cloonan's story in Saturday's Daily News. It points out that there's still much work to be done, and that as Our Fair City moves forward, some of its old glories may fall by the wayside, and that the process may be painful; among the buildings targeted for demolition by the city are the old Eagles Aerie on Market Street and the Penn-McKee Hotel. (Others include the old Henry B. Klein store on Fifth Avenue and the Swedish Singing Society and McKeesport Appliance Parts buildings on Shaw Avenue.)

I will be sorry to see the Eagles go, since my grandfather was a member, and I have fond memories of attending functions there, but it's been sad to watch it deteriorate, and I have a bad feeling that the damage to the building is well advanced. As City Administrator Dennis Pittman told Cloonan, any structure can be rehabilitated, but once the costs of fixing the old building are more than the cost of building a new one, it's unlikely to happen. The Eagles and the Shaw Avenue buildings are owned by something called the Museum Hair Institute, whose managing partners say they want to open a museum of hair. Well, stranger things have been memorialized in museums, I suppose. If they're serious about doing something to preserve the Eagles (which was originally one of the mansions that once lined Market Street), I hope they act already.

I'll be even sorrier if and when the Penn-McKee goes. With the opening of the McKee's Point Marina and the revitalization of the Palisades, which is hopping several nights a week these days, I was hopeful that someone would buy the Penn-McKee and reuse the lower floors for retail and maybe a decent sit-down restaurant. I'm not sure what you'd do with the upper floors, though I suspect senior citizen housing will continue to be a booming business in the Mon Valley for at least the next 20 years.

I don't know how much use Our Fair City has for a hotel, although the explosion in hotel construction in West Mifflin and North Huntingdon leads me to believe there's some demand; the Penn-McKee's rooms, which are very small and run down (the hotel was most recently a flophouse), would basically need to be gutted and completely reconstructed.

Still, the Penn-McKee was once considered a very important part of life in the valley, having hosted (among other things) the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1947, and as long as it's standing, there's hope that it can be reused.

There have been some frankly half-hearted attempts to market it over the years, and I'm not sure who's to blame for allowing this landmark at the gateway to Downtown to fall into disrepair. County deed records show that the tax bills for the Penn-McKee go to Edward L. Kemp Inc., the heating and air conditioning contractor on West Fifth Avenue, while the registered owner is something called "See Bee Inc." (For what it's worth, Kemp owns more than a dozen other buildings around the city, several of which the county's assessors have rated as "poor," "very poor" or "unsound." But don't take my word for it. All of the information is publicly available to anyone who wants to read it.)

A check with the state's corporations bureau gave me no information about See Bee other than the fact that it's a real-estate investment company with a Pittsburgh address.

Frankly, the Penn-McKee and the city's residents and taxpayers have deserved better stewardship than the building has gotten, whoever is responsible for its current deplorable state. It pains me to say it, but if the owners have no intention of doing anything with the building until it falls down (like the Hunter Livery building did a few years ago), then perhaps it's better if the Penn-McKee is torn down. If anyone has a realistic plan for saving it, I hope they step up, and soon.

Ah, there's that word "hope" again. Am I just kidding myself, or do I have reason to keep the faith?