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Originally Posted by PITairport
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Below is the text from today's Business Times article about the P-G project. Let's hope that maybe Michael Troiani sees how an old building can be incorporated into a new project and is welcomed by the community. I hope this happens, but it seems a longshot in the current environment. Fingers crossed.
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Moon Township-based DiCicco Development Inc. is quietly marketing a two-building redevelopment for the former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette property downtown.
After buying the vacated 200,000-square-foot building at the end of last year, DiCicco is shopping around a two-building proposal for the site at 34 Boulevard of the Allies, one that calls for reconfiguring and building upon the established structure and the other new ground-up construction pitched as a build-to-suit for a major user.
DiCicco couldn’t be reached for comment.
But the company showcases the companion proposals on its website, calling them the “Press Building” and the “Press Tower” and recently began showing the plan to potential tenants.
Any proposal by DiCicco for the site remains preliminary, still requiring full approvals from the city. It's also highly speculative, in an office market still in a state of deep stall from the Covid-19 pandemic, as most companies continue to operate under work-from-home policies, a widespread practice that is revising assumptions about what demand for office space will look like once the pandemic is fully over.
Whatever that demand may be, DiCicco’s early proposal demonstrates some ambitious assumptions about what the demand will be for the two projects.
The “Press Building” redevelopment is currently expected to be a 292,400-square-foot office building totaling nine floors, with 211 dedicated parking spaces, with an illustration showing a brick building in which new upper floors are built onto the established structure and terraced back.
The “Press Tower,” also called Commonwealth Place in the company’s marketing, is proposed as a new ground-up, 17-story office building totaling 245,730 square feet of space and offering 184 parking spaces.
Combined, the two projects rank among the biggest in the works in and around the central business district, in which the last office building built was Tower 260 at JLL Center near Market Square, which was completed in 2016.
DiCicco is dipping a toe in the water to assess a market that’s challenging to read right now but with lots of concern about the overall strength of a downtown only attracting a small fraction of its daytime population due to Covid-19.
In its most recently quarterly report on Pittsburgh's office market, Newmark Knight Frank indicated a central business district trending toward historically high vacancy, reaching 19.1 percent.
At the same time, the Pittsburgh economy overall has been improving in recent years and generating strong interest from outside investors, many seeking to develop and propose urban projects in the fringe neighborhoods beyond downtown.
A number of new projects in and around downtown are marketing their new space against downtown's established inventory of space that is generally older and not as current with meeting new tenant demands.
While it is still to be determined how the two buildings would be phased, the potential scale of the combined proposed structures are comparable in size to JMC Holdings' 1501 Penn Avenue in the Strip, totaling more than 500,000 square feet in 21 stories, and the new FNB Financial Center in the works for the Lower Hill expected to total 382,000 square feet and reach more than 24 stories on site adjacent to downtown.