This is sort of off the current topic, but the mentioning of the expansion of Heinz Lofts (and how I've been dropping my daughter off at the Sarah Heinz House every day) made me think about the former location of the neighborhood of Schweitzer Lock. What's going on here that such prime land - positioned in-between the North Shore and Heinz Lofts - remains a dump?
The portion between Morgan at North Shore and 579 isn't horrible. Too many parking lots/office buildings, and no residential component however.
There's that nice abandoned Victorian apartment/storefront rotting away, with an rowhouse next door, and a huge overgrown URA parcel. I'm shocked no one has wanted to put something in.
Still, the area looks like Shadyside compared to the area betwen 579 and Heinz Street. These blocks contain some of the worst urban blight in the city, with some blocks completely and totally empty. They nominally have parking on them in some cases, - the one at the corner of Heinz and S Canal is chained off and has grass growing out of it.
Virtually all of the vacant lots are owned by Buncher (who also owns two warehouses in the area). The assessor's site shows that many of these parcels had houses on them relatively recently. I'm guessing Buncher has had a long-term process of buying out and knocking down buildings here - for what reason I'm not sure. Is it pure land-banking, or is it plans for some future project? If it's the latter, I'm guessing they're going to wait until they get full control over all the blocks in this zone (excluding the block of the Heinz complex on the west side of Heinz Street) - which probably means that everything historic remaining in the area they don't own yet (maybe seven buildings) will get demolished and they'll start with a clean slate.
Regardless, I know when I saw the Allegheny Riverfront Vision plan, there was a riverfront view which showed new construction filling these blocks. Was this merely "aspirational" or has anything actually ever publicly been discussed?
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