By Patricia Lowry, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh's newest park promises to be a green gateway to Downtown, with a meandering, diagonal path leading visitors from the end of the rustic, riverside Eliza Furnace Trail to the bustling intersection of Grant Street and Boulevard of the Allies.
When it's complete next spring, PNC Firstside Park also will feature seven smaller, spiraling paths, some or all of which are expected to lead, in a later phase, to sculptures. The spirals will snake their way through a mounded landscape of trees, ferns, flowering bulbs, ornamental grasses and other perennials.
The design is surprisingly park-like, forested and organic; even the park's perimeter of buff-colored terrazzo sidewalks and gray granite curbs will be rounded at the corners, contributing to a romantic landscape seen as contrast and counterpoint to the orthogonal PNC Firstside Center, opposite the park across First Avenue.
There is a small eating area, seating 24, and benches interspersed throughout, but this is not your standard urban plaza with copious seating and reams of pavement. This is mostly a park for strolling or striding, one that brings welcome new connections and 1.5 acres of green space to a section of Downtown that sorely lacks it.
The privately owned park should be an amenity not only for the banking center's 1,500 employees, but for anyone working or living on the southeast edge of Downtown and anyone willing to make their way to it.
"PNC wanted this to be a destination spot" for trail users, families, office workers and others, said Steven Gillespie, one of the park's two designers.
Gillespie and Rachelle Wolf, both landscape architects at Astorino, collaborated with PNC staffers, including Gary Saulson, director of corporate real estate, and a California artist whom PNC wouldn't identify -- even though the spirals grew out of the artist's idea of how the sculptures would be placed in the park.
"PNC plans to wait until it makes a final decision about what sculpture(s) it may choose and announce the sculpture(s) and artist at the same time," PNC spokeswoman Darcel Kimble wrote in an e-mail. "The decision is close to being finalized."
In announcing the park in 2004, Saulson said PNC, which operates a day-care center for employees at PNC Firstside Center, wanted to "create a child-friendly environment -- someplace kids want to go. I don't want to give away too many ideas, but it will definitely appeal to children."
At the time, Saulson also said the park would interpret some of the history of the site, which in the early 1800s was adjacent to the Scotch Hill Market, burned in the Great Fire of 1845. The Boulevard of the Allies ramp is on the market site now.
In recent years, the park site held the seven-story Public Safety Building, a 1960s expansion of the four-story, former Post-Gazette building. PNC paid $4.2 million for the Public Safety Building in May 2004 and soon began a careful deconstruction, recycling 98 percent of its materials, including some crumbled into gravel and used as fill on the site. PNC declined to reveal the cost of the park.
Some of its spiraling paths will open to other walkways, allowing a different diagonal stroll through the park opposite the main diagonal path. The main diagonal will be paved in buff terrazzo and lined with white birches and pedestrian-scale light poles. The labyrinthine spirals, done in chipped, compacted limestone, could make the park a meditative or playful experience, but much depends on the form and content of the sculptures.
One aspect of the park could encourage a contemplative environment: The back of each of its perforated-metal benches will incorporate a short quotation, about 2 inches tall, from a notable person, including Helen Keller, Martin Luther King and Confucius.
The park also includes a small plaza area, paved in scored, dark gray-tinted concrete, with six silver-colored tables, each with four attached chairs. Like the benches, they will be contemporary in style, taking their aesthetic cues from the design of Astorino's PNC Firstside Center. The park's buff, gray and silver color scheme also was inspired by the center, for which Gillespie and Wolf designed the surrounding landscape, with its cascading fountain along First Avenue and the inlaid compass that terminates the Eliza Furnace Trail.
One of the park's greatest amenities will be its 101 trees, with varieties chosen for fragrance and four-season interest: red maples, lindens, zelkovas, river birches, white birches, redbuds, saucer and sweetbay magnolias, and flowering cherry, crab-apple and callery pear trees.
The park's perimeter sidewalks, interior paths, benches, tables, chairs, trees and sod should be installed by the end of October. Ornamental grasses and flowering perennials and bulbs will be added in the spring.
Asked if the park was a placeholder for a future building, project manager Susan Golomb said it isn't, but added, "you can never predict what will happen in 20 years."
First published on August 29, 2006
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