A few readers were quite struck by this column’s detailing last week of PNC boss Bill Demchak’s excoriation of the decline of downtown Pittsburgh.
Wrote one:
“I thought that PNC … proposed another of its towers of banking be located Downtown. If the CEO now publicly states that [the Golden Triangle] is not safe, not economically viable and not conducive to have a business within its evirons, the city must then be in dire straits and in bad shape.
“The city fathers and the mayor inviting and planning for businesses to return back into town and expecting people to return and take up residence in the planned future renovated apartments from the empty boarded up buildings is a pipe dream.
“It will be a waste of good money on these sure-to-fail enterprises.
“The city is lost unless there is a great change in the political leadership and I see no hope of that on the horizon. Pittsburgh is beginning to look and decline like Detroit.”
Wrote another:
“I wonder if Mr. Demchak and his supporters would consider selling their houses (probably in the suburbs?) and buying a condo or renting an apartment downtown.
“I heard that the McDonald’s on the corner of Liberty and Stanwix has closed permanently. It was a convenient location for Downtown workers and for tourists, but that area has become dirtier and more dangerous by the minute.
“Do you recall the news story a couple years ago where a family went to a McDonald’s on a Saturday and a man who had been thrown out of McD’s an hour earlier returned with a knife and stabbed the family’s young son multiple times in the back?
“Fortunately, he survived but was in serious if not critical condition. I would never go Downtown, even though our concert halls are located there.
“By the way, I just read a story about the City of San Francisco. Crime and filth are burgeoning, so much so that many companies are leaving the city and relocating.
“And the other day, there was a story on the news about the rise in crime in Washington, D.C. I always considered D.C. a dangerous place but, apparently, it’s getting worse.
“Our cities — and our country — are decaying and becoming cesspools of crime. How sad that it’s happening now in Pittsburgh, too.
“Where can we run to in order to escape it???”
Here’s a short postscript to the mess that downtown Pittsburgh has become:
Radio reports have it that the new Target store Downtown, not even in operation for a year at the old Kaufmann’s department store location, has been beset with a serious shoplifting problem.
When it opened last July, store director Jeremy Petit, in a KDKA-TV story, touted the new Target, scaled down for an urban footprint, as a long overdue perk for Downtown.
“The essentials, the food, there’s not really a one-stop shop for this community and we’re excited to bring that to downtown Pittsburgh,” he said at the time.
And city officials hyped the new store as a “calling card” for other businesses to come in and fill empty Downtown buildings and help revitalize the area.”
But given the general lawlessness that’s been running amok for so long, and the newly revealed shoplifting problem, one is forced to wonder for how long Target will stick around.
Some calling card, eh?
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
