Input sought for riverfront plan at Hazelwood Green

Terri Shields remembers when the Hazelwood neighborhood was the heart of Pittsburgh’s industrial base.

The steel mill, operated by Jones & Laughlin and later LTV, was on the shore of the Monongahela River there.

“I remember when it was a stinky mill. All of the stinky air,” said Shields, 59. “Hazelwood was a thriving community at that time.”

Things have slowly changed since the mill closed in 1998. The site is being marketed as Hazelwood Green and 178-acres are being developed by a partnership among foundations in the region and others including the Regional Industrial Development Corporation of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

It’s already the home of the Mill 19 development, where Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden broadcast a speech from earlier this week. In January, new streets and bike lanes opened.

“We’re seeing strong market interest in the site,” RIDC President Don Smith said. “I think the river is a tremendous amenity.”

The future of the 1.3-mile stretch along the river is part of a plan being drafted by the Pennsylvania Environmental Council to guide its development and decide how to preserve its storied industrial past.

“It’s a huge piece of land that I believe a lot could be done on,” Shields said.

As chair of the Greater Hazelwood Community Collaborative and Advisory Committee, she is one of the people involved with a series of public meetings that start Sept. 8 that will continue through October.

“We seek to gather input from diverse voices,” said Todd Stern, managing director of U3 Advisors, a New York-based consulting firm that’s working on the plan. “We want to hear input about historical industrial assets, uses, landscaping.”

For more information about the meetings, which will be conducted virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, click here.

“Connecting the Hazelwood community back to the 1.3 miles of riverfront along Hazelwood Green has been a long-standing dream,” Sam Reiman, director of the Richard King Mellon Foundation, said in a statement. “This master planning is the first step in activating the riverfront to support outdoor recreation, public health and local businesses.”

The R.K. Mellon Foundation, along with the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and The Heinz Endowments, bought the property in the early 2000s. The foundations created an entity called Almono (named for the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers) that has guided the former industrial zone’s gradual development. The McCune Foundation, among the original investors, sold its share to the R.K. Mellon Foundation in 2016.