Joseph Sabino Mistick: Don't mess with the Strip

Pittsburgh’s Strip District is a treasure. This uniquely Pittsburgh neighborhood has flourished without government planning and is beloved by generations of Pittsburghers and hundreds of thousands of annual visitors.

Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration is about to permit the ruin of all that.

You may have seen the billboards that say “Preserve the Strip! Halt Mayor’s Plan to Restrict Penn Avenue, Stifle Access, Impede Emergency Vehicles.” Or you might have signed one of the many “Preserve the Strip” petitions circulated by Strip District businesses. That pushback is in response to a traffic plan being shoved through by Gainey’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI).

DOMI wants to make Penn Avenue one lane wide and create a bike lane between 31st and 22nd streets, the eastern gateway into the Strip. “Right sizing” is what DOMI calls its proposal to create a choke point just above the busiest stretch of Penn Avenue. It is actually “wrong sizing,” “dangerous sizing” and “business destroying sizing.”

One stopped vehicle — broken down, letting off a passenger, making a delivery — will shut down Penn Avenue. Predictably, traffic will stretch for blocks, idling vehicles will spew fumes and emergency vehicles will be boxed in. Strip business owners are begging the mayor and city council to lead this time — instead of following the bureaucrats.

DOMI claims pedestrian and automobile safety is its goal. Everybody wants increased safety. Traffic signals at key intersections — and other traffic calming measures that DOMI is good at — should be the first and least disruptive safety measures. But there is something else driving DOMI’s zeal, and that’s the proposed bike lane.

BikePGH, which advocates for bike lanes, often seems to be calling the shots with DOMI. BikePGH has done some fine things, increasing bike safety in many places and creating a youthful vibe that will attract a youthful workforce. But the organization is way off base in the Strip.

Sometimes it has seemed that BikePGH and DOMI are the same organization, ignoring the most obvious issues of economic vitality and, in this case, public safety, too. The bike lane lobby usually wins out over the neighbors with the help of like-minded DOMI employees who have been given a free hand by the mayor to redesign Pittsburgh’s streets.

But this time must be different. The Strip District Business Association has a major ally in the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation (PHLF), which has saved other treasured neighborhoods from destruction. In its recent newsletter, PHLF warned that DOMI’s plan could kill “the economic vitality and entrepreneurial vigor that makes the Strip District a distinctive place of attraction, engagement and cultural life for Pittsburghers and tourists.”

I have been going to the Strip for so long that I knew the real Primanti brothers. I am still there, along with many others, some traveling every Saturday from Ohio and West Virginia, just to hang out at La Prima Espresso in what has become our other neighborhood.

Whatever your tradition or taste — Italian, Greek, Middle Eastern, Asian — you can find it in the Strip, along with sports apparel, Pittsburgh souvenirs, furniture and other goods. The Strip hums, especially during holidays when whole families traditionally shop there together.

In the mid-1980s, when a national developer wanted to create a festival market in the Strip, the city told them to forget about it. We already had a festival market — a real one. Gritty and wonderful. And for all its happy chaos, the Strip works.

Most mayors — until now — have understood this basic rule: Don’t mess with the Strip.