Where We Are
Lawrenceville is undergoing a significant and exciting transformation. Business corridors are being revitalized by shops, galleries, and restaurants and are drawing customers from around the region. New residents are buying and restoring Lawrenceville’s affordable and historic housing stock. Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh will relocate to Lawrenceville in 2008, bringing with them nearly 3,000 employees and 150,000 patients each year. Lawrenceville is becoming well-known as an artists’ community, with inexpensive living and studio space available and local events like Art All Night. The 16:62 Design Zone attracts customers from around the region to design-related businesses in Lawrenceville and the Strip District. The community also has the potential to be a technology center in Pittsburgh, with CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Consortium currently housed under the 40th Street Bridge.
Where We Want to Go
In spite of these positive trends, there’s still a lot of work to be done to make Lawrenceville better—to attract new businesses, redevelop vacant properties and eliminate blight, and to make the riverfront more accessible to the community. With so much change, it’s critical for Lawrenceville to have a broad-range, long-term community strategy.
In 1999, the Lawrenceville Corporation began to address the need for a consensus-driven community plan to drive new development in the neighborhood. This effort evolved into the Lawrenceville Master Planning Team, a collaborative effort of Pittsburgh’s City Planning Department and three Lawrenceville community organizations (Lawrenceville Corporation, Lawrenceville United and Lawrenceville Stakeholders) to address neighborhood planning issues.
The Lawrenceville Master Planning Team
The Lawrenceville Master Planning Team is facilitated by Pat Ford, Director of City Planning, and consists of the following representatives of the three community groups:
Lawrenceville Corporation: Jan Eckstein, Joe Kelly, Kate Lydon, Kate Trimble, Rebecca White
Lawrenceville United: Nancy Bittner, Tony Ceoffe, Keith Herriott, Rob Stephany, Connie Lee Walsh
Lawrenceville Stakeholders: David Green, Alexandra LaPorte, Tara Merenda, and Mary Moses
What We’ve Achieved
In 2005 , the Lawrenceville Master Planning Team hired a consultant team consisting of Rob Pfaffmann and Carl Bergamini of Pfaffmann and Associates; Karen Brean of Brean and Associates and Valentina Vavasis, a development expert and consultant. We held community meetings at the Teamsters Temple on May 25 and July 11 to get input and ideas about the community’s vision for the neighborhood, and presented the final plan on September 7, 2005. The final plan is included below as a downloadable PDF file.
Download a copy of our Community Plan (PDF).
We Thank...
We would like to acknowledge the generous support of our funders who made this worthwhile effort possible: Councilman Len Bodack and the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh.
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