Pittsburgh Urban Development to Get Power-Planted?

The Post-Gazette and the Trib are both reporting that The Cordish Co., the group responsible for Baltimore's PowerPlant Live!  and similar developments across the country, is eyeing property on Pitttsburgh's North Shore.

Neither of the reports mentions public subsidies, so my typical rant will have to wait. But the development is still worth thinking about. Here's part of the Trib's story:

A Baltimore developer is negotiating to build nightclubs, restaurants and stores on eight acres next to Heinz Field, promising to draw thousands of visitors to the North Shore every weekend.

The Cordish Co., a developer with entertainment projects in several cities, said it is working with Continental Real Estate Companies to build one of its Live! Entertainment District developments on land between Heinz Field and PNC Park.

"The project will be comparable to other Cordish Live! Districts, such as Fourth Street Live! in Louisville," company Chairman David Cordish said in an e-mail to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

"It will become a meeting place for the entire region, and an amenity not just for the North Shore but the entire Downtown," Cordish said. "Millions of visitors will come every year, as they do in our other projects."

In that case, it's worth taking a look at exactly how those millions of people come to visit, since they reportedly are going to do so in similar fashion in Pittsburgh. Here's a story from the Baltimore Sun that appeared earlier this year (registration required):

Reacting to public pressure, Power Plant Live has ended College Night, a festival of drunken revelry that drew busloads of young people to a neon-lit courtyard in downtown Baltimore where they wandered from bar to bar guzzling cheap drink specials.

Developer David S. Cordish controls Power Plant Live and an affiliate holds an arena license that that gives his tenants the right to sell alcohol. Yesterday, a Cordish official met with the Underage Drinking Coalition, a group of police and liquor board officials, and announced that College Night had been canceled.

The announcement came as legislators in Annapolis debated a bill that would ban College Nights at Power Plant Live, where they had become a regular Thursday event, and one other city venue.

An article in The Sun Feb. 23 detailed underage drinking problems at or near Power Plant Live. City vice police said they had arrested or issued citations to 165 underage drinkers in a six-month period and that dozens of other young revelers had been caught using fake IDs, urinating in public, carrying open containers of alcohol, abusing drugs or fighting.

... The Sun's article described how bar promoters -- often college students -- were paid by Power Plant Live venues to rent school buses to transport students to College Night. The buses would pick up students on college campuses. The bus stops later were moved to residential neighborhoods after university officials banned them due to campus drinking problems.

Now, I am admittedly something of a libertine, and I would never use this sort of story against any kind of development. Bars are bars. And college students are college students. But that poses something of a problem for these developers and others like them, I think, especially when they start promising "development."

To wit... what do you think happened in Baltimore after they shut down college night? Was there a surge in library attendance? Grade point averages? Rhodes Scholarships? Hell no. Those kids just went drinking somewhere else. And you know what? They were drinking somewhere else BEFORE college night.

That is, these millions of visitors Cordish is promising do not come from Toledo and Duluth and Wichita. They come from other places in the city that just got "undeveloped." Sure, some of these people might be moving in to the area because they love chain nightclubs. But how many?

So sure. Put up a new Power Plant. But get ready. All those drunk people are someone else's drunk people at the moment.That's none of my business, of course. As long as this is built with private money, that's just the way things go. Maybe existing bars need a bit of competition.

But I can tell you this. I lived in Baltimore for a long time. And I went to the Power Plant there exactly once. I HATED it. One of Baltimore's great strenghts is the existence of good, cheap neighborhood bars. The ESPN Zone is a bad, expensive corporate bar. But other people like it. So be it. Just don't believe anyone who tells you this is going to "develop" the city. All it will do is shift some money around.

Oh, and I love this little bit from Bill Toland's PG piece:

Cordish hopes to build one of its signature urban "Live" districts, which can be found in Louisville, Kansas City, Baltimore and elsewhere. "Power Plant Live!" in Baltimore and "4th Street Live!" in Louisville feature shops, clubs, restaurants and bars, many of which are chain or franchise outlets and can already be found in Pittsburgh.

Yes. Sounds great.

And an omionous sign from the Trib piece:

Fourth Street Live! and the city's Louisville Slugger Field for its AAA-affiliate team to the Cincinnati Reds are credited with sparking a building boom that is bringing 1,800 new homes to the city, he said.

Cordish is receiving a tourism tax credit from Kentucky -- rebates that represent a percentage of sales tax money generated by tenants. The rebates are capped at $16 million over 10 years.

The city agreed to provide free parking after 6 p.m. on weekdays and all day Saturday and Sunday, Kamer said, in a city-owned garage next to Fourth Street Live!

Last, here's this from the Trib:

Cordish -- perhaps best known for its Power Plant development, which helped to turn Baltimore's Inner Harbor into a tourist attraction -- doesn't plan any residential buildings at the North Shore development, Kass said.

The "Kass" in question is Frank Kass, chairman of Continental, which oversees development of land between Heinz Field and PNC Park. The writing here is a bit confusing. Did Kass say that the Power Plant development "helped turn Baltimore's Inner Harbor into a tourist attraction," or is that the Trib's reporter saying that? Either way, that's a shocking revelation for anyone familiar with the Inner Harbor.

The Inner Harbor, built in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is widely touted as the greatest thing ever created for any reason anywhere. It saved Baltimore, dammit. From the get go. The notion that it might not have done that, and that it needed help from the Power Plant, a separate development that cost millions and millions of dollars, is a different version of history. See, the Power Plant did not open until 2001. And it was a "partnership" with the city of Baltimore, which is code for "public subsidies." Keep in mind that the Power Plant is DIRECTLY ADJACENT to the Inner Harbor.

So if the Inner Harbor was such a successful redevelopment effort from its inception, why did the city have to pitch in for a development that finally turned it into successful tourist attraction 20 years later? I mean, after 20 years, shouldn't the world's greatest urban revitalization scheme have been able to at least lead to private investment on directly adjacent properties?

Nope.

Comments

[Jonathan Barnes]

The last time I was at the Inner Harbor, maybe 10 years back or more, it seemed OK.
Why'd they have to screw it up with some big ugly chain?

[Jonathan Potts]

I was at the Inner Harbor 8 years ago and it was nothing but chains as I recall. that's no problem--unless those chains are being fed tax dollars to open up.