Garfield Residents Plan Rally Over Bottom Dollar Site

Discount grocer Aldi is ignoring a community development group’s request for information on the future of one of the stores it is acquiring from a competitor, representatives of the group said.

The Bloomfield-Garfield Corp. plans to lead a rally Monday requesting that Aldi share its plan for the 6-month-old Bottom Dollar Food store at 5200 Penn Ave. in Garfield that will close by the end of the year.

“We want it to remain a grocery store so that our neighbors have access to food,” said Sarah Burke, communications and marketing manager for the Bloomfield-Garfield Corp.

In November, Belgium-based Delhaize Group announced that it planned to close its 66 Bottom Dollar Food stores, including the 20 in the Pittsburgh area, by the end of the year and sell the real estate and remaining lease liabilities for $15 million to Aldi Inc., which operates more than 1,300 stores in the United States.

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Pittsburgh Police To Step Up Walking Patrols To Help Combat Wave Of Violence

A map of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with its neighborhoods labeled. For use primarily in the list of Pittsburgh neighborhoods. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Pittsburgh police will step up patrols in the city’s eastern neighborhoods to combat an uptick in homicides, many of which appear to be drug-related, officials said on Monday.

Homicide detectives were closing in on a suspect in one of several recent shootings in a North Side public housing complex, officials said.

Police Lt. Daniel Herrmann said police know “key actors” in a shooting on Wednesday that killed one man and injured another in the Northview Heights housing complex.

“We need more information to pull people off the street,” Herrmann said. “We know some of the key actors, but we don’t have enough to get a warrant yet.”

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Tiny Houses Offer Big Potential In Neighborhoods Like Garfield

Locator map with the Garfield neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania highlighted. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tiny houses could play a big role in rebuilding Garfield by filling some of the neighborhood’s hundreds of vacant lots and boosting homeownership in a more affordable way, officials say.

Downtown nonprofit cityLAB intends to build a 210-square-foot home on a small parcel between two-story homes on North Atlantic Avenue, a couple of blocks from bustling Penn Avenue. Leaders of the group hope more will follow.

“There’s no such thing as a small building project,” said Chad Chalmers, an architect with Sewickley-based Wildman Chalmers Design LLC who is working on the Garfield project, noting that construction of a tiny house must go through the same steps as a traditional one — in some cases, more requirements.

An added step for Garfield’s tiny house could be to seek a variance to a section of Pittsburgh’s building code that requires any newly constructed home to have an off-street parking space. In this case, the 180-square-foot space would be nearly as large as the home and eat up one-fifth of the property.

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Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield Neighborhood Gets Its Turn To Become New Hot Spot

Locator map with the Bloomfield neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania highlighted. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Stability has been one of Bloomfield‘s strengths. During the East End’s worst years of blight and crime, Bloomfield went about its business while other neighborhoods got triage.

The drawback was being ignored.

Lawrenceville, Garfield and East Liberty came out of the mire with high-capacity staffs of community development nonprofits, while the Bloomfield Development Corp. morphed out of a merchants’ association with one staff person, Karla Owens, who left in 2012.

Now the Bloomfield Development Corp. is coming around the track on the inside, ready to assert the neighborhood’s presence with six years of funding, a new executive director and positive trends afoot.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2013/12/09/Bloomfield-gets-its-turn-to-become-new-hot-spot/stories/201312090037#ixzz2n0C960do

12 Artists, 3 Groups Get $220,000 In Heinz Endowment/Pittsburgh Foundation Grants

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A sound-art tour about gun violence in Garfield, a poetry manuscript about white American identity and lessons with a master glass artist represent a few of the projects to be funded by $220,000 in grants from the Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation.

The second funding cycle of “Investing in Professional Artists” will support the work of 12 artists and three organizations in areas ranging from musical composition and playwriting to drawing and dance.  Individual artists will receive $8,000 to $10,000, while organizations will get $35,000 each.

The grants support artists working toward a finished project, according to Germaine Williams, senior program officer for arts and culture at The Pittsburgh Foundation.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/ae/art-architecture/12-artists-3-groups-get-220000-in-grants-695591/#ixzz2ZEBMicAF