New Beginning: Allentown’s Warrington Avenue Poised For A Makeover

The crowd inside — and eventually outside — 816 E. Warrington Ave. one recent evening gathered to showcase a newly renovated Allentown property. The former Ken’s Variety had been vacant for more than 20 years.

As the evening deepened, “Open in Allentown,” a “pop-up” event with a garage-style glass door rolled up, became a stew of neighborhood leaders, investors, consultants, residents of Allentown and nearby neighborhoods mingling over cocktails and catered nibbles.

The event and mix of people signified what Hilltop Alliance executive director Aaron Sukenik called “Warrington Avenue in its reinvention phase.”

One mile from Downtown (Pittsburgh) and cradled by the hot markets of Mount Washington and the South Side Slopes, Allentown is riddled with residential blight, and 35 percent of its commercial properties are vacant. But the newly repaved Warrington Avenue is on the cusp of a transition from being seedy to being seen.

Read more:

http://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2015/04/06/New-beginning-in-Allentown-Warrington-Avenue-poised-for-a-makeover/stories/201504060015

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