News Around the Neighborhood

Free Tickets for Northsiders: Resounding Sound

Resounding Sound

Texture Contemporary Ballet July 20-23

Texture kicks off its seventh season with high energy in Resounding Sound. With two live bands and thrilling new choreography, this is one show you will not want to miss! Resounding Sound includes a new ballet choreographed by Kelsey Bartman to the music of legendary icon, Bob Dylan. Sacramento-based musicians, Justin Edward Keim and Vincent Randazzo, will be playing renditions of select songs, including “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Just Like A Woman.” Alan Obuzor also brings Pittsburgh-based Meeting of Important People (MOIP) back to the stage to play selections from their latest album, Troika. Come hear MOIP rock the New Hazlett once again as the dancers bring their music to life. Resounding Sound also features other works from Texture’s extensive repertoire including two pas de deuxs, Lacrimosa and Reminiscence, and the fun trio Ice Ice. A solo piece, Song for Viola, and group work, Allowing at Most, a Caryatid, will also be danced.

You’re Invited

Thanks to the generous support of the Buhl Foundation, Northside residents and workers are invited to attend this performance for free. A limited number of tickets are available online, so reserve your seat today. [ebor_button style=”pumpkin” url=”https://www.eventbrite.com/e/northside-texture-july-20-tickets-36170031538″] Thursday, July 20 at 7:30 pm [/ebor_button] [ebor_button style=”pumpkin” url=”https://www.eventbrite.com/e/northside-texture-july-21-tickets-36170983385″] Friday, July 21 at 8:00 pm [/ebor_button] [ebor_button style=”pumpkin” url=”https://www.eventbrite.com/e/northside-texture-july-22-tickets-36170995421″] Saturday, July 22 at 8:00 pm [/ebor_button] [ebor_button style=”pumpkin” url=”https://www.eventbrite.com/e/northside-texture-july-23-tickets-36171009463″] Sunday, July 23 at 2:00 pm [/ebor_button]

Public Meeting: Affordable Housing Trust Fund

On Tuesday, July 18th at 6:00 pm, Councilmen Lavelle and Burgess will be hosting a public hearing to discuss legislation to raise the realty transfer tax by 1%, invest 10 million annually into the Housing Opportunity Fund, and issue a $100 million bond to increase affordable housing.

$100 million dollars into the Housing Opportunity Fund for example will assist residents in:

  • Paying their rent
  • Living in new affordable housing
  • Buying their home
  • Repairing their existing homes
  • Buying and rehabbing abandoned houses
  • Clearing liens and judgements from their properties

For the full flyer, as well as the number to call in if you’d like to speak (you do not need to call in if you just want to attend) please visit pittsburghpa.gov/cityclerk/schedule.

Letter from the President – July 2017

So what are you doing on Tuesday evening?

See suggestions below.

In both July and August there will be no AWCC Membership Meeting on the second Tuesday of the month. Attendance always drops off because of vacations in these months, and everyone deserves a little break anyway. The monthly Membership Meetings will resume on Tuesday, September 12, and each second Tuesday in the months that follow.

During this summer hiatus, the Civic Council’s committees will continue to meet on their regularly scheduled days. And during this time, if you have an issue that requires action please feel free to let us know by emailing president@alleghenywest.org.

Now back to that question about Tuesday evening: If you’re in town on the second Tuesday of July or August and find yourself longing for the excitement, friendly faces, fun, and refreshments of your regularly scheduled Civic Council meeting, don’t despair. Here are a few suggestions to get you through the night:

  1. Grab a cool refreshing beverage and sit out on the front steps. In no time at all, you’ll have an impromptu block party underway.
  2. Stroll to the Allegheny Commons for an iceball from Gus & Yia Yia’s. Have a seat on a park bench, and in no time at all you’ll have an impromptu picnic underway.
  3. Head to the corner of Western and Galveston and order a cool refreshing beverage while seated at an outdoor café table. In no time at all…
  4. Call a friend who has the misfortune of not living in Allegheny West. Invite them to visit you. Then do #1, #2, or #3. Try really hard to be kind and understanding when they keep telling you that there’s nothing like this where they live.

 
The Summer of 1962 was cause for ongoing concern in the community that would one day be called “Allegheny West.” The almost daily front page headlines touting the “urban redevelopment” of the entire lower Northside brought new – and dismaying – details with every edition. The familiar amenities and landmarks that this generation had known all their lives were being added to the growing list of sites that would “makeway for the new Northside.”
 
Far beyond the initial pronouncements of some new shopping, office, and housing structures, as the specifics began to arrive it was clear that the entire of Allegheny’s central business district was to be leveled. More than 300 buildings in total would be razed. The project was so Herculean that at the outset it was viewed as pie-in-the-sky.
 
But ridicule turned to shock as the “take zone” expanded to include churches, schools, theaters, houses, stores, hotels, the railroad station, Boggs & Buhl Department Store, and the revered Allegheny Market House.
 
All of these were fully functioning every day destinations, where thousands of residents lived, worked, played and did their weekly shopping.
 
But an equally horrific scourge had also arrived: real estate speculators. In the free-for-all of redevelopment, outside money began to pour in, acquiring whatever was available in the hope of being bought out at an inflated price by government acquisition. Across the lower Northside – and especially in the neighborhoods abutting the Commons – properties were being snapped up by owners who had no interest in maintaining or improving. Some, in fact, found it more cost effective to empty and board a building rather than deal with day-to-day operation. And they competed for properties against those who would locate their business or residence there. Prices were going up, and both the appearance and the viability of neighborhoods was going down.
 
Of course, for neighboring owners who lived or operated businesses in the vicinity this was disastrous. Everyone could only guess at which rumors were or weren’t true, and worry about whether the next sale would hit even closer to home. Along Ridge Avenue, the acquisitions by Allegheny County for a proposed college had begun. Had the neighbors been privy to the original site plans, they’d have had even more to be concerned about: an extended buildout across 20 years that would take the campus north to Western Avenue and east and west to Brighton Road and Allegheny Avenue.
 
On the 800 block of Brighton Road and the 900 block of North Lincoln Avenue, entire block faces of houses had already fallen to the wrecking ball – intended for “future developments” that were never to come.
 
Just as the neighborhood was beginning to organize itself, the immensity of the task actually was expanding dramatically. And while some were resigned to their fate, others were convinced that by banding together there was a different outcome available – although imagining what that outcome might be was becoming increasingly difficult.
 
John DeSantis
President, AWCC

PechaKucha Night Pittsburgh Vol 27

PechaKucha Nights are informal, fun gatherings held in more than 900 cities worldwide, where creative people share their ideas, works and thoughts in a 20×20 format; a presentation style with 20 images that advance automatically for 20 seconds each, as the presenter talks along with the images.

Tuesday, July 18 at 7:00 – 9:30 pm
City of Asylum, 40 W North Avenue
Doors open at 5:00 pm

Among the 11 local presenters will be Allegheny West’s own Brian O’Neill, author of the 2009 book The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the 21st Century. Brian will talk about the inadvertent plug his book just got from Donald Trump and what has changed about the city since the book was written.

Arrive early for dinner or drinks at Casellua. Enjoy great food, wine and artfully curated cheese plates.

Shop and browse City of Asylum Books, an independent bookstore specializing in works in translation and world
literature.

If you have questions about PechaKucha Night or how to pronounce “PechaKucha”, please contact Greg Coll at
gregcollcreative@gmail.com . We look forward to packing the house!

Co-organized by Greg Coll with AIGA Pittsburgh, AIA Pittsburgh and Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council

2017 2nd Annual 4th of July Rib Cookoff

We’d like to thank all the participants in this year’s Rib Cookoff. Once again their efforts made this annual picnic a great success and one of the best foodie events in town!

This year’s participants included Tom Barbush, John Burton, Clayton Harris, Scott Mosser, John Tingue, Mariana
Whitmer and Tony Caruso.

While all the ribs were fantastic, bragging rights go to Scott Mosser for 2017. Scott will be holding onto the trophy for 12 months but will bring it back for 2018’s winner! If you have a great recipe that you’d like to enter next year, please remember that the neighborhood will provide the ribs! What have you got to lose?

A Night of Traditional Colombian Harp Music

City of Asylum (2017)

Melba Janneth Rey Rey

Thursday, July 27th
8:00 pm

Melba Janneth Rey Rey (Colombia) performs traditional Colombian harp music with an unusually rhythmic flair. She discovered her passion for harp music at the age of ten, while attending the academy of Joropo & Arpa. Under the tutelage of maestro Hildo Ariel Aguirre Daza, she became a master of the Colombo-Venezuelan harp music traditional in the Llanos region in Colombia.

Melba is an internationally-lauded musician and has performed with premiere ensembles Arpas de Colombia and Agrupación Femenina Cayena and in many major Colombian venues.

[ebor_button style=”pomegranate” url=”https://cityofasylumpittsburgh.secure.force.com/ticket/#sections_a0F3100000NTnJREA1″] Reserve Your Free Tickets [/ebor_button]

Did you know that there is a restaurant in City of Asylum @ Alphabet City? During these events, Alphabet City will be set up so that you can have dinner during the event (or simply order drinks).

[ebor_button style=”concrete” url=”https://www.opentable.com/r/casellula-pittsburgh”] Reserve a Table for Your Visit [/ebor_button]

When making your reservation,
please add that you wish to see the film under special notes.

A Film Anthology About the LGBTQ Experience in Kenya

City of Asylum (2017)

ReelQ & Pittsburgh Black Pride Present

Stories of Our Lives

Friday, July 14th
7:00 pm

In 2013, The Nest Collective (a Nairobi-based arts collective) began interviewing people identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex in Kenya. After collecting hundreds of stories, they wrote scripts for 5 of the most compelling and transformed them into Stories of Our Lives, an anthology of short films.

Stories of Our Lives

“Stories of Our Lives is both a labor of love and a bold act of militancy, defying the enforced silence of intolerance with tales rooted in the soil of lived experience.”

– Toronto International Film Festival

Stories of Our Lives was an Official Selection of the Berlin and Toronto Film Festivals, and was a winner of the Special Jury Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, among other notable accolades.

[ebor_button style=”pomegranate” url=”https://cityofasylumpittsburgh.secure.force.com/ticket/#sections_a0F5A00000JKdquUAD”] Reserve Your Free Tickets [/ebor_button]

Did you know that there is a restaurant in City of Asylum @ Alphabet City? During these events, Alphabet City will be set up so that you can have dinner during the event (or simply order drinks).

[ebor_button style=”concrete” url=”https://www.opentable.com/r/casellula-pittsburgh”] Reserve a Table for Your Visit [/ebor_button]

When making your reservation,
please add that you wish to see the film under special notes.

Recipes from A Tour & Tasting in Old Allegheny

Thank you to all of our friends, new and old, who joined us for 2017’s A Tour & Tasting in Old Allegheny. Those of you who attended already know that we had wonderful Spanish tapas to pair with a selection of wines from the same locale. Even if you weren’t able to make it, we wanted to share these delectable treats – and information about the wines that greeted visitors to homes and gardens alike.

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Thaw Mansion

Dish: Spanish Skewers
Wine: Bodegas Muriel Fincas, Bodegas Hesvera

Hipwell Building

Dish: Tortilla Española
Wine: Martin Codax

Whitmer House

Dish: Spanish Meatballs with Cracked Olives
Wine: Latue Tempranillo

& Sweets

Dish: Chocolate Dulce de Leche Bars
Wine: Delgado Medium Dry Amontillado Sherry
Bonus: Cinnamon Churros
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Emmanuel Church

Dish: Gazpacho
Wine: Jaume Serra Cristallano

Willock House

Dish: Pan con Tomate
Wine: Clos de Nit

Johnson House

Dish: Blue Cheese & Walnut Shortbread
Wine: Bodegas Hesvera
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Help Out in Allegheny Commons for OpenStreetsPGH

Hello, Northsiders!

I am looking for some help this weekend at this month’s OpenStreets! I will be at a table over near the Iron Deer statue in Allegheny Commons with a table full of fun stuff and a device I use to make BIG BUBBLES =)

Big Bubbles

I will be there from 8am setting up till 1pm. Please let me know if you are willing to join me as a volunteer for even just half an hour. Any help is appreciated =)

Thank you all! Hope to see you Sunday!

Erin Tobin
Community Outreach Coordinator