Once a premier destination for the neighborhood of Homewood, the Greater Pittsburgh Coliseum has stood empty for years. And it could remain vacant for years to come: City officials plan to redevelop the site, but more than a year after calling for suggestions and months after naming two finalists, they’ve decided to restart the entire process.
Constructed in the late 1800s as a car barn that once held more than 100 trolleys, the sprawling structure covers almost an entire block on the well-traveled Frankstown Avenue.
In the 1960s, it became a hub for entertainment and at various times housed a roller rink, bowling alley, event space, and cafe. Homewood had grown into a thriving hub for Black culture. Local resident Rico Rucker said the Coliseum stands out as a big part of his childhood in the 1990s.
“We had Bingo, cabarets — it was the place to be,” he said. But he remembers when the property began to fall into disrepair. Standing under an overcast sky one recent afternoon, he scanned the building from the adjacent parking lot. No one can enter — the doors are boarded up.
“It has been nothing,” he said. “And literally we don't have nothing as a community to go to. We don't have a venue to go to. We have to go outside of our community. And we're not welcomed in other communities.”
The Coliseum consists of two similarly-sized parcels. The Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority bought one of them in 2018 and invited bids last year to revive it. Rucker, who owns a commercial cleaning service, submitted an application to restore the roller rink and bowling alley he loved as a kid.
He advanced to the final round of the process this spring, along with a very different rival plan.
The company Conturo Prototyping proposed to move its advanced manufacturing plant to the Coliseum, along with a free vocational school run by the University of Pittsburgh. In addition, architectural drawings show that most of the building’s frontage would have been reserved for neighborhood businesses.
“We were going to leave it open to the public to decide what goes in" the storefronts, Conturo’s owner, John Conturo, said. “And the way our business operates is, we would be able to support that whole facility at a very low cost.”
Ripe for growth
Today, Conturo Prototyping is based in North Point Breeze, just outside Homewood. It makes precision parts for industries ranging from aerospace to autonomous vehicles and power generation.
Since 2016, it has grown to more than 30 employees, and Conturo expects to add another 30 over the next few years. He has hired Homewood residents before and does not require a college degree for machinist jobs. The proposal he submitted for the Coliseum says the company's starting wages range between $18 per hour and $27 per hour, with opportunities to advance to higher-paying positions.
“We really want a state-of-the-art facility … that people like to work in and that’s comfortable to work in and [where employees] can make accurate parts,” Conturo said of his plans to relocate.
But the URA pulled the plug on both his and Rucker’s proposals last week. In a letter, the agency said its selection process had been “insufficient." It offered no further explanation.
Conturo was crushed. He said the Coliseum is the only facility he knows of in the city that can accommodate his business’ expansion. He estimates he spent between $20,000 and $30,000 over three years to prepare his proposal.
“It's even hard for me to look at these renderings now, knowing that this vision will not happen in that community,” he said as he opened the images on the computer in his cramped office.
“We'll be left with a vacant building for the foreseeable future,” he predicted.
Resetting the clock
Rucker said he felt as though he’d been hit by a ton of bricks, too. So he gathered supporters to attend a public forum that Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey hosted last week at Homewood’s Community Empowerment Association.
“There is something that we have to do as the people to unite as the people, to show them how powerful we are, because everyone knows what that Coliseum has to offer,” Rucker told a cheering crowd that had gathered in the gymnasium where the meeting was held.
Roughly 100 people attended to hear updates about a range of community needs. But the atmosphere grew tense when top Gainey deputy Jake Pawlak said officials had doubts about Rucker’s plan.
“Of the proposals that we received, the proposal that had the ability to make the greatest financial sense was not a recreational asset,” he said.
About one-third of Rucker's $6 million to $8 million plan was supposed to come from investors he didn't identify, according to documentation Rucker filed with the URA. Another third would come from fundraisers such as a Homewood Walk of Fame where people would buy engraved bricks for $100 each.
Conturo, meanwhile, had lined up banks behind his approximately $4 million proposal. But he lacked the kind of community support that brings residents to meetings.
That dichotomy leaves officials with a tough choice — and they want another shot at making it. Gainey assured the crowd he'll restart a community process that began with former Mayor Bill Peduto.
“We weren’t there two years ago,” he boomed at last week’s forum. “But we heard the community. So we had to make the choice.”
The URA hasn’t said what it will do next, but Pawlak suggested it could limit proposals to recreational uses.
Conturo said that would be a setback for the manufacturing jobs that once sustained the region.
“Manufacturing has continuously been pushed out [of the city] for other things, and it's left behind a whole community of people that could really benefit from opportunities like that,” he said. “It's really sad to see and heartbreaking.”
He and Rucker said they haven’t given up completely: They plan to meet this week to see if they can blend their ideas — so that the Coliseum can provide jobs, plus amenities for when the work day is through.
Margaret Krauss and Kiley Koscinski contributed to this report.
