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Wants location for parking garage, new bus station

Friday, February 21, 2003

By Dan Fitzpatrick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

In a move that would add more parking spaces Downtown and brighten a dreary section of the central business district, Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy intends to demolish the Downtown Greyhound station and replace it with a 1,050-car garage and a new station for the bus company.

	An artist's depiction of proposed Grant Street Transportation Center

Murphy expects to make the plan public today at a press conference.

Billed as an architectural improvement for the area near the new David L. Lawrence Convention Center, the bus and garage complex could cost as much as $25 million, according to Pittsburgh Parking Authority Director Ralph Horgan, who has been talking to Dallas-based Greyhound Lines Inc. for the last nine months.

Greyhound, which moves 880,000 people in and out of Pittsburgh each year, has been at the same two-acre site since 1959. The site, bounded by Penn and Liberty avenues and 11th and 12th streets, provides a nexus between Downtown and the Strip District. The company's brown and gray building can be seen from the government and corporate buildings of Grant Street, and the site is bisected by railroad tracks, making any redevelopment "incredibly, incredibly difficult," Horgan said.

According to a "term sheet" signed yesterday by Greyhound and the Parking Authority, the two sides have agreed to spend a total of $150,000 on the project's preliminary design work, giving them time to figure out what the new complex will look like and how much it will cost.

The Parking Authority would like to purchase Greyhound's 43-year-old building, demolish it and put up two new buildings totaling 525,000 square feet, more than triple the size of the current Greyhound building. During a two-year construction period, the bus station would move to temporary quarters along the Monongahela River, Downtown, filling out half of the Parking Authority's 767-space Second Avenue Plaza.

But none of that can happen until the two sides agree on how much the Parking Authority will pay Greyhound for its building, how much it will cost to build Greyhound a new one and how much it will cost Greyhound to build temporary quarters. Horgan estimates that the final tab could be $25 million, and he expects to apply to the federal government for $4 million of that total.

The rest, he said, could come from Parking Authority bonds.

No money, according to a mayoral spokesman, will come from tax increment financing, in which the increased revenues generated by a new project are used to pay off bonds issued to finance it.

As Horgan sees it, the new garage and bus terminal would create much-needed parking space near the convention center and the government buildings along Grant Street while creating an architectural focus for an area that often looks like the "back end of Downtown," he said.

For the mayor, "adding parking spaces Downtown is a high priority," said Murphy spokesman Craig Kwiecinski. The new garage, he added, "will serve a lot of different functions, providing parking for daily commuters, for people going to our new convention center and people going to the Strip District and the Cultural District."

	Online Map: Greyhound station proposal

Work on the project began when Dallas-based Greyhound Lines called the mayor's office nine months ago to talk about the improvements it wanted to make to its building. Horgan's thought was, "Let's have a bigger discussion about this." Mark Fallis, assistant director of real estate for Greyhound, said, "We put our heads together."

Horgan hired local real estate broker Keefe Ellis to help him with the negotiations and traveled to a bus station inside a parking garage in Minneapolis to see what Greyhound's new projects look like.

"A bus station, in and of itself, does not have to be a negative."

If the Parking Authority and Greyhound can agree on what the new building will look like, demolition of the existing station could begin by the end of 2003. The new complex, tentatively called the "Grant Street Transportation Center," would take two years to build, Horgan said, and it would be situated next to a proposed light rail "T" stop.