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Pittsburgh City Council is considering plans to provide city residents with free fresh produce by ramping up urban farming on vacant land owned by the public. Council on Wednesday will debate three bills designed to facilitate urban agriculture. One would direct the Finance Department to identify vacant properties owned by the city that can be used for urban farming. Another would authorize the hiring of East Liberty-based Grounded Strategies for $45,000 to prepare a 1.2 acre property in Brookline and…

The piano that was played in the film adaptation of August Wilson’s play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” — filmed here last year, release date pending — sits in a three-sided shed on what was, before last summer, a vacant lot in Braddock. The Pittsburgh Film Office donated the piano, an upright Shoninger painted yellow. The lot was cleared, graded and recast as a community music space by Gisele Fetterman and Kristen Michaels, founders of the nonprofit For Good Pittsburgh. It…

The 2019 WPXI Holiday Parade presented by Neighborhood Ford Store will march through downtown Pittsburgh on Saturday, November 30 starting at 9 a.m. Here are the other featured acts you'll see in this year's parade: >>RELATED: WPXI Holiday Parade Presented by Neighborhood Ford Store to be held on Saturday, Nov. 30 Other Acts 3 River Region Model A Restorers Club - Family hobby antique automobile club for Ford Model as that drives on tour every other weekend during the summer. Allegheny…

Residents Empowered to Turn Vacant Lots Into Green Spaces Meet the people who are in the middle of the project, and see the cool things they've done to get rid of blight, one space at a time. DISCUSSION Posted By Kristen Burns September 19, 2019 It’s been proven that cleaning up vacant lots helps to improve the mental health of people who live in those communities. Think about it, who wouldn’t want to walk outside and see beautiful flowers and…

There are many easy ways to be easier on the earth, environmental advocates want you to know. You could just give up. Wake up in the morning, read the latest about climate change or trash in the ocean or pollution emissions in our own Mon Valley, and it might seem that the only sensible course of action is to shrug and go about your normal routine, muttering, “There’s nothing I can do about that.” There’s another option, and it need…

A municipality, a school district, a nonprofit and an eatery are the latest entities to earn designation as “Allegheny Live Well” communities. On Jan. 29, the county announced Penn Hills, Avonworth School District, Grounded Strategies in Larimer and Azorean Café in Bloomfield are the newest additions to the program. The Live Well program, launched by Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald in 2014, now includes 62 municipalities, 48 restaurants, 28 workplaces and 16 school districts. Fitzgerald created the program to encourage…

The death of the American manufacturing sector made ghost towns out of cities across America. In these challenging times, some cities were successful at reinventing themselves and went on to forge new economies and transform their once-sprawling, empty lands into something new, something remarkable. Year after year, Pittsburgh appears on best cities for jobs lists, thanks to its burgeoning tech industry after a desperate decline following the fall of American steel. Then there are other cities, like Detroit, that have…

Kimberly Griffith and two of her children were driving home after lunch when the rain started to pick up. The day — Aug. 19, 2011 — had already been a rainy one in Pittsburgh. But on that afternoon, another 2 inches of rain fell in one hour. Griffith pulled up to the bottom of Washington Boulevard in a storm with enough force to blow off 60-pound manhole covers. The street filled with 9 feet of rainwater and sewage, and Griffith’s minivan was submerged,…