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Four years ago, the meeting room at the Phipps Garden Center in Mellon Park was standing-room-only as neighbors of Mellon Park organized to fight the center’s expansion.
The Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens had wanted to expand the garden center by 6,000 square feet into the Mellon Park lawn where concerts are held, creating a permanent performance space.
Point Breeze residents organized against the plan. They created The Friends of Mellon Park, brought in Preservation Pittsburgh to help them get the park designated as a historic landmark and had it specified as an arboretum.
All of that work and a series of meetings with Phipps executives have resulted in a much more modest expansion plan that was shared with the public on Oct. 19.
The garden center will be bigger, but it will build on its own footprint, adding classrooms where the back patio and the loading dock are and incorporating the Scaife Garage, which currently is a city public works storage area.
At a 2019 meeting, Elizabeth Seamans, the founding chairperson of Friends of Mellon Park, took the microphone and railed against the original expansion plan, calling it inappropriately out of scale with the small park.
“And all this stuff about biophilia, the most biophilic thing in the world is grass and trees,” she said.
At the meeting this October, she raised her hand to speak again.
“Thank you,” she said to Richard Piacentini, president and CEO of Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. “This looks lovely and it will be wonderful to see a new garden center here.”
Larry Gerson, vice president of the Point Breeze organization, also had kind words for Piacentini. “It’s rare for people in power to listen to the public, and I have to give it to Richard for that.”
Despite the support from neighbors, Piacentini was clear that construction on the building would not start soon.
“I have to raise the money first,” he said. He estimated the renovations will cost about $15 million.
The historic garden center is about 16,000 square feet. When the construction is done, the new center will be about 20,000 square feet.
Piacentini said the building, which Phipps rents from the city, is in terrible shape.
Mike Gwin, an architect from Rothschild Doyno Collaborative, presented an outline of what was being considered.
When Gerson asked for a show of hands as to whether those in attendance liked the new plan, a large majority raised their hands.
Seamans was concerned that a planned glass-roofed atrium in the center of the building would cause light pollution in the nearby walled garden where a star chart of twinkling lights is a feature. Gwin said a lighting engineer was working on the project and would make sure it was not a problem.
One part of the plan that was eliminated was a cafe. Now, there is a proposal to add a kitchen, which local clubs that share the space can use.
In addition to raising the money, Piacentini said the plan will have to go through the city’s historic review, art and planning commissions for approval. The proposal goes before Pittsburgh’s Historic Review Commission on Dec. 6 at 1 p.m.
Construction of the building will take about 14 to 16 months.
The proposal calls for removing some of the newer additions and restoring the original Mellon carriage house and incorporating the Scaife Garage behind it. The Department of Public Works storage yard will become the main entry.
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