Were I a better shooter or had I a few thousand bucks worth of cameras and lenses, this installment would lead-off with a superb photo of Pittsburgh’s Nine Mile Run flowing below the Parkway East (aka I-376) and a sign beside the new houses high on the hill overlooking it all reading “HOMES AVAILABLE.”
But I'm not and I don't, so I'll have to explain it mainly in words . . .
From its sources in the near eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh, Nine Mile Run courses down through the city's Frick Park en route to the Monongahela River. It empties into the river across from Homestead’s massive Waterfront shopping complex – formerly the site of Andrew Carnegie’s (later, U.S. Steel’s) gargantuan steel mill, scene of a particularly bloody chapter in the American labor movement – some nine miles above “The Point,” where “The Mon” joins the Allegheny to form the Ohio River.
For the best part of a century, Nine Mile Run was a poster-child for just about every environmental insult Man could inflict upon a water-way: a depository not just for the raw sewage flowing from nearby neighborhoods like Squirrel Hill, Regent Square, Duck Hollow, Edgewood, Wilkinsburg and Swissvale in times of heavy rain, but for the caustic runoff from an estimated 200 million tons of slag from the Carnegie, U.S. Steel and Jones & Laughlin mills dumped nearby, not to mention the usual urban notsam and flotsam of old automobile tires, purloined shopping carts, “disposable” diapers and the like.
A little over a decade ago, the City of Pittsburgh, the Army Corps of Engineers, Carnegie-Mellon University and the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association got together and launched a major initiative to clean-up Nine Mile Run. The work included reconfiguring stream channels and building boardwalks overlooking dozens of acres of reconstructed wetland, along with enhancing native wildlife habitats and planting native trees, shrubs and wildflowers. When completed in 2006, the Nine Mile Run project was the largest urban stream restoration in the United States.
Ironically, the restoration project might never have happened but for the slag heaps that did so much to taint the waters draining into Nine Mile Run. In its ongoing efforts to reinvent itself following the steel industry’s collapse in the 1980s, the city of Pittsburgh targeted those man-made mountains as the site of a new, upscale housing project, aka Summerset. Understanding it would be problematic to get potential buyers to part with their money for houses overlooking what often amounted to an open-air urban latrine, the City joined forces with the Corps of Engineers, CMU and the NMRWA to restore the waterway and wetlands. Ten years and $7.7M later, the project resulted in the renewal of what no less than Frederic Law Olmstead, Jr. once opined was “perhaps the most striking opportunity noted for a large park” in America.
But there’s a deeper irony at work here. After all, the nucleus of Frick Park consists of lands donated to the City of Pittsburgh by Henry Clay Frick, the man whose company provided the coke used by Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills . . . whose slag did so much to poison the waters of the park bearing Frick’s name.
Frick’s stately mansion – Clayton – is a stone’s throw from the northern edge of the 151 acre parcel of woodlands he bequeathed to the city in 1919. Subsequently, Frick’s daughter Helen donated additional acreage for the park and, with the recent addition of 106 acres in lower Nine Mile Run adjoining Summerset, Frick Park now totals more than 560 acres, making it the largest of Pittsburgh’s parks.
With all due respect to the lions, tigers and bears in the zoo at Highland Park, Frick Park is Pittsburgh’s wildest space. More than 100 species of birds have been identified in the park, and reliable (or at least believable) sitings of bears are not uncommon. Apart from small sections in Squirrel Hill, Point Breeze and Regent Square, the majority of the park consists of wooded hillsides and ravines running down to the relatively level “flood plains” of Nine Mile Run and Fern Hollow. As such, accessing the bulk of the park requires committing to a hike or bicycle ride down (and later, up) steep hillside trails. What’s more, Frick Park is rather linear in nature, stretching the best part of three miles from the John Russell Pope-designed Gatehouse on Reynolds Street to where Nine Mile Run discharges into the Monongahela River.
Like most any urban park, Frick Park has its civilized side. Not far from the Gatehouse and Clayton stands the Frick Art Museum, built at the behest of Helen Clay Frick, opened to the public in 1970 and currently winding-down a major exhibition of Fabergé “objects.” And just down the street from “The Frick” stand the only public lawn bowling greens in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The Regent Square side of the park boasts clay tennis courts, baseball fields and a playground while, at Squirrel Hill’s entrances, there’s another playground as well as the Frick Park Nature center, currently being restored in the wake of a devastating fire in 2002.
Of course, as the Nine Mile Run project attests, restoration projects are at the very core of Frick Park . . . much like a Pittsburgh that is continually restoring, reinventing and even reimagining itself.
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