Community Planning

What should Lawrenceville look like in five years? How do we make the most of the great assets in Lawrenceville, and how do we solve the neighborhood’s tough problems? How do community residents and business owners build the vision for neighborhood change?

Community planning offers a good place to start the discussion about the neighborhood’s future. Community plans get citizens involved in defining and guiding how the neighborhood will grow, and how we protect what’s good and eliminate what’s not so good.

Lawrenceville is a large neighborhood with many different pockets of activity that are all facing different challenges. Because of this diversity, we have a number of community plans underway today.

Where We Are

Lawrenceville is undergoing a significant and exciting transformation. Business corridors are being revitalized by shops, galleries, and restaurants and are drawing customers from around the region. New residents are buying and restoring Lawrenceville’s affordable and historic housing stock. Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh opened  in May 2009, bringing with them nearly 3,000 employees and 150,000 patients each year. Lawrenceville is becoming well-known as an artists’ community, with inexpensive living and studio space available and local events like Art All Night. The community also has the potential to be a technology center in Pittsburgh, with CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Consortium currently housed under the 40th Street Bridge.

Where We Want to Go

In spite of these positive trends, there’s still a lot of work to be done to make Lawrenceville better—to attract new businesses, redevelop vacant properties and eliminate blight, and to make the riverfront more accessible to the community. With so much change, it’s critical for Lawrenceville to have a broad-range, long-term community strategy.

In 1999, the Lawrenceville Corporation began to address the need for a consensus-driven community plan to drive new development in the neighborhood. This effort evolved into the Lawrenceville Planning Team, a collaborative effort of Pittsburgh’s City Planning Department and three Lawrenceville community organizations (Lawrenceville Corporation, Lawrenceville United and Lawrenceville Stakeholders) to address neighborhood planning issues.

The Lawrenceville Planning Team

The Lawrenceville Planning Team is facilitated by resident Rachel Rue, and consists of the following representatives of the three community groups:

Lawrenceville Corporation: Janice Donatelli, Matthew Galluzzo, Maya Henry, and Kento Ohmori

Lawrenceville United: Lauren Byrne, Harry Geyer, David Green.

Lawrenceville Stakeholders: Mary Coleman, Paul Cali, Sarah Kroloff, and Mary Moses

What We’ve Achieved

In 2005, the Lawrenceville Planning Team hired a consultant team consisting of Rob Pfaffmann and Carl Bergamini of Pfaffmann and Associates; Karen Brean of Brean and Associates and Valentina Vavasis, a development expert and consultant. We held community meetings at the Teamsters Temple on May 25 and July 11 to get input and ideas about the community’s vision for the neighborhood, and presented the final plan on September 7, 2005. The final plan is included below as a downloadable PDF file.

Download a copy of our Community Plan (PDF).

We Thank...

We would like to acknowledge the generous support of our funders who made this worthwhile effort possible: Senator Jim Ferlo, former Councilman Len Bodack, and the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh.