Wilkinsburg rising: Scrappy suburb sports signs of long-sought revival

One late January morning, Dontae Comans pushed his two youngsters in a shopping cart down the tidy aisles of Wilkinsburg’s new Aldi supermarket, the latest success story in the tattered borough’s ongoing revival.

Moments earlier, Comans, Wilkinsburg’s first-term mayor, had presided over a grand-opening ceremony before joining scores of his eager constituents inside the community’s first new big-box retailer in nearly two decades.

Some shoppers, such as Louise Plowden, a 72-year-old grandmother bundled in a puffy yellow coat and black wool hat, had lined up before dawn, waiting for hours in freezing temperatures to score one of the gift cards being given away to the first 100 customers.

“They were here fixing up these shelves early,” Plowden said with approval as she placed applesauce and a sleeve of bacon into her cart. “It is just rare to see them opening a store in Wilkinsburg.”

Rare indeed — and welcome. Long marred by blight, crime and poverty, Wilkinsburg has begun to shrug off its hapless image and transform itself into a magnet for investment.

Private-sector development money is pouring like never before into this postage-stamp sized community that sits on Pittsburgh’s eastern border. State and federal politicians are steering six- and seven-figure grants into projects that are remaking the landscape. Construction sites dot the streets. And demolition crews are razing vacant buildings.

“There was a sense of stagnancy before, and I don’t think anyone can make that kind of statement now — all the wind is in our sails,” said Councilman Mike McMullen, 39, a technology worker and first-term councilman who moved to Wilkinsburg in 2013.

“Now is beyond the time for people to look back at Wilkinsburg,” McMullen added.

Consumer spending had shifted toward indoor malls and shopping centers like Monroeville’s Miracle Mile.

Today, just 1 in 3 residents own their own home instead of renting, far below the U.S. average of 64%, census data showed.

Nearly 20 years ago, there were signs that a reversal of fortune might be possible. Developers built a Sav-A-Lot supermarket and a GetGo gas station. What might be minor news in bigger cities resonated strongly in a place with Wilkinsburg’s riches-to-rags history.

Now, businesses are keen to extend the success stories of Pittsburgh’s East End as redevelopment marches down Penn Avenue from East Liberty and Bakery Square straight into the heart of Wilkinsburg.

Twenty commercial projects are in the works, bringing an estimated $175 million investment — more than 10 times Wilkinsburg’s 2025 budget.

Wilkinsburg also is managing nearly $13 million in grants and other state funds to upgrade infrastructure and spur revitalization.

The borough may be small — roughly half the size of Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood — but it’s well-trafficked.

About 20,000 motorists drive through Wilkinsburg and its business district every day. An additional 30,000 people — about 7.5 million people a year — ride public transit weekdays on the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway, where passenger numbers are consistently the highest at Wilkinsburg’s stop.

U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, who represents Wilkinsburg in Washington, D.C., said the borough’s revival is no longer hypothetical.

The Fox Chapel Democrat last year helped funnel nearly $1.7 million to a mixed-use construction project there.

“In a place like Wilkinsburg, I think you see the ambition to revitalize,” Deluzio told TribLive.

Development vs. blight

The revitalization talk in Wilkinsburg — and residents’ efforts to push back against a sour reputation — is not new.

Almost 20 years ago, Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation worked to acquire and restore four roughly century-old structures in the borough’s Hamnett Historic District. Two $500,000 grants helped fund the work.

“There’s a perception of what Wilkinsburg is,” Michael Sriprasert, then the foundation’s director of real estate development, said at the time. “People don’t realize it’s something more. … That’s why we’re saving these buildings.”

The borough tried to jump-start its lagging business district in 2010, launching what it called “The Wilkinsburg Plan.”

Officials formed the borough’s community development corporation. In 2015, voters overturned an 80-year-old alcohol ban. And nine years ago, the revitalization kicked into a new gear as attention turned to a group of the borough’s former grand dame buildings.

In 2016, nonprofit groups launched a $6.5 million renovation of the Wilkinsburg Train Station, a 1916 beaux arts gem on Hay Street. It boasts a skylight, clock tower and what the Wilkinsburg Community Development Corp. describes as “delicately patterned terrazzo and mosaic tile floors.”

The station had sat vacant and vandalized since it stopped handling passenger rail traffic in the mid-1970s.

Four years later, in 2020, the corporation rehabbed the blighted Lohr Building into offices and an art gallery in the heart of the business district. With its arched windows, the 1893 red-brick building has been home to a church, a newspaper office and a bank, among other tenants, according to the community development group.

A nonprofit is raising $8.9 million to restore the Hunter Building, a circa 1899 structure on Penn Avenue that a borough historian called the first apartment building constructed in town.

And last year, as Gwen’s Girls, an advocacy group for young women, shared its $6 million plans to renovate a now-empty Wilkinsburg building into its new headquarters, a separate group announced plans to build a 10,000-square-foot performance space inside a shuttered elementary school.

On one block, a $2.5 million redevelopment is planned for a Christian church. And in the borough’s Regent Square section, ground is set to break next month on six single-family homes.

“When you drive through there, it doesn’t always look like there’s a lot happening — but there really is a lot happening,” said Anne Elise Morris, 72, a longtime resident who heads the Wilkinsburg Historical Society.

“It has taken us a long time to get to where we are now, where people are investing,” she added. “But when you see things like the train-station project work, people stop and say, ‘Wow, people really are investing in Wilkinsburg.’”

A key part of this renewal is rooted in a vacant Penn Avenue lot that once housed a six-story tower billed as “Pittsburgh’s Most Modern Suburban Hotel.”

The Penn-Lincoln Hotel opened in 1927, when Wilkinsburg, a bustling travelers’ stop on both the Pennsylvania Railroad line and the Lincoln Highway, was in its golden age. It later became an apartment complex before falling into disrepair. In 2014, it was demolished.

Now, efforts are underway to erect a $25 million, four-story building there with 41 affordable apartments and 12,000 square feet of street-level retail space.

Backed by a state grant, low-income tax credits and federal funds secured through Deluzio and fellow Democrat Bob Casey, the state’s former senior U.S. senator, developers are working with ACTION-Housing Inc. and Hosanna House on the project.

“We really want something that will draw people to Wilkinsburg,” said Steve Hellner-Burris, Hosanna House’s chief operating officer. “Our goal is to say, ‘How do we make this a destination?’ The train station (renovation) happened. Penn-Lincoln’s next.”

Hitting the mark

Developer Al Lardo helped shepherd the Aldi project to completion.

He previously had invested in nearby Rockwell Park, an ambitious plan to transform a 24-acre industrial plot near Wilkinsburg’s border with Pittsburgh’s North Point Breeze neighborhood into what Lardo envisions as “a full live-work-play environment.”

When Lardo talks about a “new Wilkinsburg,” he underscores this critical link between the communities. Lardo believes the revitalization of East Liberty and the continuing expansion of the Bakery Square mixed-use development in Larimer are helping to spur what goes on across the invisible border separating Pittsburgh and Wilkinsburg.

“There’s going to continue to be a momentum down Penn Avenue,” Lardo, 54, of Squirrel Hill, told TribLive. “Rockwell Park is the next domino in that progression. And then Aldi is the domino after that. … We’re going to stay with it. We’re in it for the long term.”

With nearly 2,500 locations in 40 states — only Florida, Illinois and Ohio have more than Pennsylvania’s 165 — Aldi evaluates potential sites for residents’ demographics, population trends, “growth,” foot and vehicle traffic, and real estate availability.

“This one kind of hit the mark on all of those things,” Kevin Ely, Aldi’s divisional vice president, said of the Wilkinsburg site, which hugs the Pittsburgh Regional Transit busway and a park-and-ride lot with more than 700 spaces.

Several officials said it isn’t hyperbole to talk about the Aldi project as a kind of spark for what they hope will be future projects in Wilkinsburg.

“This is the first new construction project of its kind in a long time,” said Tracey Evans, who heads the Wilkinsburg Community Development Corp. “This, to me, feels like a second renaissance, this wave of projects. And that’s very exciting.”

Tackling blight

There’s a flip side to the new life springing up in old buildings, one that is impossible to ignore: the blight that for so long had brought Wilkinsburg down.

Though stately homes fill the borough’s more affluent Regent Square and Blackridge neighborhoods, more than 500 abandoned or deteriorated homes pepper Wilkinsburg’s streets, many of them radiating off the Penn Avenue corridor.

In 2020, Wilkinsburg started spending $300,000 annually to demolish these buildings. Since 2023, state Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills, and Rep. Abigail Salisbury, D-Swissvale, have landed grants totaling just over $1 million to supercharge efforts.

Salisbury, a former Swissvale councilwoman, said she understands the obstacles faced by towns like Wilkinsburg, which she represents in Harrisburg.

She helped Wilkinsburg’s land bank secure nearly $240,000 to acquire borough properties that went vacant when homeowners died and renovate them for moderate- to low-income families.

“The reality is that people aren’t coming back to live in a lot of those blighted houses, and even if they were, they’re not fit to live in,” Salisbury told TribLive. “I think we really have to adjust these communities to what the future looks like. We have to move forward.”

Since 2023, nearly one-third of Wilkinsburg’s blighted homes have met the wrecking ball, borough officials said.

“As a historian, I love to save everything,” said the local historical society’s Morris. “When you can look into a house’s front window, though, and you can see out the top of the roof, there’s nothing worth saving.”

With rebirth also comes a warning, courtesy of John Diano. He has watched Wilkinsburg’s business district fade during the 38 years he has worked in — and, for the past 13 years, owned — a paint and hardware shop on Wood Street.

“There once were a lot of businesses here. I’ve seen them come and go,” said Diano, 69, of Murrysville, as he stood recently near a rainbow of Benjamin Moore paint samples inside Pennwood Paint and Supply Co. “We’re a dying breed.”

Diano doesn’t want developers pushing out those who called Wilkinsburg home during tougher times. He said he has seen that unfold in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty and Lawrenceville neighborhoods.

“It’d be nice to build, but it has to be affordable,” Diano said. “Aldi is a good thing. Anything like that is a positive thing. But you’ve got to be careful.”

On average, Wilkinsburg remains cheaper to rent or buy a home in than Pittsburgh, data shows. But rising interest in the borough’s real estate could impact that.

Last year saw a “significant increase” in people applying for permits for new housing construction, said John Antinori, the borough manager.

The shift is small — the number increased by fewer than 10 applications — but Antinori thinks it’s powerful, anecdotal evidence.

“One-and-a-half years ago, we weren’t getting those kinds of inquiries,” he said.

Antinori and others stress that the borough can encourage redevelopment without displacing longtime residents.

“The borough’s view is that gentrification is not inevitable,” Antinori said. “The choice isn’t blight or gentrification. You can have affordable and sustainable prosperity.”

Surviving

Affordability drew James and Eric Youngblood to Wilkinsburg. The cousins grew a catering business and ran a food truck for a decade before opening Perfection At Its Best Catering on Penn Avenue as the pandemic waned.

Today, the Youngbloods said, regulars come to their takeout shop for a signature deep-fried cornish hen, seasonal treats like fried green tomatoes or the shop’s line of fresh lemonades.

They now stay open until 2 a.m. several nights a week to keep up with demand.

The cousins also tend to a once-abandoned garden two doors down, growing what they need to cook — everything from cucumbers and peppers to okra and 24 varieties of tomatoes. In a garden beehive nearby, an estimated 30,000 bees yielded 55 pounds of honey last year.

“It was affordable to open here — and Wilkinsburg is coming up,” said James Youngblood, 44, who lives in Pittsburgh’s East End. “They’re doing a lot of building around here. So we’re gonna take the ride.”

Eric Youngblood said he has seen Wilkinsburg change in subtle, but meaningful, ways.

A few years ago, he started sweeping the sidewalk in front of Perfection At Its Best. A neighboring shop owner followed suit, he said. The Youngbloods then started shining their windows. Today, they like taking breaks after the lunch rush to hand out free food samples to those walking past the shop.

The cousins have bought in to the promise of Wilkinsburg, just like William Smith III, a borough councilman who has lived there since 1991. The 66-year-old retired union carpenter said it’s time to believe the hype.

“We’re just getting started,” Smith told TribLive. “We’ve still got a long way to go. But it’s good to actually start seeing the work start that we planned a long time ago.”

He’s betting on his scrappy suburb.

“Wilkinsburg,” Smith said, “is a survivor.”