Everyone traveling into Downtown Pittsburgh from the East End through Schenley Park has been stopped in their tracks by a sign that has stood on the edge of the park for a good part of Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration.
Against a bright orange background, it reads “All Bridges Closed Ahead.” And that is a broad hint as to why the Gainey administration has failed to get the city back on track.
Pittsburgh has its problems maintaining as many as 446 bridges. This became clear when the Fern Hollow Bridge in Frick Park collapsed in January 2022 at the start of Gainey’s first term as mayor. That catastrophe was the result of the Peduto administration’s repeated failure to heed the warnings of bridge inspectors over several years.
Shortly after that, the two Schenley Park bridges and other bridges throughout the city have been closed. Very little has been done to rectify this mess — no alternative routes, no traffic officers at critical intersections and no hard dates as to when major arteries will be reopened. Gainey’s response has been not much more than a shrug of the shoulders.
But there is another kind of bridge that Pittsburgh needs now — those connectors the region has used to weather tough times like the collapse of Big Steel, the switch to an “eds and meds” economy, and the cleanup of our air and rivers. Now we are a post-covid city tuck in neutral and sliding backwards.
Unfortunately for Pittsburgh, Gainey is an odd politician who goes out of his way to exclude individuals and groups that have a stake in Pittsburgh.
From the beginning, Gainey has refused to talk to reporters from one of the city’s two major newspapers. He has refused to negotiate in good faith with UPMC, the city’s largest employer, for a “payment in lieu of taxes“ plan that could include our leading education and health care providers. He has ignored pleas for more police protection and defunded the police instead.
It is a pattern of behavior that was described in a May 7 editorial in The Jewish Chronicle. “Gainey’s camp will not give Pittsburgh’s only Jewish newspaper access to our mayor,” they wrote.
Citing numerous attempts to meet with Gainey since January to discuss his relationship with a national leader of the “boycott Israel” movement, they called Gainey’s refusal to meet with them “disturbing if not dangerous” behavior that “potentially disenfranchises Pittsburgh’s Jewish community,”
And, at a time when the city desperately needs development, Gainey has made developers the enemy, demonizing them and referring to them as “predator developers.”
Phil Ameris, president of the Western Pennsylvania Laborers Council, recently told his members that Gainey has “made it harder for development to move forward. Projects stall. Investors hesitate. Developers walk away.”
“Gainey’s policies don’t punish the rich — they punish the working men and women who put on their boots every morning.”
The need for bridge building to revive a stagnant city, help a divided nation find its way, bring peace to a warring world — even recommit a church to its mission on Earth — was center stage this week at the conclusion of the papal conclave.
As Pope Leo XIV said in his first public remarks from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, “We have to look together how to be a missionary church, building bridges, dialogue, always open to receiving with open arms for everyone … .”