An unpaid advisor on the International Free Expression Project, Flanagan also has some concerns.
“It remains to be seen who is going to buy it from the Blocks,” Flanagan said. “Ultimately, the question about whether or not the project happens depends on who takes the building. The new owner will determine the viability of the whole project.”
A subsidiary of Block Communications, Press Acquisition Corporation, purchased the property from the Pittsburgh’s Press’s parent company for $7.3 million in 1992.
The prospect of the Blocks handing the building over to the International Free Expression Project is nil; Victor said he’ll have to hold off on pursuing any work on the project’s physical space until a new owner is found.
Finding that owner is proving more difficult than Victor would like.
While the Business Times reported in May that a new buyer, Johnstown-based Zamias Services, planned to bid on the property, sources told Postindustrial that the offer fell through and that a subsequent offer also fell through. The PG building has now been vacant for more than four years.
“We are in discussion with interested buyers and hope to be very short-term owners of 34 Boulevard of the Allies,” said Diana Block, executive vice president of Block Communications, through a spokesperson.
When a new owner is found, there’s no guarantee that they’ll support Victor’s vision for the International Free Expression Project. One pressing concern is the expense. Victor said he’s talked to at least one architect who said the initial marketplace development he envisioned would cost as much as $12 million, which wouldn’t include “the cost of outfitting it with displays, a rebuilt press, movable walls, stalls, and the like,” Victor said, adding that “maintenance costs would be substantial” and that other costs would include “moving installations, floor sections and other things in and out of the building … as well as commissioning artworks, events and such.”
None of that includes whatever remediation that a new owner might have to take on. Edward A. Shriver, a principal at the architectural and urban design firm Strada, said that the building operated as a foundry and railroad engine repair business prior to its most recent role as a printing press. That history has placed an environmental toll onto its structure, he said, estimating that remediation efforts would cost at least $1 million and could go as high as several million dollars.
“The problem isn’t so much chemistry” related to the printing presses, he said, “as it’s just that the building has been worked over so many times over nearly a century.”
That’s a lot of expense for a potential landlord. It reminds David Bear of similar costs that he faced with a potential landlord a few years ago.
Bear, who was also an editor at the PG, dreamed up an idea in 2007 for High Point Pittsburgh — a park atop Pittsburgh’s highest skyscraper, the U.S. Steel Tower, similar to the Empire State Building’s Observation Deck, that would give Pittsburghers a 360-degree view of the region.
In 2010, Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry began funding the High Point Pittsburgh Investigation, allowing Bear to use CMU resources and students to construct an incredibly detailed and convincing interactive model for the park that he could take to executives overseeing the holding company that owns the U.S. Steel Tower. Despite support from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh’s mayor, and a host of other local luminaries and organizations, High Point Pittsburgh went nowhere.