F E A T U R E
Clean and safe are important ingredients for attracting retailers, another important component of developing an 18-hour downtown. Retail (including restaurants) was decimated by the COVID-19 mitigation measures in spring 2020 and the climate for shopping and dining did not improve much until after vaccines were widely distributed. Waldrup reports that 30 percent of the ground floor tenants went out of business downtown in 2020. New businesses have been backfilling those spaces and the survivors of the pandemic have seen demand recover. “It’s an interesting time for retail and restaurants. Coming out of the pandemic, there weren’t enough people downtown to support these businesses. Now, these businesses are seeing more customers, but downtown workers don’t make up most of that customer base like they did in the past,” says Jason Cannon, first vice president at CBRE. Adele Morelli, owner of Boutique La Passerelle, echoes Cannon’s observations. Morelli says she took advantage of any available grants and incentive programs to survive 2020 and built a new website that gave her customers a way to buy without visiting the store. When foot traffic returned in 2021, she had a record year with a different clientele. “2021 was a building back type of environment. PDP continued to have events and Visit Pittsburgh drew people into the city; so, while we lost our main client base of women working downtown, we gained clients from people who were visiting Pittsburgh,” Morelli says. That’s my biggest new client base. Every day someone comes in who is visiting Pittsburgh because people are doing more regional travel by car.”
The City Club Apartments will be the first residential new construction in downtown since the Lumiere Condominiums were developed by the Piatt Organization in 2017. Rendering by Indovina Associates Architects.
The synergy between residential development and retail is as real in
Downtown Pittsburgh as it is in Cranberry Township. The reality that retailers need lots of rooftops – or at least lots of apartment doors – was misread by Mayor Murphy 25 years ago. Downtown office workers can support retail and restaurant businesses, but the daytime workforce in Pittsburgh was no longer large enough by the mid- 1990s. Today, those businesses are thriving with a fraction of the daytime workforce as potential customers. The current environment proved attractive enough for Target, which is devoting half its floor space to groceries and staples.
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DEVELOPING PITTSBURGH | Fall 2022
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