Caught between a river, a water project and a railroad, a marina community tries to hang on

Thomas Grubbs woke up on Monday, Aug. 3, checked the group chat and felt it in his stomach.

“Oh, I’m actually trapped,” he said. “Like, I can’t leave.”

Lock Way East is the only way in or out by land, with ongoing construction blocking the access to Lock Way West from the marina. That Sunday, contractors for the Allegheny Valley Railroad closed the east crossing while working on track maintenance.

“If there was an emergency, I’m not sure what would happen,” Grubbs said.

The closure was temporary, but for Grubbs and other marina residents, it sparked fears about how another, yearslong construction project might impact their access.

As the railroad works on maintenance this summer, Pittsburgh Water is building a nearby pump station and needs the crossing as part of its $470 million Water Reliability Plan Projects. As the two projects ensue, residents fear more closures could follow. 

Once the pump station opens in 2029, the water authority has outlined a new configuration for the roadway that would take out the only current public road. While they say residents could access the marina through a temporary permit to cross several properties and reach Lock Way West, some feel this lacks permanence and security.

Marina denizens have turned to Pittsburgh officials in an effort to guarantee long-term road access.

A resolution before Pittsburgh City Council, introduced by Mayor Corey O’Connor’s administration, would authorize the city to enter into agreements with the railroad, the water authority and several private property owners while the two crossings are, in the resolution’s words, “upgraded or removed.” 

The resolution before council does not include guarantees for access to the marina. It hasn’t yet gotten a vote from council’s Committee on Public Works and Infrastructure.

Unique in Pittsburgh

Diamond Beach is, by most accounts, the oldest family-run marina in Pittsburgh, and it runs on membership. About a dozen people live on boats docked in the marina, in Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar, year round. Others rent space to fabricate metal or store boats, and the population swells and thins with the seasons. 

In the past two years, the marina, owned by Katie Bowie, has built out bathrooms, stocked kayaks for rent and, this winter, chartered a social club — the Brilliant Float Club — so that people without boats can come down to the water. After the 2024 flooding in Asheville, North Carolina, the marina became a collection point, where people all across the region dropped off supplies that residents then drove south.

“The social club is really a way that we can increase access to the river,” said Emma Honcharski, who sits on the club’s board. The point, she said, is “building community around recreation, joy and rest.”

Gina Favano, an artist and archivist who spent 10 years in a boathouse community on the Mississippi River at Winona, Minnesota, has begun archiving documentation of the community.

Diamond Beach offers something surprisingly lacking in Pittsburgh, she said.

“For a city like Pittsburgh, that’s a fertile crescent, there’s three rivers here, and it has such limited river access for the public,” she said. “It’s just such a class issue. The people who can afford boats and afford to keep them in a marina, then you’re able to access the water.”

House boats along the dock at Diamond Beach Marina, on the Allegheny River, on Aug. 15. (Video by Jason Alpert-Wisnia/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)

Diamond Beach brings access to an eclectic band of regular river lovers — some of whom can’t just sail away. 

“People in Pittsburgh crave a third space. There aren’t very many of them, and they come up and then go away. It’s either a landlord problem or a city problem or a money problem or a social problem, but mostly there are limited third spaces because there are so many barriers,” said Katie Bowie, the owner of Diamond Beach Marina, which she sees as a surviving third space for its community.

By Grubbs’ count, his houseboat is one of only two at the marina that can move under its own power. He also owns a speedboat. If a long closure came, he said, he would take it past nearby Lock and Dam 2 and commute by transit. Most of his neighbors could not.

“There probably would be people who wouldn’t be able to stay here,” he said. “They would have to leave.”

Honcharski is careful not to overstate the danger posed by the rail and water developments. 

“The marina isn’t under immediate threat,” she said. Asked what it would mean if Lock Way East stopped being a public road, she reached for a smaller comparison. “It’s kind of like if someone just came to your friend’s house and was like, by the way, they don’t have a driveway anymore. It just doesn’t make sense.”

The road to council

The threat to Diamond Beach’s “driveway” emerged in May 2025, as documented in a tranche of more than 90 emails between the water company, the railroad, the city, the Army Corps and the property owners, shared with Public Source by marina owner Bowie. Key points:

May 2025: Pittsburgh Water writes to Diamond Beach Land Co. saying the Lock Way West railroad crossing will be rehabilitated at no cost to the marina, and asks Bowie to sign the Agreement to Develop Public Railroad Crossing. 

July 2025: After over a month of back-and-forth, Bowie refuses to sign, writing in an email that Diamond Beach is “not prepared to agree to your proposal as written.”

August 2025: The authority’s corporate counsel tells Bowie that if Diamond Beach will not sign, “the Railroad is proposing granting Pittsburgh Water temporary access via Lock Way West while removing the Lock Way East crossing and terminating all access thereto.” Bowie replies that the marina will not commit to anything “unless and until full compensation is provided to cover our legal and administrative costs.”

September 2025: A lawyer representing the authority tells Bowie, by her account, that Lock Way East would stay accessible throughout the construction.

November 2025: The authority sends what it describes as “the agreement allowing Pittsburgh Water to pay the $5K” to reimburse Bowie’s legal expenses under which the marina would in return “release and extinguish any rights it has with respect to the Pittsburgh Water Crossing,” the document’s term for Lock Way East. 

December 2025: Bowie refuses the authority’s offer and copies three City Council offices, calling the offer an attempt to get her to surrender property rights “under the guise of a simple administrative payment.” The same week, Pittsburgh Water and the railroad sign a temporary license giving the authority construction access over Lock Way West. 

Pittsburgh Water wrote in a response to questions that it has been a good-faith partner. It has engaged Diamond Beach “since May 2025,” invited the marina owner to “several meetings, discussions and email correspondence,” and is “committed to working through their questions and concerns.”

What council is being asked to do

The one-page resolution stuck in council’s Committee on Public Works and Infrastructure since April 24 calls for agreements “for the purpose of accessing city property while certain railroad crossings at Lock Way East and Lock Way West (Council District 7) are being upgraded or removed, at no cost to the city.” 

Pittsburgh Water says that would lock in access to the marina after construction ends. Council’s approval, the authority wrote in a statement, “will secure future permanent access via a single crossing with safety provisions as required by the railroad,” and will “formalize the agreement providing permanent access for Diamond Beach and other stakeholders at the site once construction is completed.”

At the committee’s June 24 meeting, Councilor Erika Strassburger stressed the water authority’s position. 

“I just want to put on the record that as a board member of Pittsburgh Water, I’m aware of the fact that Pittsburgh Water is eager to move forward as quickly as possible, because their half-billion dollar project hinges on this agreement going through at this very sort of messy site,” Strassburger, the authority board’s vice chair, told council. 

Strassburger declined to comment, as did other council members contacted for this story.

Morgan Ress, who rents shop space at the marina and is involved in the effort to preserve road access, called councilors Deb Gross and Khari Mosley “very receptive. They know who we are. We have strong community connections.”

In a statement, the water authority indicated that the pump station project is not waiting on council but is already underway through a temporary license agreement between the railroad and water authority.

The agreement spells out plans to remove the public crossing at Lock Way East, which leads directly to the marina. Lock Way West, a private crossing owned by the Allegheny Valley Railroad, licensed to the Army Corps of Engineers, would be rebuilt and made public. Access to the properties behind the railroad, including the marina, would be granted by easements. 

Records denied

While marina constituents work to protect access through negotiations and advocating to council, some say they’ve struggled to get clear information from the water authority, even as they’ve been pressed to sign the documents.

Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law defines a requester as “a legal resident of the United States.”

“Anybody who meets the statutory requirements can request a document,” said Adam Tragone, a First Amendment lawyer at the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic who represents journalists in Western Pennsylvania.

Ress said he is a U.S. citizen.

Tragone said it may have been the appearance of AI-generated text in the request that caused the water authority to balk, or the suggestion of an unverified email address.

The authority’s letter also claimed that release of the development agreement would endanger “the safety or physical security of a public utility,” but did not detail the risk. 

Ress filed an appeal to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records, which was granted on Aug. 17. That gives the authority thirty days to either provide the requested agreement or appeal to the Court of Common Pleas.

Who closed the road?

Grubbs is an environmental scientist, who said he is familiar with water treatment projects. 

“I’ve never been on a worksite where they just surprise closed a road that affected people that live in an area that they can’t leave from,” he said, referring to the railroad company.

On Sunday, Aug. 2, a gate through the Pittsburgh Water construction site was open, and residents used it sparingly. By Monday it was locked.

Grubbs called off work. Another resident’s guest, arriving with a child, could not get in and parked across the river. He went and got them in his speedboat.

The water authority “don’t allow us access through their property, even though they absolutely could,” Grubbs said. “It would have gone a long way to be a good neighbor.”

Emergency access during the closure, the authority said, “would be the responsibility of the railroad because it was their project and their decision to close the crossings.” It added that it was “not made aware of any formal requests from the marina for advance access, and no emergency access requests were denied during that time.”

The railroad had told residents much the same thing a week earlier. On July 28, Allegheny Valley Railroad Company president John Ashbridge emailed Bowie the schedule of the upcoming crossing closure, writing that only one crossing would be out of service at a time and that Pittsburgh Water had said it could not pilot members of the public through its construction area for safety reasons.

Pittsburgh Water said the railroad notified it of the closures on July 23.

Ashbridge did not respond to multiple requests for comment, by email and phone.

The crossing that stays

The railroad company, citing safety concerns, is driving the decision to remove the crossing on Lock Way East.

Local residents have noted their own safety issues at Lock Way West, part of the alternate access route.

“A crossing that Ts into our fence at a 90 degree angle is an accident waiting to happen,” wrote Jody Choder, the owner of Choderwood, a recreational site located on Lock Way West, in an October 2025 email to the city. This July, she reported that an 18-wheeler “hit the telecom pole that is still in the middle of the crossing zone.” 

The Army Corps has also raised concerns in emails that railroad construction activities have sometimes affected its access to the lock and dam. The corps declined to comment on future implications of the two projects, telling Public Source that “we are continuing to discuss the matter with the appropriate parties.”

Grubbs is not planning to go anywhere.

Thomas Grubbs walks down the pathway toward his house boat at Diamond Beach Marina on Aug. 15, in Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar. (Video by Jason Alpert-Wisnia/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)

“That construction project or Pittsburgh Water in general will not affect my commitment to being a resident,” he said. 

“The real potential of the marina is the safe harbor [from the general grind],” said Ress. “It’s a place where we can define how we want to live for ourselves.”

Feixu Chen is an editorial intern at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at feixu@publicsource.org.

Jason Alpert-Wisnia was a visuals intern at Pittsburgh’s Public Source.

This story was fact-checked by Abigail Nemec-Merwede.