Paul Godfrey walked his dog along Goettman Street in Troy Hill one hot Thursday afternoon in early August. A pair of boys played basketball on the nearby court while about a dozen more splashed around in the spray park. His walk would take him past the old Cowley-Goettman Recreation Center that anchors the park.
“I wish they’d get to it,” Godfrey said, referring to long-promised restoration work on the boarded up building that closed in 2003 during the city’s fiscal crisis. “I was hoping they would have started on it now.”
Godfrey moved to the neighborhood five years ago, around the time news broke that the neighborhood’s wishes for a rec center revamp seemed to be granted: The city received more than $300 million in federal pandemic relief funds, and of that, $6 million was earmarked for Cowley.
Five years and two mayors later, there’s little information about when residents can expect the building to be finished. And that $6 million pledge has so far resulted in spending of only $600,000.
Dan Gilman, the chief of staff to Mayor Corey O’Connor, said the Cowley project is a priority for O’Connor, though it’s too soon to project an opening date.
“It’s the top new rec center priority for the mayor. It’s something he literally campaigned on,” Gilman said, adding that the city has applied for grants to help cover the cost and is looking at demolition and land stabilization costs.
A city website for the project shows plans for a total demolition and rebuild of the facility, including meeting and dining space, a kitchen, restrooms and a full- or half-court gymnasium.
Community need
Morgan Kasprowicz, president of the Troy Hill Citizens group, said the neighborhood’s topographic isolation increases its need for a local gathering space.
“Having a rec center in our neighborhood is great for our children to have, it would be great for seniors to have a place for meals and programming,” she said. “If you’re not personally driving, those things are not accessible to you.”
Valerie Webb-Allman has lived in Troy Hill for 17 years. She said her two children are impacted by the absence of a community hub within walking distance of their home.
Her 13-year-old daughter is very social, but she and her friends “just walk around” the neighborhood. And while Troy Hill does have a ballfield and outdoor park space, an indoor space would be more useful to her 20-year-old son who has autism.
“He doesn’t drive, so for him, a space where he could go hang out with other young adults would be really great, but he doesn’t really go to parks,” Webb-Allman said.
Webb-Allman said she is concerned that the impending closure of Pittsburgh Schiller 6-8 school, part of Pittsburgh Public Schools’ consolidation plan, could leave the neighborhood even more in need of public spaces if the Cowley Center isn’t rebuilt.
Slideshow: Valerie Webb-Allman, a resident of Troy Hill for 17 years, walks the neighborhood with daughter, Lily, 13, and son Matt, 20, and his autism support dog, Retro. The makes use of the parks and public gardens as best they can, but Webb-Allman says there’s no place where to gather inside for events that won’t fit in homes. She’d love a rec center for her children to have a safe indoor space to gather, especially as their asthma and allergy to mosquitos complicates time outside. (Photos by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
“Our entire geographic area of the North Side is starving,” she said. “We are just asking for one thing … We don’t even have a McDonald’s for old men to go sit at and argue.”
ARPA to the rescue?
The American Rescue Plan [ARPA], championed by then-President Joe Biden and passed by Congress in March 2021, doled out billions of dollars to cities and towns financially reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. Pittsburgh’s allotment was $335 million, a substantial sum equal to about 60% of the city’s operating budget at the time.
ARPA gave cities a lot of discretion on how to spend the money, only barring using it to cut taxes or fill pension funds.
Former Mayor Bill Peduto, in a plan approved by City Council, set aside $15.5 million to renovate seven rec centers, including $6 million for Cowley.
Gilman, who also served as Peduto’s chief of staff, said the $6 million was intended to be combined with other funds to fully cover the project, and that the Peduto administration thought it could be completed before the end of 2026, when ARPA funds had to be spent.
The plan was amended numerous times by the administration of Mayor Ed Gainey, who served from 2022 through 2025.
Of the planned $15.5 million investment into rec center improvements, only $3.2 million remained when Gainey left office, according to a city report from June of this year. About $600,000 has been spent on the Cowley Center for design and community engagement work that has been done to date.
The Gainey administration decreased the Cowley allocation from $6 million to $2.5 million in December 2022, then to $750,000 in August 2023.
The administration said at the time that it was not abandoning the projects that lost ARPA funding, but was shifting that money to “shovel-ready” projects that could meet ARPA’s time requirements.
Asked if the city will be able to fully fund the project as soon as the project reaches the construction phase, Gilman said: “The mayor has been very clear that reopening the Cowley rec center is a priority … and we’re not going to stop until we do.”
A good use of $335 million?
Five years after the passage of ARPA, its legacy in Pittsburgh is complicated. Some residents, like those in Troy Hill, saw planned neighborhood improvements fall short, while others received long-sought assets like the Davis Avenue Pedestrian Bridge, lead line replacements and substantial renovations to a few rec centers (though none that were shut down, like Cowley is).
Money also was poured into initiatives less immediately visible to most residents, like the Pittsburgh Land Bank. Ineffective for years, the Land Bank received $3.5 million from ARPA and gained momentum toward its mission of repurposing the abandoned and condemned properties that dot the city.
Some of the city’s ARPA spending, unrelated to rec centers or the land bank, has been called into question by District Attorney Stephen Zappala, who served a search warrant on the mayor’s office for records dating to former Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration. He has suggested to reporters that there may have been money spent for which the city received nothing in return, but he has not unveiled specific allegations or charged anyone to date.
Gilman said that perhaps ARPA’s greatest legacy in Pittsburgh is that it saved the city’s government from outright collapse.
“The city was facing laying off almost half its workforce if it weren’t for ARPA,” Gilman said. “A huge chunk of that money was spent upfront in just making the city survive.”
The most recent reporting shows $112 million, about a third of the total, was spent on avoiding layoffs.
Charlie Wolfson is the local government reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Octavia Liku.
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