Happenings in Pittsburgh!! (Philadelphia, York, Washington: environment, skyscrapers, real estate)

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This is good news for businesses and job growth in the area. Hopefully it will all bear fruit.

Pop City - Largest energy purchasing initiative in region's history will reduce business utility bills

Allegheny County and the City of Pittsburgh have announced a major new program that will significantly reduce utility bills through a “reverse energy online auction” for businesses and industries across the region.

The Western Pennsylvania Municipal Aggregation Program will create the largest purchasing initiative in the region’s history, says Chief Executive Dan Onorato, who teamed up with Mayor Luke Ravenstahl to announce the plan this week. The program will be available to school districts, hospitals, colleges, universities, municipalities, non-profits and private businesses both large and small.

“It’s unique to anything we’ve done,” says Tim Johnson, director of administrative services for the county. “The city and county are coming together to combine collective purchasing power to piggy back on the contract we’ve negotiated. “

It's too early to speculate the savings to businesses, but Johnson said it would be "significant."

“This has the potential to be largest cost-saving public/private partnership in the history of Western Pennsylvania,” says Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.

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Good grief, CMU is rolling in money just from local Pittsburgher's! Just last week the Mellon Foundation donated 25 million! Now Heinz is donating more than 22 million to CMU! Heinz also gave an additional 20 million to other Pittsburgh specific entities including the cultural programs.

Another huge grant comes CMU's way; $22 million from Heinz Endowments

Three days after Carnegie Mellon University announced a $25 million gift from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, it has won another large grant -- more than $22 million from The Heinz Endowments.

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Also, CMU and local Universities going green!

CMU getting plaudits for getting greener

On everything from building construction to energy conservation to cage-free eggs and organic granola in the dining halls, area universities are turning "green."

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[londonbarcelona]

Originally Posted by guylocke

Good grief, CMU is rolling in money just from local Pittsburgher's! Just last week the Mellon Foundation donated 25 million! Now Heinz is donating more than 22 million to CMU! Heinz also gave an additional 20 million to other Pittsburgh specific entities including the cultural programs.

Another huge grant comes CMU's way; $22 million from Heinz Endowments



Also, CMU and local Universities going green!

CMU getting plaudits for getting greener

Speaking of CMU -
Talk about the integrity of a region.
His man is a great representation of the area, IMHO.
Randy Pausch

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Stuffed pasta from around the globe?? Yes, please!

Pop City - DumplinZ Café serves specialty stuffed pastas from around the globe to Downtowners

Downtown lunch options just got a lot more varied. Located at 411 Seventh Ave. on the ground floor of the Chamber of Commerce building, DumplinZ Café celebrates its grand opening on Oct. 24.

The 1,200-square-foot café, whose entrance is located on Smithfield Street, has undergone minor renovations and been outfitted with new equipment. DumplinZ owner Alex Gershanok, who hails from Russia, started the business with three Pittsburgh-area partners.

Specializing in stuffed pastas from around the globe, DumplinZ carries Italian ravioli, Russian pelmeni, Eastern European pierogies, and Chinese dumplings. Highlights include sauerkraut-laden “kapusta-rogies” and sour cherry “chereniki” dessert pierogies. “We’re hoping that since this area has a large Eastern European makeup, it will be something people grew up with and maybe have gotten away from and want to retry,” says DumplinZ manager, Chris Conlogue. “In other countries, there are fast-service stuffed pasta places. I don’t know of any here.” The café also carries breakfast dumplings filled with baby sausage and cheese, vegetarian pita sandwiches and Presto George coffee.

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Now this is neat!! It a really user friendly map that shows all the projects going on all over the city! All almost 4 billion dollars worth!

Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership

[Stagger Lee]

Originally Posted by guylocke

Now this is neat!! It a really user friendly map that shows all the projects going on all over the city! All almost 4 billion dollars worth!

Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership (broken link)

That is very neat. Its nice to see all those red dots in downtown, or near the center part of the city.

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The Children's Hospital being built is quite an impressive feat. They even have an outside healing garden on the roof!! I have no doubt, once opened in 2009, it will snag award after award after award, more than the current one does!

New hospital for kids taking shape detail by detail

Work continues apace in Lawrenceville, where the new incarnation of the expanding Children's Hospital is rising around the husk of the venerable St. Francis Hospital.

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Travel + Leisure recommended 8 stores in the country where you can buy smart and give back in terms of green and organic. Among an impressive list of cities, Pittsburgh made the list with Equita!

Green Market - From Boston to Seattle, eight stores where you can buy smart - and give back

Pittsburgh
Equita One-stop shop for fashion, body, home, and food in a converted ice factory. Products are sourced from artisans and fair-trade companies in over 40 developing countries. Ice House, 100 43rd St., Suite 114; 412/353-0109; shopequita.com.

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As more people visit Pittsburgh each year for a "best urban adventure" and "best outdoor" city (we've won both in the last year or so), kayaking is becoming big! My brother and dad have been on this bandwagon as far back as I can remember!

Kayaks provide a new way to explore Pittsburgh: City of steel looks different from water (broken link)

PITTSBURGH — Contrary to what I vaguely suspected, this city isn't a crumbling relic of the industrial age, a factory town where steel, ketchup and sliced pineapple are king.

That's not to say H.J. Heinz Co., purveyor of the puréed tomato product, and Dole Food Co. Inc., a name synonymous with Hawaii's favorite fruit, aren't as integral to Pittsburgh as Dell Inc. is to Austin. Just one look at the giant metal pineapple planted along the Allegheny River downtown makes that obvious.

What did surprise me when my husband and I zipped up to P-Town recently to visit our former neighbors (he was spirited away by Heinz after earning an MBA from the University of Texas) was the lushness of the place. Hills, just like Austin. Parks tucked in every neighborhood. Cyclists, joggers and hikers galore.

What better way to explore a city known for the three rivers that slice through its urban core than to rent kayaks and paddle them? We drove downtown with Scott and Alison Bogel, the neighbors, who invited their new neighbors along just to make the circle complete. At a little rental booth steps from PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, we signed waivers, paid attention during a short how-to briefing and climbed into a fleet of brightly colored plastic kayaks. We were within sight of where the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers merge to form the Ohio.

Look up and down the rivers and you'll see bridge after bridge. It's like the Pennybacker Bridge over Lake Austin was cloned, its offspring dipped in yellow paint and plopped here, in the midst of the former steel city. In all, 15 major bridges span downtown, and we got to paddle under half a dozen of them, gliding alongside speedboats and a dredge, the skyline sparkling in the background.

Paddle around and think about all the reasons aside from steel that Pittsburgh is famous. Mister Rogers really did live here. So did Perry Como and Andy Warhol. It's the hometown of the Clark candy bar. And the 1980s movie "Flashdance" took place here.

Life vests buckled securely around us, we stroked a mile or two downstream, gazing up at each bridge we passed underneath, admiring the intricate metalwork. Then we pivoted our boats and headed into the current. Kayak Pittsburgh rents beginner-friendly, flat-water kayaks, which are longer and more stable than the little snub-nosed boats most people know.

Work as hard as you like, or sit back and coast. Either way, you'll get a new perspective on one of America's great old cities.

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The Carnegie Museum, much like the area, is going through a renaissances! The new dinosaur exhibit looks beautiful (pic included) and anatomically correct!!

100 years on, another renewal for Carnegie's museums

Andrew Carnegie's museums in Oakland went through their first major expansion in 1907, adding a dinosaur hall, a grand central staircase and the marble-columned foyer for his music hall. A hundred years later, the crown jewels of Pittsburgh's arts and cultural scene are going through another major renewal phase.

Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh is currently hosting one headline-grabbing show, "Bodies," at its North Side science center while girding for two major exhibitions at its Oakland home: the reopening of its world-class dinosaur collection Nov. 21 and the Carnegie International contemporary art show in May.

The museums have invested $60 million in capital improvements during the past five years, topped off by the $36 million expansion of the dinosaur hall in a former outdoor atrium. That improvement project is the biggest in the system's history, costing more than the entire construction of Carnegie Science Center in 1991.

The science complex is due for its own major overhaul starting next year, with planning under way for new facilities dedicated to environmental, robot and sports studies.

"I can't recall, in my tenure or in my memory, when so many things have come together in such a relatively short window, and that sort of put us front and center on so many stages," Carnegie Museums president David Hillenbrand said last week.