Business as Usual: Rivers of Steel

Transcription: 

So good afternoon, everyone. Happy Friday. This is Audrey Russo's president and CEO, the Pittsburgh Technology Council. Welcome to business. As usual, we have a great guests wrapping up this week, lots to talk about lots to pack in, and an amazing ambassador for Pittsburgh. So before I do that, I want to thank Jonathan kersting. He's joining us today's vice president of all things, media, and marketing for the tech Council. And I also want to give a huge shout out to Huntington bank. Huntington bank has been our partner right from the onset, they've just been tremendous through the entire pandemic. and beyond. They've also been with us as we run a lot of experiments and business as usual being one of them. So we're pretty excited about today. This is wrapping up 136 conversations that we've had since the onset of COVID. And our job is just to make sure that we are keeping the community connected, we're keeping them informed. We're trying to showcase. We're trying to bring some positivity, but we're also trying to make sure that we are connected to all the things that are happening in our community, both tech focused as well as all the amenities. And today is just another example of that. We've muted your microphones. So we've done that on purpose, and then we have a chat session. So we'll have an opportunity to have a conversation. I do want to tell everyone that next week we have another great week we're kicking off the week with Mark de Santos, who's who's the CEO at Bloomfield robotics. We also have Richard score, Penske, he's the project lead at the circular economy, which many people are very, very passionate about a co vesto. We have Ben Wilson at reverse agile, he's going to be talking about his incubator, and some of the work they do. And then right on Thursday, we have Finch Fulton, Deputy Assistant Secretary for transportation, and policy at the US Department of Transportation. So we've got that in the hopper, and we've got more so I'm going to jump in, I'm very thrilled to have Auguste carlino who goes is Auggie, which I love. And he's president and CEO of rivers of steel. And this is this is an organization that everyone needs to know about. Some of you may know about it, but we're gonna do a dive into really talking about what he's up to. And what what whole what's in store for the future. So oggy before we start, it's great to see you. Let's talk a little bit about yourself. Augie, the man share your journey about you know how you got to rivers of steel and the role that you serve in our community.

Oh, Audrey, thank you for having me. It's good to see you all to and hope everyone stand. Well. You know, that's a scary story only because I could talk forever about it. But I've been with rivers of steel for 30 years. I came off of Capitol Hill, working for a former congressman from Pittsburgh, Bill Coyne. And then, like a lot of people do on the hill, they end up downtown DC lobbying. And I did that for a while and it was my wife, a New York City native who never lived in Pittsburgh. That said to me, she wanted to move to Pittsburgh to raise kids because she thought it was a better environment for them to grow up and then then the DC area. And so we did that. And I came back to a job that at that time, Senator Hines was spearheading to try and save a part of an old steel mill to turn it into a national park service site. They needed some help figuring out the ins and outs of legislative work on the hill, both in DC and in Harrisburg. You know, I fit that bill. Frankly, I thought you know, I'd be there for a couple years and move on. But I've been having way too much fun. I have to tell you. And you know now that project and when I say a little project that's not little in scope at all, literally sighs You know, that's the carry furnaces and swissvale and Rankin. We cover eight counties now we've done about 500 projects in those communities brought in several hundred million dollars in money to help redevelop rebuild many things that you all been on like Riverfront trails, Riverfront development, Brownfield revitalization, historic restoration, Main Street communities, all toward an eye of these old industrial communities because frankly, you know, that old industry was the was the foundation of what we know and are experiencing pittsford today, you know, technology that we are all talking about you all showcase. You know, Pittsburgh was the Silicon Valley 100 years ago for industrial technology. And it's amazing the resilience of this city and being able to transform itself to new industries in order to meet demand of global economy. And and that's what we talked about it reverse of steel.

Well, what what's the mission?

Tell us? What, what is the mission of reverse steel,

you know, you're going to embarrass me in front of some of my staff who I know are in this audience, that I can't repeat to you the exact mission statements have to be exact, but correct. And I'm going to tell you what it is, in theory. Our job is to focus on old industrial communities, as it said, and make sure that that culture that history survives as this region transitions. It's not to stand in a way of progress, and redevelopment, but to work with it in a way that that that heritage in history is not whitewashed from the landscape. This is not an novel concept for Southwest Pennsylvania. This is actually a federal program created by Congress National Heritage areas, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has a similar program called state heritage areas. And what we become are conduits of money from the state and federal government to help communities in that transition mode. And using their history, so that there is an understanding and assemblance of place and people and culture that allows the communities economy to regrow. But still with a nod to, to you know, the people that founded these communities in this region, you know, we can all go to places where I call like the Manet's mile of America, you get dropped down in the middle of place, and you have no idea where you're at because everything looks the same, right? But as we redevelop brownfields, you see a lot of the recognition of the old Pittsburgh in these new redevelopments. And that's what we're after, not just on those old industrial mill sites, but putting that into communities, teaching it in schools, always with a reflection of who we are as people and what this region did and does today. That's our mission.

Wow, that's pretty bold, in and wide. So

what about the evolution talk about

the evolution? You've been there? for 30 years you built the organization has wide touch points. But what about this evolution of it? I mean, because you're doing very different things today than you were doing. Yeah.

Our first, our first primary role as a nonprofit, is that I never wanted the organization to act like a nonprofit, if we were going to partner with businesses on redevelopment of old brownfield sites, on economic with and with economic development agencies, in in the counties in southwest Pennsylvania, that the mission of the organization in our evolution always had to be thinking and working like a for profit business. That mean we needed to be entrepreneurial, we needed to be opportunistic, we needed to be able to figure out what do we bring to the table for those partners that they may not have access to that we can get because of what we were designated as a federal and a state Heritage Area. And, and we started that way, small, like I said, small, not in size, but definitely small in scope and carry furnaces and homestead. And then we saw opportunities and other industrial communities because similar to homestead, you know, places like clairton, and Brownsville and kittanning, and Beaver, they all had similar needs and similar problems. So we began to work with them, finding ways to help them get money, making connections with them with foundations, and really building their capacity as stewards of their community. One of the things that this region had, as an old industrial community is this paternalistic approach, that we were all dependent upon the big company for our tax base. And for for where our communities went, when those mills and mines closed in the 70s and 80s, that whole network of structure disappeared with it and these communities were left spinning. So we tried to build that capacity back into those communities. That's been an evolutionary process and something that we still do a lot with in those communities. But we're now seeing local organizations coming into play where we act as a partner, we don't have to be carrying the load of their development programming or their projects for them the way we weren't 25 years ago. So you know, I you know, this is not me saying it but this this organization, rivers of steel, our partnership With all of you, it's been held up and showcased as a model for how other regions in the country can work. And I'm proud of that. We've got a great staff, I can't do it all myself, you know, just let them go. And they do things.

He shouldn't be proud there. There's there's a quick question, Jonathan, if you just want to ask that, because I think it's a good question. All about partnerships. Yes. Who

are you currently partnering with right now? Oh, boy. Well, one of the biggest partners we have is Allegheny County Department of development on the whole redevelopment of the Kerry furnace. site, our permanent partners, because of our designation is the National Park Service at the federal level. And at the state level, the Department of Conservation and natural resources. Those are the places that we get the majority of our funding annually from in order to run the Heritage Area program. And then from that, we are looking to partners in other communities, so their county economic development agencies, big and small historical societies. We do a lot with schools and school programming on Explorer, the STEM education boat that sits down behind the Carnegie Science Center set up and we partner with the Carnegie Science Center, and the Carnegie museums as well. You know, we've got dozens and dozens of partners, too numerous to go through that whole list right now. But again, that opportunity, we're looking for anything in anyone we can work with.

So what about like this river boat, the Explorer river boat? How did that become, you know, integrated into what you do?

Well, one of the things we were looking at early on is in our planning in our in our goals for development of the Heritage Area, is that as steel mills and mines closed, there were opportunities for access to the river that the communities never had at their disposal. And, and the strategy of ours was literally changed the focus of Riverfront development so that the river friends didn't, which were always then, at one time, the backyard of industry, we wanted to make river friends the front door to a community that literally was a goal of ours spelled out in a plan. And one of the things we began to do is not just work on Riverfront revitalization like with the port of Pittsburgh, and that whole North Shore Riverfront that's over there in the city of Pittsburgh, but also work with organizations who were trying to get access to the river with their program. And at that time, in the 90s, there was an organization called river quest. So we help them not just get money to help build their dock for that boat. But we were working with them on education, programming, to teach the history of technology from the standpoint of the steel industry, because what they were teaching was an environmental evolution of the rivers. And we saw the need to help kids understand why the rivers are what they are today, compared to what they were 100 years ago, polluted and place you wouldn't want to go near. So that created that partnership and that relationship early on. And then as organizations do they grow they they drift apart a little bit and I apologize about the pun. But I read one day that they were on the verge of going out of business because of financial problems. And like you know, anyone that works with a partner, you're concerned about them. We had obviously money invested them in them, as I said, so a simple phone call one day in April of 2014 turned out to be two years later, a merger acquisition that we orchestrated with them friendly merger acquisition in order to keep this world class STEM program going. But what we're doing now, in addition to the school kids on the boat is doing Pittsburgh, what we call Pittsburgh, 101 tours that talks about the evolution of Pittsburgh as a technological industrial city, and the boats available for charters by private organizations or individuals if they want to use it.

So so much of what you do, it just spans a lot and it includes focus on the arts. And there are some things that you've been doing recently that have really cultivated that you remember we went to Bilbao along with other leaders in the arts and nonprofit community a couple years ago, you know, just to look at what was going on in in Bilbao. And you know what it meant for economic development. Talk about the arts. How does that that's been woven into your work, and if people don't know that rivers of steel, I'm gonna ask Alexi to put on link up so they can go to your link.

Got it there? Absolutely. Yeah. So ultra arts was a bedrock of what we looked at. And when I say Cultural Arts, I'm talking about traditional art programming or art practices, I should say that that survive our ancestors. Right. And we know a lot of those things. We see a lot of that around our region right now. You know, one of one of the easy things to point out that ties in a way to we're asking Audrey, you know, his icon in churches, right? If we're talking about murals on walls and icon orography, we think about some of these churches that we have, well, you know, this is all reflective of our immigrant heritage, that has manifested two different ways of expression of 21st century community. And one of the things you see on old industrial sites that have been abandoned, is graffiti. And, you know, I personally think while graffiti, I understand is a nuisance, and in many times illegal, I'm looking at the art of the graffiti and a lot of times the art in the graffiti is absolutely stunning. it so it became a challenge to us years ago, to try to figure out a way at carry furnaces to use that art that was being trespassed on and tagged in ways to make the site attractive to a different audience that just would come there for an historic tour. Coincidentally, before we got access to carry furnaces, there was a group of sculpture artists that illegally had access to the site and constructed out of scrap metal and tubing that they that they took from the site. They constructed a big deer head and the deer head at carry furnaces. Yeah, I see Jonathan, motioning the deer headed carry furnaces is a rough reflection of the metamorphosis that of an old industrial site goes through when it sits abandoned. If anything is doing anything to transform the site. It's Mother Nature taking over the site in flora and fauna, and, and deer were beginning to populate a site where for 100 years, nothing lived except for the workers came in and out of that site. So that was their testament to this evolutionary change that was happening in Pittsburgh. We took the two of those, merge them together and began to work on arts and carry furnaces as an incubator for craft art. Because you think about what the men and women did there. They were iron pours they were steel pours, and in a way they were they were metal artists, in the way that we know about metal artists that work today, right into blacksmith shops, or an all these shops that you see in Lawrenceville on the south side. So we're using that as an incubation spot in order to build out what we call the mon Valley creative quarter. And that is a nod again to river valley that was the most industrious, hardest working River Valley in the history of the world. And now where we can work with craft artisans that use metal, and glass and pottery, we're looking to incubate them out of carry furnaces, put them into these older communities that we work in, so that they can take over abandoned storefronts on Main Street and help work with those communities in those County Economic development organizations to transform those communities where people then go shop and then hopefully go to work. established businesses maybe go back to live someday. It's a big strategy. It's going to take a lot of time to play out. But we're seeing the benefits of that early on in this in this project.

Oh, there. There's a couple of questions. I think they they meld. Jonathan, it's, we can just get to those two and I want to talk about that pandemic.

Absolutely. And before I ask a question, it's got to say I've encountered some foxes down along the Kerry furnace light in my days riding my bike There are so it's amazing what's going on. So basically the whole idea here is I'm obviously working with other cities that have waterfronts like ours and you're still working internationally with cities like Bilbao at all other cities in the region. Yeah, we're working through eight counties, Allegheny Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Washington, Westmoreland, Fayette and green so it's that whole network of the water and its major tributaries, some were working in Rice's landing I mentioned For contaning we've we've had involvement within their Riverfront revitalization. We worked with the port of Pittsburgh on the whole North Shore revitalization project. We work with Damien Sofer, on the south side development we worked with in homestead, continental on the revitalization of the waterfront. You know, again, the idea is not to stand in the way of development that happens there. We want to see that development come in. But we encourage developers to use elements that are a reflection of that industrial history, so that there is a an understanding of this place being what it was in what it is today. And it's it's worked out well. Yeah, there are there's similar cities that have a rivers of steel like organizations like in Cleveland or Detroit. Well, it's interesting you say that, one of the other heritage areas is in Aqua based out of Akron, Ohio, Ohio and Erie Canal corridor, and they are working on a revitalization plan of the entire canal system that connected Cleveland, down to Asheville, Ohio. And in one of their major focuses funded by the Knight Foundation, is the whole transformation of downtown Akron with this historic canal trailway literally a waterway and a walking trail as the spine that is the anchor for revitalization of downtown Akron. Another one is Yuma, Arizona, on the Colorado River and a whole project there on cleaning up the riverfront through Yuma and getting rid of invasive species and making the river not only visually more appealing but more appealing to developers that might want to locate nearby the river. So the there's a there's a couple other projects that are out there like that.

So what let's talk about the pandemic,

because you've done some really, you know, amazing things we can talk about the car pool theater, I mean, you've had to do some pivots. So what have you been doing? I mean, I think you're doing something you know, like us, we're wrestling with every single pivot every day, every week. And new one, doesn't it.

So tell us what what you've done.

So carry foreign furnaces normally would be open for regular tours. Plus, on top of that people rented for use for big festivals, movie companies that come into Pittsburgh, often would rented from us for settings in movies, you know, in mid March that all shut down. And that's bread and butter for our for our revenue stream as an organization, in addition to the grant monies and the federal and state money we get. So we began to think about how do we how do we work at carry furnaces in a way that could get people there. And we were really hamstrung until the economy was allowed to open back up again. So we began with smaller group tours socially distancing them and taking them to limited places there. But really what what the pandemic provided for was these other ideas that we had, that we just didn't ever have time to, to implement one of them being the drive ins that carry furnaces, you know, we had so much activity and carry furnaces prior to the pandemic that we could never do this drive in movie concept that we had thought about trying to do. So we did it, you know, we built the screen on the side of one of the buildings. The the courtyard or the western field, as we call it, that stretches into swissvale we use as the parking area for the cars. And, you know, we started with what we would thought was going to be six showings one a month and that would be it. Well, those showings sold out before we even announced the movies that were going to be a month on those drive ins. There's one coming up I think either this weekend or next week and forgive me for not knowing but it doesn't matter anyway. That's sold out. As is the last Monday November. People do these what we started with movies that that were Pittsburgh based movies all of our favorite one being Flashdance. Right. That Academy Award winning movie. Sorry, I saw it again that night and I thought oh my lord, you know, that was what Pittsburgh is famous for. You know, I'm going to throw I'm going to throw you guys a curve because we're going to be showing pretty soon. The fish that safe Pittsburgh, and anyone that knows Get those out one that's going to be that's going to be one of the movies we show but but this coming week because it's the Halloween season, it's a horror classic. So we've got the exorcist and I think the second movie is the omen. You know, some some of those that you might be afraid to walk into a dark room after saying, Yeah, we showed my favorite movie of all time. Last month, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, you know, you know, and people like it, they want to get out, they want to do things, we create an environment where they can sit outside their car and still be social distance. We run tours before the movie so that they could see it. The idea behind all this is not just movies, which people are interested in. But some people that are interested in driving or just going to a movie may not ever think or know about Kerry furnaces, and what it offers, not just by way of history, but all these other programming we're doing. So it's expanding our audience to different people, in ways that we may not have ever been able to reach these folks if the pandemic hadn't happened. And they're wildly successful.

Can you accommodate

150 people within the states limit? Right? So that's not 250 cards, that's 250 people so we're advanced selling tickets. And once we hit that limit, we shut down the ticket sales and, and it's been going fine selling

food that people allowed to touch.

Yeah, there are food trucks that come in ones that know us and that we partnered with, you're allowed to bring your food, you know, if you want to bring a cooler. And, and, and again, they the food trucks have been happy. It gives them a venue in the pandemic, right?

Anything any other new experiments that that you want to talk about?

What we just closed down last night, the final showing of a project we called light play at carry furnaces. This was a an exhibition of 11 artists, their medium was light. And if you go to our website or do a Google search on the news, you'll see some images of that absolutely spectacular transformation of the carry furnaces and an internal workings of the carry furnaces. I had somebody email me after they visited a week or so ago that described one of the buildings that they had walked into one of the rooms where it was meant to feel like the building was breathing the way the light worked. That said she actually felt like the building was like lungs expanding and contracting. You know, we've got an amazing, go back to what you asked Audrey, when you said this, our experience in Bilbao, we have amazing population of artists in this region that are looking for ways to showcase themselves. We're providing a forum and a setting for them. Other people are doing that, you know, if you look at all what Pittsburgh had been thought about, no one would have ever thought this this graphic illustration art that we're seeing all throughout the community in the region. And it's great to be a part of that.

Well, you know, Today is National Manufacturing Day. And I have to give credit to Brian Kennedy who serves as executive producer of the show as well as overseeing ops for having you on because the legacy of manufacturing and the craftsmanship and the honor that you've done by looking backwards as well as looking forwards is really quite just quite remarkable. So, you know, our you know, your work in terms of blending cultural amenities, physical properties, as well as interesting ways to stay connected is is part of some of the sweetest pieces of Pittsburgh. So, thank

you, we see it as adding an asset to what otherwise might be looked at as as a negative in a draw, right? If you only see these old mill towns, and if you only see an old brownfield site is dilapidated and segregated. How are you all and others in the economic development industry ever going to convince people to move here, relocate a business set up shop right? What we're trying to do is you know, Polish literally polish off the rust without getting rid of the rust and helping people realize that the this is this is a thing that once it's lost can never, ever be rebuilt, right and again, I will never say we can save everything that's out there. There, but saving those things that are important, that are iconic structures that are resemblance of who we are as people of Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania. If you take that out of us, you've literally torn away our spirit in our in our soul. And and I don't think anybody wants that to happen to Pittsburgh.

Well, I On that note, I want to thank you for your leadership, for your continued vision for your ability to see all the the intersections of all that everyone does here. And for you know, being such a good collaborator, you're your true asset to our region. So I want to thank you for joining us, you should go out to rivers of steel, obviously, you now Now we have to get on the on the market to figure out how to get tickets to your shows, because they're all sold out. But hopefully you'll do more. Hopefully you'll do this as long as you can through the winter. And continue. Continue to do your great work. We're big fans. Auggie, thank you for the time. And well,

let me let me just say something I'll make an offer to you any of your membership online today or after if they want to come out to us? Email Audrey and Brian and Jonathan, you let us know. We'll get you into the site. Okay, we'll do special tours for you guys. All right. I want to go.

You Aki, thank you for your leadership, the rivers of steel, and everyone have a great safe weekend. We got a great lineup for next week as well. So stay safe

and I'm signing off.

Thank you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai