Frick Park restoration continues Gatehouse returning to original appearance
By Jennifer McGinnis, TRIBUNE-REVIEW, June 24, 2000
The little changes that the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy is making to the Reynolds Street entrance of Frick Park may go unnoticed But, when they all come together, park patrons will see the gatehouse as it appeared in the 1930s. "I tell people it's going to look the same, only a lot better," said Meg Cheever, president of the conservancy. Construction crews have torn up a dilapidated blue stone walkway leading to the gatehouse. Workers have removed stones from the front windows that were installed to cover vandalism. When the renovation is finished this fall, back-lit frosted glass windowpanes will glow behind curved iron window bars. And lanterns that once adorned each side of the gateway will be bolted in. In 1919, industrialist Henry Clay Frick bequeathed to the city 150 acres of land that is now known as the Frick Woods Nature Reserve. The Frick family commissioned John Russell Pope, the architect who designed the National Gallery, to build archways to mark each entrance to the park between 1931 and 1935. The Fricks also hired Innocenti and Webel, a landscape architectural firm from New York, to design a planting scheme for the Reynolds Street entrance.
Over seven decades, some of the landscaping was bricked over or pulled out. Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy has acquired original drawings of the gatehouse and will attempt to restore the architects' vision. The asphalt shingle roof that replaced the original roof will be exchanged for a deep brown tile roof like the one Pope placed on it. Evergreen shrubbery will be planted in front of the gatehouse and trees will be pruned or replanted so that they are true to the original design. The gatehouse restoration is the first phase of a pilot project the conservancy launched this year to polish and preserve the features that give Pittsburgh's four regional parks a distinctive flair. "If you take away the details, a park is not really a special place anymore," Cheever said. "You want it to be not just something that you can have in your back yard." The city is launching a major effort to bolster the roads, walls, walks and restrooms in the parks. Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy is staging fund-raisers and petitioning foundations to help the city undertake extensive restorations. Once the $500,000 gatehouse project is complete, the conservancy will convert an unused building in Schenley Park into a visitors' center, refurbish the chapel pavilion in Riverview Park and redo the entryway garden at Highland Park. Dan Deibler, chief of preservation services for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, said maintaining parks protects the architectural treasures of a community. "It's important to understand that parks are designed just like any building is designed," Deibler said. "They should be preserved with the same kind of effort that you'd use if you were restoring a house."
Cleanup begins on damaged trail in Frick Park
Thursday, September 10, 1998
By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
A sign posted at the North Clayton Trail in Frick Park announces it is closed and advises hikers to enter at their own risk. Fifty yards down the woodland trail that parallels Forbes Avenue, the trunk of a hickory uprooted by the storm that blew through Western Pennsylvania June 30 lies across the trail, reinforcing the warning. It's been more than two months since the storm, but the damage and the danger are still everywhere on and along the trail through the 150-acre Frick Woods Nature Reserve.
Walk a little farther, and there's a 100-foot-tall silver maple leaning precariously against a sturdy oak on the downhill side of the trail. A big sassafras and another hickory lie uprooted across the trail. Big branches with leaves gone brown long ago hang dangerously from trees all across the hillside above Forbes Avenue. "This is dangerous. Some of the damaged trees and branches look stable, but they're still falling down, sometimes with a grinding sound, sometimes with what sounds like a pistol crack," said Barbara Balbot, director of the Frick Environmental Center.
Balbot was along the trail yesterday, consulting with foresters Robert Carlberg and Steven Hawkes as they began the dangerous job of assessing the tree damage and marking trunks for removal. They used blue spray paint to mark the trees for cutting -- a straight blue line all the way around a trunk for trees containing salvageable timber and a blue "X" to mark those with no timber value.
"We hope to break even out of this disaster," Balbot said. "We hope to have the really dangerous trees removed in an ecologically sound manner that will pay for itself."
Other city parks, notably Riverview and Schenley, and other parts of Frick Park also sustained damage during the June storm, but were cleaned up by city work crews or tree removal firms. "Aside from the danger -- and we want to get it cleaned up -- we want to retain the forest stand's value as a wildlife habitat," she said. "We want to disturb the remaining vegetation on the forest floor as little as possible to prevent erosion on the hillside."
Balbot said after the trees were marked, tree removal would begin this fall. Final cleanup will stretch well into next year. "After we take out the trees, we'll prune others and leave their branches to rot on the forest floor," Balbot said. "We also hope to plant and find places for flowering, low, understory trees, hemlocks and pines."
Afternoon rains washed out the foresters yesterday, but not before they identified 150 trees for timber salvage and marked 100 more for removal that are damaged but have no value. The majority of the trees marked for cutting are red oak and black cherry, but there are also sassafras, tulips and maples wearing blue paint.
Many of the trees have trunk diameters between 12 and 36 inches. "We got about halfway through the area in assessing the trees for removal," Carlberg said. "It's amazing to see how much damage there is." He said the assessment would be finished next week. "We have a harder time dealing with this than the forest itself," he said. "Now we can plant conifers in the canopy openings, which should work perfectly for that."
Finding buyers to cut and take the salvage timber that is down and damaged has been hard because the work is dangerous and it takes up to twice as long to cut as standing trees, Hawkes said. "There were a couple of trees that I ran by to mark with paint," he said. "If there were much wind today, we wouldn't be standing here in the woods talking." Balbot said the aesthetics of the reserve area, originally donated to the city by industrialist Henry Clay Frick in the early 1900s, was also a concern. "A good gardener has faith in the future," she said, "and we have faith that we will find funding for reforestation planting in the area."
Nature stymies Frick Park site
Warm winter delays cleanup from June storm
Monday, March 01, 1999
By Kristen Ostendorf, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Almost eight months have passed since storms hit the north slope of Frick
Woods Nature Reserve. The effects of the storm are still evident, however,
along North Clayton Trail of this Frick Park site.
Overturned and seemingly precariously perched trees still line the trail,
which overlooks Forbes Avenue.
And a sign, which was put up after the storms, still warns walkers that
"many standing trees on the hillsides of this trail are unstable and subject
to tree-fall."
That hillside was hit hard by the June 30 storm that shook the Pittsburgh area.
All the other trails in the Frick Woods Nature Reserve are open.
But the trail's caretakers are worried that the cleanup - and any
dragging across the forest floor - could cause more damage.
"We have been waiting and waiting and waiting for the ground to freeze," said
Barbara Balbot, director of the Frick Environmental Center, which manages the
nature reserve.
A forester was supposed to begin cleanup in mid-January, but the
temperatures warmed up. Balbot said foresters hoped to minimize further
damage to the forest floor by doing cleanup work while the ground was frozen.
"The ideal situation is for it to be way below freezing ... but we may not
be able to wait that long," she said.
The first stage of cleanup - removing large logs along the trail - should
be finished by the end of this month.
Remaining limbs, branches and twigs will be made into mulch and spread on
the forest floor. Fallen trees will be placed parallel to Forbes Avenue to
prevent erosion.
The center also plans to plant new trees in the area, Balbot said. She
expects the trail to reopen in the spring, probably by May 1.
"We are so concerned about further damage," Balbot said. "We are taking
very slow steps in this cleanup."
She said the nature reserve has tried to keep people off the trail
because some of the trees along the hillside have loosened roots and could
topple with high winds or another storm.
It could take 25 to 50 years for the forest to restore itself to the way it was
before the storm.
Thousands of trees, from saplings to mature trees, were lost, and shrubs
were crushed. The loss opened the forest floor up to sunlight, Balbot said.
"It takes a long, long time for trees to grow," she said. "The entire ecology
of any area like that will be changed."
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