By SHANNON O. WELLS

It may be the bold, multicolored art-deco-style “New Granada” theater sign towering over Centre Avenue in the heart of the Hill District that catches the eye, but on the less-celebrated back side of the building that faces Wylie Street, there’s plenty to be excited about.

Extensive renovations are nearly complete for the fifth-floor space in the historic theater building at 2007 Centre Ave., accommodating Pitt’s newest Community Engagement Center (CEC), which for several years has operated in other spaces including the nearby Blakey Program Center and Bedford Hope Center.

What was for decades a neglected theater annex with growing trees visible through windowless gaps in the brick walls, the re-vamped structure is now an inviting, state-of-the-art complex accommodating spaces for offices, meetings, classes, activities and performance to serve community-based interests and education. It joins CECs in Homewood and Hazelwood as Pitt-sponsored neighborhood-based centers of engagement.

Originally known as the Pythian Temple, the New Granada Theater building — completed in 1928 and closed in 1970 — is owned by the Hill Community Development Corporation (CDC). Renovations for other parts of the structure are ongoing, with the third floor nearly ready for occupancy.

During a mid-April tour of the space, Keith Caldwell, executive director of place-based initiatives in the Office of Engagement and Community Affairs, said the Hill District CEC provides a now-permanent focal point and gathering place for a broad range of people and activities.

“Part of what’s cool, and we see it in Homewood … is that you create a space for folks who wouldn’t have gotten a chance to run into each other,” he said. “The CECs are definitely a place where people who wouldn’t normally connect or cross paths are able to do so.”

Artist Tacumba Turner’s participation in the Environmental Justice Summit, held in April at the three CECs, led to him partnering with the CEC and Pitt’s Archives & Special Collections for arts programming this fall.

As in Homewood and Hazelwood, the Hill District’s 8,700 square feet of space will be available for use by University and community members “as long as it’s a publicly benefiting purpose,” Caldwell noted. “You can’t have a birthday party here, but if you want to host a meeting with folks talking about the tree canopy in the Hill District, you can host that here at no charge.”

Once furniture arrives to complete the functionality of the space, which is graced with a plethora of natural light and high-ceilinged rooms of various sizes, the possibilities will multiply.

“If you want to just work out of the space, you can certainly do that too,” he said of the CEC’s drop-in center. “We want to be able to be a space where community members, students, staff, faculty can just come and work or reserve a room, host a meeting.”

The center also will accommodate the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP); the Department of Music’s Jazz Studies program; and education and social work elements of the Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence. A digital inclusion center will facilitate STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) programming, as well as workforce development in digital literacy.

Access initiatives also will be offered by the School of Computing and Information, the Swanson School of Engineering and Pitt Digital.

The value of STEAM

In 2020, the Board of Trustees’ Property and Facilities Committee approved contributing up to $6 million to the Hill Community Development Corp. for the CEC project, including additional leased space in the planned adjoining building. The lease term was set for 10 years at $1 per year and includes three five-year extensions and one four-year extension option.

Caldwell said it’s the CECs’ job to “help all 16 schools from across the University generate partnerships, but again, recognizing that these catalytic opportunities for a CEC come, in some ways, because there is a unique area of emphasis within the community and prioritization — and on our end, stuff we’re good at, where we think we can add value.”

The STEAM education piece came from conversations that started around 2014 before the CEC was involved.

“The Hill CEC and other partners got together and talked about what did they want to see happen with the New Granada Square redevelopment,” he noted of the community-involved process. “They wanted this to be a center of digital inclusion, STEAM and STEM education, and access and opportunity.

“At that point, it was like, ‘All right, we can see around that together.’”

Caldwell credited Hill District CEC Director Kelly Protho with doing “a fantastic job” securing partnerships with a “whole host of groups on campus to help connect with those kinds of STEM educational opportunities for young people and older adults.”

These include STEAM Saturdays where the CEC partners with student groups. “They come in, they put in a curriculum that is very engaging, from extracting DNA from strawberries to designing a video game,” Protho explained. “We started out with about four programs that the community kids in grades three through eight can come in and participate in, and now we’ve grown that to over 14 programs on Saturdays, once every semester for four to six weeks.”

Working out of the Blakey Program Center and Bedford Hope Center among other Hill locations, student groups “are really facilitating programs, and the kids keep coming back,” she said. “It’s really fun for them. The parents are always reaching out to see what other programs we have, but we really do programming across the lifespan.”

That includes adult coding and grant writing, and the new STEAM studio space on Wiley Street has received grant funding “to really look at bringing new tech to this space, to activate it.

“What I am really hopeful for is not only bringing new tech, but also being a space for our neighborhood schools to be able to use in their own neighborhood (as a) destination for field trips,” Protho said of local schools including Miller Elementary and Pittsburgh Weil Early Childhood Center.

“We’re really looking at cultivating those partnerships to grow even stronger connections so that they can bring classrooms over as field trips, and we can partner with those student groups to host programs (and any) way to activate the space with the youth that are in the neighborhood.”

Intentional enhancement

Given the historical marginalization of the Black population in the Hill District, including extensive urban renewal projects that effectively gutted once-bustling business districts, Protho said she and her CEC colleagues are committed to being thoughtful about how the CEC occupies the space.

“There is a way that we come into this space (where) we are intentional about not buying up the building to have a Community Engagement Center,” she said, “but being very intentional about, ‘Hey, we want to partner with community partners to be in this space,’ or ‘Hey, we want to be anchor tenants,’ instead of coming and … taking. I think that there is an intentionality about how we show up that is different.

The CEC aims for a narrative where its leaders and partners are “really, really working hard to ensure that when we say something, we mean it. And if we are saying that we’re going to be here for a long-term commitment. We’re signing a lease for 29-plus years.

“We can’t rewrite history, especially the history that we weren’t here for,” she added. “We can really be intentional about how we’re showing up. And I think that Pitt has done a great job with their community engagement centers in showing up differently.”

Caldwell added that it’s not the job of the CEC or its staff to “interpret what somebody’s experience was,” in the Hill District. “What they lived through is what they lived through. However they experienced it, that is how they experienced that.”

The CEC, he explained, “works hard” to train its partners around “acknowledging and validating the experiences of others. (When) people say things like, ‘Well, that happened then. That doesn’t happen anymore,’ it’s a non-starter conversation.

“Just acknowledge and validate somebody’s experience and say, ‘How can we do better now?’ Or ‘What can I do with you to ensure this doesn’t happen?’”

Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

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