Route 65 study to focus on reconnecting Pittsburgh's North Side neighborhoods

Pittsburgh was awarded $1.4 million on Wednesday to study whether it should alter a section of Route 65 in the city’s North Side to reconnect the Chateau and Manchester neighborhoods.

In the 1970s, officials raised a portion of Route 65, also known as Ohio River Boulevard, onto a viaduct to create an expressway from the Fort Duquesne Bridge on the North Shore to the McKees Rocks Bridge at the northern edge of the city.

The project accommodated increased traffic in the area, but also largely cut off Chateau and Manchester from one another.

U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Swissvale, said the construction of the Route 65 expressway inflicted “lasting detrimental effects on the community.”

The City of Pittsburgh and Manchester Citizens Corp. submitted an application for the federal funding. U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Scranton, sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation in support. In it, he wrote that the study would look at the feasibility of reestablishing a “connected street network” on Route 65.

The study wants to look at alternatives to the viaduct that carries Route 65 as an expressway. Casey said the city’s Manchester-Chateau Neighborhood Plan recommended possibly transforming that section of Route 65 into an at-grade boulevard or increasing the number of connections from the expressway to the neighborhoods below.

“The North Side is a vibrant and historic section of Pittsburgh, but neighborhoods like Manchester have suffered from harmful infrastructure decisions that divided and isolated the community,” Casey said in a statement.

There is now only one access point between Manchester and Chateau over about 1 mile of roadway along Beaver Avenue and Chateau Street. That intersection near Juniata Street has had some problems in the past with pedestrian safety.

The planned study also comes as housing and entertainment developers eye Chateau, which is currently a neighborhood dominated by light industrial use.

The federal funding comes from a grant program that dedicates money from the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law to reconnect communities that were previously cut off from economic opportunities by transportation infrastructure. Before this grant program, other projects that have seen success in removing expressways and localizing roads include removing the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle and tearing down the Park East Freeway in Milwaukee.