cityLAB met with Babs Bailey Carryer last week who talked about the missing support system for every day entrepreneurs. Pittsburgh is quick to support tech and bioscience start-ups and puts a lot of money behind them. But what about all the other entrepreneurs who help to round out a healthy economy?
6% Place
garfield intersection
Gigapan survey
Gigapan is a robotic attachment to a digital camera that automatically takes a large number of individual images across a precise grid then stitches them together to create an interactive panorama. On account of the vast amount of data in each compiled image a viewer can zoom in and explore the photograph, much as one might a neighborhood. CityLAB is exploring the use of the Gigapan technology to document Garfield and the Penn Avenue Arts District.
Courtney and Anthony take a 360 degree panoramic view of an intersection in Garfield.
The Gigapan robot with mounted digital camera.
The robot automatically pressed the shutter 288 times to make the panorama.
New coro fellow
Anthony E. Harbour, a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs, joins cityLAB today for the next 6 weeks. His interest in grassroots community development and under-served populations marries beautifully with the work he will be doing on the Special Impact Zone along the Penn Avenue Arts Corridor and in Garfield.
our walk score
Stand at the intersection of S. Atlantic and Penn Avenue, right in the center of our Special Impact Zone, and Walk Score rates this community as very walkable with a walk score of 80.
face-off
While the Penn Avenue Arts District has been successful in drawing arts uses, it remains a corridor through two neighborhoods. When it was imagined fifteen years ago it had two distinct goals. One was to see whether the arts could transform the very blighted place that it was. The other was to “zipper” together the two vastly different neighborhoods on either side of it. This second goal was never achieved and while Friendship to the south is nicely middle class, Garfield to the north struggles with an impoverished population and much vacancy. This is a socio-economic face-off. Can our experiment help to resolve it?