Preservation is Green

Transcript

OPEN: Many older developed countries are full of relics. But in this country, we're used to tearing down and building over. We pay little attention to the ecological impact of demolition. Local preservationists are now appealing to the public to save the Mellon Arena in Pittsburgh. They say preserving it is much better for the environment. Violet Law has the story.

[Ambient sound of demolition]

LAW: Although the design of a new arena for the Pittsburgh Penguins is just now being considered by the city's planning commission, the site is already cleared. Fourteen buildings were torn down during the summer to get it ready. But some people say the signs aren't good -- if this mass demolition is only a prelude to razing the Mellon Arena. Nearby shopkeepers, like Suzie Kissel, say they've suffered. Kissel runs the J and B Sales Store facing the cleared site.

KISSEL: The air has been rough. You can hardly go outside on Fifth Avenue to stand out there to walk along the avenue. Just been a lot of dirt.

LAW: And Chad Glick, her clerk, says the dust has even triggered his allergies.

GLICK: [sniffling]It makes me cough a lot more, sneeze a lot more. I deal with it about five, six hours a day.

LAW: Most Pittsburghers remember the last demolition of a sports arena. It was the beloved Three Rivers Stadium, the site of the 1960 World Series. Some forty years later, the massive concrete structure was imploded. Old photos show the stadium was shrouded in a cloud of dust. Preservationists who are trying to save the Mellon Arena say there's more than meets the eye in a huge demolition. Arthur Ziegler is president of Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation.

ZIEGLER: The environmental problems of tearing it down are you have to dismantle it at great cost. You have to count the environmental cost of having all those trucks come in, all the dust that goes into the air from the demolition, and the physical cost of the removal, the diesel fuel, the exhaust, noise pollution and then the cost of the landfill over the centuries.

LAW: Right now, only asbestos, but no other wastes, is monitored by one agency, the Allegheny County Health Department. Ziegler says that a lot more should be done.

ZIEGLER: The environmental cost would seem to me to be significant, but we really need a good analysis of exactly what those would be

LAW: While that analysis is yet to be done, one thing is certain. It took a lot-a whole lot-of energy to build the arena. Close to 3,000 tons of local steel went into the dome structure. That is about the same amount of energy as 726,000 gallons of gasoline would produce. Architect Rob Pfaffmann of Preservation Pittsburgh knows the math. And he advocates reusing the arena in order to conserve the energy.

PFAFFMANN: The Civic Arena, and buildings like it, have a lot of embodied energy and a lot of potential for reuse. This is a concept that fits into new innovations that are coming to green buildings, which will start to take that into account. So we as preservationists like to say the greenest building is the one that is already built.

LAW: Indeed, preservationists now see that they can contribute to the green building movement by re-adapting historical buildings. This year, at the National Preservation Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, there was a lot of discussion about these strategies. Here in Pittsburgh, preservationists suggest that the arena can be re-used as an open-air green space or an indoor shopping mall. [FADE IN NAT SOUND of a Penguins home game] But people who want to demolish the arena say the land should be used for housing instead. The preservationists, meanwhile, hope that after the Penguins have moved into the new arena, the team can pass the puck to them. They point out that preservation is conservation.

ZIEGLER: Here we are as preservationists conserving the built environment and that has to be better for the physical environment than tearing them down, hauling them to the landfill via diesel-powered vehicles. A preservationist seems to me automatically a green person.

LAW: For The Allegheny Front, this is Violet Law.