News Nearby: Federal Grant Helps Bakery Square Expansion

The Department of Commerce has awarded a $2 million Economic Development Administration grant to the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) of Pittsburgh for additional redevelopment of Bakery Square in the Larimer section of the City.  

“This federal grant will help provide the public infrastructure necessary for the second phase of the Bakery Square redevelopment, which has brought new life to the old Nabisco bakery site,” U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, (D-) said Monday at the press conference announcing the award.  

Acting U.S. Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank joined Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, Doyle and other officials Monday afternoon to announce the grant for the new East End development, just minutes from Regent Square.

Walnut Capital has purchased a 12-acre site across the street from Bakery Square from the Pittsburgh School District, the former site of Reizenstein Elementary and Barack Obama Academy of International Studies, and is working with the URA to redevelop it.

The developers plan to turn the former school into Bakery Square 2.0, a $120 million mixed-use development that will feature 400,000 square feet of office space across the street from the original Bakery Square.

This new phase of redevelopment will include offices, labs, retail and residential components. Once completed, officials expect the site to create 2,400 jobs and generate $7 million in annual tax revenues.

The EDA grant will be used for construction of public infrastructure like streets and utilities for the office portion of the site, and other government funding will be used for other site preparation activities, but the vast majority of the funding for the $120 million project will come from the private sector. 

“Bakery Square has been a great example of a successful public-private partnership to redevelop and re-purpose an old industrial site and revitalize a distressed community," Doyle said. "Bakery Square 2.0 will build on the original project’s success and create more office and lab space for Google, UPMC, other current tenants, and new tenants from local universities and medical centers.”  

Bakery Square is located on a site along Penn Avenue where Nabisco built a large bakery in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Larimer in 1918 and operated it for the next 80 years. In 1999, after Nabisco closed the facility, the Regional Industrial Development Corporation of Southwest Pennsylvania bought the building and leased it for several years to the Atlantic Baking Company, but the company went bankrupt several years later.  

According to information provided by Doyle, in 2006, the City of Pittsburgh declared the vacant facility blighted, and the following year the property was sold to Walnut Capital, which began redeveloping the site. The redevelopment of Bakery Square involved government at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as more than $100 million in private investment.  

Work on the site was completed in 2010, and Google moved its Pittsburgh headquarters there. The $130 million project is approaching its projection for creating more than 2,000 jobs.  

Doyle, who has worked to bring jobs to the region, said federal assistance has been invaluable in helping this region recover from the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and 1980s.