A two-woman, five-man crew Saturday finishes the framing on a new house built by Habitat for Humanity on Walnut Street on Warren's West Side. See article at this link.
You can either move to a new location or change the way your old home looks. Either way it will be a new home. People, businesses,and organizations appear to be moving back into Warren, if only in a methodical manner. Non-profit organizations are helping to make this happen, following the construction boom of Impact Warren, which saw the creation of a waterfront district on the Allegheny River a few years ago.
The closing of Home Street School in the city's Hooktown section off of Conewango Avenue a few years ago will mean more new home construction as the land there is being assigned to new developers. These will represent the first commercially constructed homes in the city for many years and could include up to 6 to 8 new single family homes in a highly desirable residential location within walking distance of the High School.
Current demolition of abandoned houses throughout the city will stimulate even more construction in the future as the city currently faces its lowest population estimate of approximately 9,400, down from 15,000 in the 1970s.
Economically, the area appears to be in a healthy state with the unemployment rate much lower than the national average. A local boom in timber and oil and gas extraction will probably help already established industry and maintain a low unemployment rate despite what appears to be an oncoming national recession with nearly a tenth of the country already on food stamps.
Facade restoration and new signage is going up in downtown Warren,
sponsored by Mainstreet Warren. Here on the left Fresh Cup CoffeeHouse
is getting a fresh logo overhead its storefront window. Next door, The
Subway sandwich shop will also receive the same treatment in a matching
style. Neither business is moving into a new home but once the
restoration work is done their homes will look new and passersby will
be able to identify the businesses from at least a block away.
Around the corner in the former G.C. Murphy building Allegheny Mountain Martial Arts has moved into its new location on Liberty Street. And sometime next fall, a new bookstore called Authors is planning to set up shop in the building pictured below, just a few doors down on Liberty Street which was previously occupied by a crafts store. A source close to AlleghenyAlmanac says that reading chairs for book browsers have already been picked out. The new bookstore may feature an 80/20 mix of used/new books, as well as sheet music, and CDs. Authors will be an expansion of the already existing and continuing business on Second Avenue, The Allegheny Book Mart.
In the same Liberty Street block, the newly created Allegheny Arts Center will foster a variety of art mediums and business at the 225 to 229 Liberty Street
addresses, Warren's main downtown retail street. Click on any photo to see
it in full size. The blue canopy in the right of the photo may be a new home for a specialty bakery shop. This is another project sponsored by Mainstreet
Warren.
In the meantime you may notice even more scaffolding in place at the Point, the block of Second Avenue that joins Pennsylvania Avenue downtown, just across from the Music Park. By summer's end downtown won't look the same.
Photos and text by Chris Lareau
For further reading:
Warren County Chamber of Commerce and Industry
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