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Monday, November 04, 2002

By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The Pittsburgh-to-Harrisburg Mainline Canal Greenway has been referred to more succinctly as the "Double 'Burger Corridor."

	Online Map: Pittsburgh-to-Harrisburg Mainline Canal Greenway

But "it's actually a triple," jokes project coordinator Dan Pryor. "We've got Hollidaysburg in the middle."

The meat of this is not just a physical trail between two big Pennsylvania burgs. Land trails will be part it, as will water trails and roads, as well as the towns and other attractions along the way.

So the greenway is more of a sausage, 2 miles wide and 320 miles long. Or, as Pryor prefers, an "open space connector." Imagine a park and development zone -- a ribbon of recreation and revitalization woven from local projects.

Eventually, as the gaps fill in, a person could hike or paddle from the 'Burgh to the H'burg.

One of the partners at Pittsburgh's end, Friends of the Riverfront, is hosting a greenway planning and design open house today at which you not only can learn about where this ambitious project is now but also have input into where it's headed.

	Related article: Millvale hopes new boathouse, park will become hot spot for river recreation

The open house runs from 1 to 7 p.m. at Friends' new office in the Terminal Properties, 33 Terminal Way, just off East Carson Street under the Liberty Bridge in the South Side. Pryor, who is based in Duncansville, Blair County, will be there. So will project consultant and international greenway authority Chuck Flink, from North Carolina-based Greenways Inc.

Friends Executive Director John Stephen, who'll attend a round table discussion from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m., invites people to discuss their ideas with the experts and learn more about local projects that are key links, such as Friends' Allegheny River Water Trail and the Three Rivers Rowing Association's new rowing and paddling center to open at Millvale later this week.

As Stephen puts it: "The greenway provides the larger context for the local work we're doing."

It's not easy to describe a greenway because it is as much conceptual as concrete. Pryor describes it as a grassroots effort to connect layers of recreation, heritage, economics and environment.

Tying it all together thematically and metaphorically is the route of the old Pennsylvania Mainline Canal, which opened the "west" to development when it was completed in 1834.

The Allegheny Ridge -- the Eastern continental divide -- was an obstacle for constructing that project. But this one is being led by the Allegheny Ridge Corp., a nonprofit group charged with developing the Allegheny Ridge State Heritage Park in Blair, Cambria, Somerset and Huntingdon counties.

It was the corporation that saw the existing amenities and the possibilities of the Pittsburgh-Harrisburg corridor and nominated it to be a Millennium Legacy Trail. As part of an effort to improve and expand trails across the country, a White House council in 1999 named 50 Millennium Legacy Trails -- one in almost every state and territory -- to "honor the past and imagine the future" of America while capturing the essence of each area they traverse.

Each Millennium Legacy Trail is supposed to bring public and private groups together to provide tangible future benefits.

Mainline Greenway supporters, working with federal and state funds, hope to improve the quality of life for residents as well as attract visitors to this region by linking conservation with development. That's already the idea behind the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources' Heritage Parks, which include the "Rivers of Steel" one at this end of the state.

The greenway is all about linkage -- linking the two heritage regions, linking the two big urban "trailheads" with communities in between, linking waterway planning initiatives on the Kiski, Conemaugh and the Juniata rivers.

In this part of the state, Pryor says, "we have a heckuva lot of natural capital sitting here that needs to be planned wisely, for not only recreational use but also for environmental remediation" -- cleaning up mine drainage and other ugly legacies of the industrial past.

Establishment of the greenway will be truly a watershed event, since the route flows along the Kiski-Conemaugh and Juniata watersheds. Following the old canal, the route continues down the Allegheny River from Freeport to Pittsburgh and, at the other end, down the Susquehanna to Harrisburg.

So many different elements will become part of it that Pryor can't say when the greenway will be completed.

In a sense, he says, "the greenway is done. It's what we put in it" that remains to be worked out.

And that's why the nearly 100 "stakeholders" on the statewide advisory committee have been meeting, and why they're now doing even more to involve the public, which doesn't know much about the greenway yet.

Meanwhile, pieces are coming together. In June, the Kiski-Conemaugh Water Trail was officially established as a state water trail, and there's talk of continuing it on the Juniata. In the spring, ground is to be broken on the 10-mile "Path of the Flood" land trail from near the Johnstown Flood National Memorial to Staple Bend Tunnel to the Johnstown Flood Museum.

But as the Allegheny Ridge Corp. describes it, the goal is to build on trails to make the greenway as much of a destination as a route -- an overall "legacy franchise" that its communities can use to do everything from conserve resources to stimulate economic growth.

For more information, visit www.alleghenyridge.org/projects/greenway/greenIntro.htm.