I walked over to the North Side yesterday to play basketball at the Allegheny Center Alliance Church and I walked through the Allegheny Center mall...That place is like walking through the set of 28 days later.  There's no one there.  Stores are empty.  THIS IS A MALL.  I felt like I was walking through some sort of quarantined area, and it's 4 o'clock in the afternoon!  The whole area is just dead and creepy.  It's totally wild to see such a big area completely abandoned.  Even the old Carnegie Free Library has a sign on it that says "Closed indefinitely."  That's nuts!  What happened here???  It's almost like this area has a dark secret in it's past and no one is talking about it.

Maybe all the development on the North Shore will revive that place.  The Steelers are in talks with a west coast developer to bring in some sort of venue/entertainment complex next to Heinz Field.  You've got Don Barden's casino going in.  Another hotel going in by PNC Park.  The North Shore connection with the T to be finished in 2011.  If I were to make a prediction, I'd say that once the river front of the North Side is developed in the next 5 years, the West End/Station square side is going to BOOM.  When I say BOOM, I mean it.  The attraction of that side of the river(s) is that there's nothing there right now.  Developers will be able to plan huge buildings, not worry about closing roads and such, and have a clean canvas to work with.  I haven't heard anything about that Pittsburgh maglev project for a while either...