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Sunday, April 08, 2001
There aren't many people who can say they own a town, but Ernest E. and Marilyn Liggett are about as close as anyone I've seen since Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life."
They spent most of the 1990s knitting together 130 properties in Brownsville, the historic borough on the Monongahela River, 45 miles south of Pittsburgh. The Churchill couple now own 95 percent of this Fayette County town's largely abandoned riverfront commercial district. With other holdings in the residential areas, about 25 percent of the borough's land is in their hands.
But nothing's happening. Almost every place they own is run-down and empty.
So I sit with them in the swank lobby of the Omni William Penn, and I tell them of my own whirlwind tour of Brownsville a few weeks before. Coming in on Route 40 from the west, the view is postcard pretty, with a scattering of 19th-century churches punctuating the hillside.
Once you cross the Monongahela and slide down Market Street to the old commercial district known as The Neck, though, you're on a street of broken dreams. The only person I saw, as a local foe of the Liggetts drove me around at lunch time, was some old guy talking to a duck, apparently the only speculator so far to have flown in and stayed. The grand banks, hotel and other buildings built between 1890 and 1927 stand empty.
The Liggetts stay focused on the potential.
"I truly fell in love with the town," Marilyn Liggett said.
The Neck could be transformed into a Main Street-style outlet mall, a la Grove City, and all the people using the evolving Mon-Fayette Expressway, from Morgantown, W.Va., to Pittsburgh, could come and make a day of it.
"It's the midpoint of a $2 billion road," Ernest Liggett said, selling the dream they've failed to sell to developers. "So that's kind of a no-brainer."
He credited his wife and her real estate background with the concept that they have come to call "River City, USA." But he did most of the talking, pulling architectural sketches, aerial photos and the rest of a decade's work from an oversized briefcase.
The Liggetts are nothing like The Music Man who came to River City. Soft-spoken, proper and private, Mrs. Liggett offered that she was a native of Western Pennsylvania, but did not want to say from where. When our conversation of more than two hours closed, they told me they'd been more open with me than they have with close friends, and yet I knew almost nothing about them.
It's clear, though, that they had no experience in development this ambitious, and they've bitten off more than they can chew. When I asked if the figure quoted in a previous story of a $2 million investment in this development was accurate, he said that was a "low-ball."
"We are delinquent on paying taxes," Mr. Liggett conceded. "We pay what we have to pay by law to maintain ownership of the properties. That's not uncommon. Taxes ride until resolution through sale of the property."
They fanned hopes of a big riverboat gambling deal in the mid-1990s, and they say they've sold their entire Brownsville portfolio twice in years past, but both deals fell through. Just last Tuesday, they showed the properties to a prospective buyer. The irony is that recent bad press -- particularly a front-page story in the PG four Sundays back -- may help get the word out.
Frank Ricco, president of the Greater Brownsville Area Chamber of Commerce, wishes them well in finding someone to buy them out. "Anything to move forward," Ricco said. "If they can sell it and get part of their investment back, and show some positive movement, this community will embrace them. I certainly hope it works out for them and for us. It would be a win-win situation for both of us."
But progress remains dependent on the emergence of a white knight, a species hard to come by. And the bigger the plan, the more likely something will go wrong. We know that well in Pittsburgh, having seen the struggles of Allegheny Center and East Liberty, of Federal North and the doomed plan for Market Place at Fifth and Forbes.
No one is claiming Brownsville's woes began with the Liggetts. The borough has been in decline for decades. The problem is that the long wait for the Big Deal precludes any incremental improvements Brownsville residents might make themselves.
My friend George DeBolt of Homestead has long preached in the Mon Valley, "We've got to do it ourselves, or outsiders will do it to us."
So far in Brownsville, dreams of the win-win have been a lose-lose for everyone.
Brian O'Neill's e-mail address is boneill@post-gazette.com