New Kensington Mayor Thomas Guzzo sees the slow turnaround of his city's downtown encapsulated in a double-wide lot along Fifth Avenue lined with colorful day lilies and raised vegetable beds.

The lot, home of the Pittsburgh Beauty Academy until it burned down in December 2006, now is the New Kensington Community Garden, a joint effort among the city, Westmoreland County Community College's New Kensington campus and a handful of nonprofit groups.

“This was one of the first initiatives we took to help our city start heading in the right direction,” Guzzo said. “People took pride in it; people noticed it. Now it's part of our downtown revitalization.”

The garden, started in 2012, evolves and grows each year. Organizers donated more than 45 bushels of produce to area food banks, churches and senior citizen homes in 2015.

Last month, welding students from WCCC made a 10-foot-wide, 8-foot-tall aluminum pergola, a tribute to New Ken's status as “the aluminum city.”

WCCC President Tuesday Stanley praised the students' work and the garden to trustees in April, calling it “a sanctuary in the middle of town.”

The roughly 800-pound pergola was designed by the eight or so students who worked on it, said Dale Glessner, the WCCC welding technology and metal fabrication instructor who oversaw the project.

“They ended up going with vines and leaves they all made” to spruce up the basic frame, Glessner said. “Most of them are artists, so they did really well with it.”

The pergola is the first step in what Patrick Coulson, coordinator of WCCC's New Kensington campus and the volunteer director of the garden, sees as a grand entrance to the fenced-in lot.

Coulson said he hopes to use part of a $6,000 Revitalize Westmoreland grant from the Westmoreland County Community Foundation to install a gate in the center of the fence that faces Fifth Avenue — just in front of the gleaming pergola — and divide a center flower bed to establish a defined walkway into the garden.

The transformation

Autumn Walker remembers when the overgrown lot was “a pile of rubble.”

Walker opened her Bewitching Brew Soap shop two doors down from the garden in October during the city's second “Better Blocks” event, a grassroots revitalization effort that aims to drive residents into downtown to see its possibilities.

She said the garden fits into the broader national sustainability movement by not only looking pretty, but adding something productive to downtown.

“A lot of stuff is going back to its roots of being handmade. The garden definitely fits in with the vibe in New Kensington,” Walker said.

Coulson said the lot, bordered by brick buildings, one of which still shows fire damage from 10 years ago, was a dumping ground before volunteers cleaned it up and carted a mountain of topsoil by hand from the alley behind the garden into the raised beds.

A Penn State master gardener who teaches at the New Kensington campus helped design the layout so the garden could be expanded and tweaked.

“Each year, it seems like it gets easier and easier (to plant and maintain),” Coulson said. “The first year we felt like mules.”

Last year, volunteers planted heirloom tomatoes, squash, zucchini, beets, garlic, beans, cantaloupes, cucumbers and a peppers in a dozen raised beds.

The YMCA and local churches organize groups of children to help harvest the produce each summer and fall, Guzzo said. This fall, WCCC will offer an introduction to horticulture course at its New Kensington campus that incorporates the garden as part of its lab, Coulson said.

“You see the momentum now,” Coulson said. “Even people that may have been skeptical or cautious are now on board.”

More work to do

But just as the apple and pear trees along the edges of the garden will take time to mature, so will the transformation around the garden.

The block surrounding it is half empty.

The lot across the street is vacant. The former Renee Jewelers storefront on the corner is empty, and garbage is visible through the window.

Opposite the garden is a shuttered international food store with brown paper covering the windows, and Gene's Shoe Service, which closed in December.

But Guzzo said the garden shows people “that we're going to move forward.”

That's vital to downtown, business owners said.

“For businesses to grow up, the city needs that (garden) to attract people,” said Odilon Wafo, owner of Rue de la Cinquieme, a thrift store near the garden. “The community garden makes the city look beautiful.”

For Leslie McLaughlin, founder of the nonprofit Helping Families and owner of the thrift store that benefits the group's mission, the garden shows the power of bringing together people who otherwise might not collaborate.

“In a town like this, it's about ownership and taking it back,” McLaughlin said.

Kari Andren is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach her at 724-850-2856 or kandren@tribweb.com.

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