(CP Photo: Mars Johnson)

By Gavin Petrone, Pittsburgh City Paper

On a mid-July afternoon in Pittsburgh’s Lincoln-Lemington neighborhood, at the crest of Highland Drive and pinched between a U.S. Army Reserve Center and the Southwestern Veterans Center, is a sprawling fence guarding a complex some worry could become Pittsburgh’s “Cop City.”

The fence, marked distinctly by several signs that read “No Trespassing,” covers the entire roughly 70-acre perimeter of the old Veterans Administration Hospital, where, in 2019, former Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto proposed reconfiguring it into a center for all things public safety.

The hospital was purchased by Peduto’s administration from the GSA in 2021 — at the behest of both FEMA and the DOJ — for $1.

Peduto had hoped to move many of public safety’s training and administrative facilities, namely the Zone 5 police station and city fire headquarters, out of FEMA-designated floodplains. His proposal also included a new regional police training center and special deployment headquarters.

And while Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration axed plans for those aforementioned police facilities after he was sworn in in 2021, the hospital site itself has yet to change — ground has not been broken, and a master plan has not yet been approved.

(For more of the story, visit Pittsburgh City Paper.)

Gavin Petrone is a student at Point Park University and one of 10 Pittsburgh Media Partnership summer interns.