We offer without comment the following passage from Christine O’Toole, Slumbering Pittsburgh Neighborhood Reawakens, New York Times, March 3, 2010, at p. B7:
“PITTSBURGH – In the 1950s, the East Liberty neighborhood five miles east of downtown was Pennsylvania’s third-largest shopping district, behind Center City Philadelphia and downtown Pittsburgh, with more than 500 local businesses and a population of 14,000.
“The suburbs began to draw residents from the densely populated area in the late 1950s, however, and urban renewal schemes like high-rise public housing and ring roads were enacted to stem the flight. Instead, they drove the area into a 40-year coma. By the 1980s East Liberty had lost more than one million square feet of commercial space and half its population.”