Overview
St. John’s Green features a trail that winds from the higher elevation along Fleming Avenue, down a set of stairs, and through the lower site’s trails along McClure Avenue. Along the trail, visitors will find a stormwater meadow, a rain garden, a bicycle rack and fixit station, benches, and a small urban forest offering ample shade. Gardeners from the neighborhood have installed beds in the space to grow food and share growing knowledge.
This urban green space honors the legacy of the land while preserving a bright green future for the community.
Background
The site’s history as a place of community care dates back more than a century. Originally developed as St. John’s Lutheran Home for the Aged in 1893, the campus grew over the following decades to include a hospital, maternity ward, emergency services, and a nursing school established in 1901. For nearly 100 years, the property served generations of residents through health care, education, and community connection before Pittsburgh Mercy Health Systems relocated services and closed the campus in the 1990s. Following a devastating fire in 1999, the remaining structures were ultimately demolished in the early 2000s.
Even after the buildings were gone, the importance of the site to the surrounding community remained. In 2016, Pittsburgh Water’s “Green First Plan” brought together the Urban Redevelopment Authority, Brighton Heights Citizens Federation, and Allegheny Land Trust to reimagine the property as a community green space that could also serve as critical green stormwater infrastructure. Today, the site continues its legacy of service in a new form: a permanently protected public green space that supports neighborhood connection, environmental resilience, recreation, and access to nature for the surrounding community.
This effort to transform the land was financed in part by funds from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Growing Greener program, and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ Community and Watershed Forestry program, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Commonwealth Finance Authority, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s Neighborhood Initiatives Fund, the Heinz Endowments, the McCune Foundation, the Buhl Foundation, the Hillman Foundation, People’s Gas, the Buhl Foundation, Author Devin Grayson and sustainability students from Slippery Rock University, and individual donors from the surrounding community.