This afternoon our group had back to back talked with two speakers who ended up complementing each other more than I expected. First we headed to the F.N.B. Stadium to meet with Kris Brown, the director of Promotions and Entertainment for the Riverhounds, Kris walked us through a lot of the behind the scenes side of running a stadium, and one detail that stuck with me was how advertising space gets priced. The stadium can’t sell outward facing ads because of local billboard zoning laws, but since the F.N.B. stadium sits right along the Monongahela river next to the bridge, the inward facing ads that drivers see while crossing actually end up being worth more. To me that was such a small logistical detail, but it completely reframed how I think about “visibility” for a venue like this.

Then we sat down with Elissa DiNello, who works as the Business Development Manager for Allegheny County’s Main Streets program. Elissa’s talk hit closer to home for our actual project. She works on the exact four building blocks we’ve been using all program, businesses, civic assets, community organizations, and public resources. A lot of her talk focused on how towns access grants to strengthen those places. What confirmed something I’d already been thinking was how much these four pieces depend on each other, you can’t really strengthen one in isolation, a business doesn’t thrive without civic assets around it, and civic assets don’t get used without community organizations activating them. What made me really think was realizing how much of this work isn’t visible, it’s grant applications, funding cycles, and behind the scenes coordination that never shows up in a finished store, but it’s what makes the store possible in the first place. Going in, I figured these would be two separate conversations, one could be about sports and the other conversation could be about small towns, but by the end of the day I realized they were both circling the same idea, places thrive because of the people and relationships built around them, not just because of a single attraction.

Between Kris and Elissa, today really reinforced that whether it’s a stadium or a small town’s Main Street, the places that succeed are the ones where people keep finding reasons to come back to. We ended the day riding the Monongahela incline, which wasn’t as scary as I thought, it was pretty slow riding it up then down, but it was nice to see the view of Pittsburgh/downtown from miles up!