RANDALL TAYLOR protests with members of the Penn Plaza Support And Action Coalition outside Whole Foods Market in East Liberty, May 17. (Photo by Rob Taylor Jr.)
by Rob Taylor Jr., Courier Staff Writer
Whole Foods Market is planning to add another location—the old Penn Plaza Apartments site in East Liberty, where hundreds of families (most were African American and low-income) were displaced when its owner, LG Realty Advisors, demolished the buildings two years ago.
Randall Taylor and the members of the Penn Plaza Support And Action Coalition have a plan of their own, as well—they’ll be at Whole Foods each Friday at 5 p.m. to protest the grocer’s decision to set up shop at the new location.
Whole Foods originally backed out of a plan to have a location at the Penn Plaza site, after the enormous controversy surrounding the removal of the residents, many of whom had nowhere else to go.
But on April 29, it was announced that the grocer signed a lease with LG Realty to occupy 50,000 square feet of first-floor retail space on the Penn Plaza site. The lease also provides Whole Foods with 287 underground parking spaces.
It’s all part of LG Realty’s plan to revitalize the corner of Penn and Euclid avenues where the apartment buildings once stood with a nine-story office and retail development complex, named Liberty East.
Taylor, during a protest on May 17, told the New Pittsburgh Courier he couldn’t believe Whole Foods decided to continue with its original plans from 2016. “I had the same reaction that a lot of citizens had, they thought it was cowardly,” Taylor said.
“They…were insulting our intelligence by thinking we had forgotten all of this. It was very insulting to the public. We want them to pull out of the Penn Plaza site,” Taylor continued. “We consider that to be sacred ground.”
About 20 people participated in the planned protest, May 17, which was met with eight Pittsburgh Police officers who wouldn’t let the protesters block the entrance for drivers to get into the parking lot. Officers also stood near the entrance of the store, seeming to not allow any of the protesters to go inside the store, especially those holding a sign.
Some of the signs read, “Justice for Penn Plaza residents now—Amazon can afford it,” and “Hey, Alexa, give us back our homes.”
Amazon, the online retail behemoth, announced in June 2017 it was purchasing Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion.
“We’re not being violent, we’re not hurting anybody, we have not disturbed the peace,” Taylor said in a megaphone towards the officers. “I have no idea why the Pittsburgh Police are here acting as a personal security force (for Whole Foods), and we’re paying them? We’re paying them? They should be protecting us.”
As protesters chanted, “Amazon Prime is Amazon Crime,” onlookers such as Ravi Alagar told the Courier he was “not a fan” of the displacement of the Penn Plaza residents in the first place. “I think this is the double-edged sword with Google, the Bakery Square, etc., I don’t know how people can afford all this.”
The “G” word, gentrification, has been at the beginning of many people’s sentences after watching East Liberty transform from a majority-African American community with urban lifestyle-oriented stores to a boom of high-end apartments, new stores that appeal to the mainstream consumer, and a loss of at least 1,000 African Americans from East Liberty over a period of recent years.
But for Selima Dawson, who’s lived in the East Liberty area since she was 10 years old, she’s not surprised Whole Foods wants the more spacious site down the street. “It’s the nature of the beast,” she said, referring to businesses that see just the financial bottom line.
Taylor told the Courier that if Whole Foods won’t budge on their decision to have a location on the Penn Plaza site, the company should provide financial restitution to the residents who were displaced.
“Many of those residents walked away from there with as little as $800 after living there for 30 years,” he said. “Whole Foods is the reason why we were displaced from Penn Plaza. If they had never entered into anything with LG Realty, ‘Limitless Greed’ Realty, that never would have happened. They have a moral and financial obligation to those people that got displaced.”
Taylor made it a point not to blame the customers of the East Liberty Whole Foods, but, “every consumer should recognize when you are patronizing and giving money to bad players, bad companies and bad neighbors like Whole Foods Amazon East Liberty.”
The current Whole Foods Market store on Centre Avenue occupies 32,500 square feet and has been open since 2002. If Whole Foods continues to honor the lease it signed in April with LG Realty and occupy the location at the Penn Plaza site, it’s not clear what would happen to the Centre Avenue location.
Taylor told the Courier he has not been able to speak with Whole Foods Market officials. He said he is not calling for a boycott of Whole Foods—yet.
When LG Realty displaced the Penn Plaza residents, Whole Foods “made people feel as though they were on the side of the people” by backing out of the deal, said Penn Hills resident Lorraine Penn. “But now they’re going to go ahead with it, no one’s forgotten that. Housing is important. Community is important. So no, I don’t agree with it,” she told the Courier.
LG Realty said that the new development would actually bring more money into the fold to build affordable housing near the Penn Plaza site, and the company committed putting $1 million into improving Enright Park, which sits near the site.
But for Penn, the money for new affordable housing, estimated in the millions over time, still wasn’t worth the bulldozers that ultimately demolished the longstanding Penn Plaza buildings.
“I never see them displacing people out of Bloomfield and Garfield,” Penn said. “I never see that.”
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