AMARE GONZALEZ, 14, LEFT, SAID IT WAS THE SECOND TIME HE ATTENDED THE TEEN FEST EVENT IN DOWNTOWN PITTSBURGH. (PHOTO BY ROB TAYLOR JR.)
‘Different approach’ to how to deal with teens in city, officials say
Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership President and CEO Jeremy Waldrup admitted to the New Pittsburgh Courier that, “We weren’t sure these were going to work.”
He was talking about the teen party/get-togethers that a group of organizations called the Downtown Safety Council threw smack dab in the middle of Market Square. The events — complete with a DJ, free food, basketball hoops, corn hole, painting and information from non-profit organizations — were held on three Wednesdays this fall; Sept. 20, Oct. 4 and Oct. 11, from 3 to 5:30 p.m. The events were geared toward school students from the Downtown area, like Pittsburgh CAPA, City Charter High School, Passport Academy Charter School and Urban Pathways Charter School (high school). The ages ranged from 13 to 19.
By all accounts, the events were a success. The Courier witnessed more than 200 students at the final event of the fall, held Oct. 11, where organizations such as Ruth’s Way Inc. for Girls, Alliance for Police Accountability, MAD DADS and the Pittsburgh Police were in attendance. Students received free food, challenged each other to some basketball, and seemed to love the Hip-Hop music from DJ Young Obama, real name Jordan Gilliam.
“There are over 2,000 kids who learn in Downtown every day, and we feel like they don’t have enough of a voice in our community,” Waldrup told the Courier exclusively, Oct. 11. “We often tell them, ‘we don’t want you here, we don’t want you doing that…’”
Waldrup said the parties were “our way of saying…we want you to have fun, we want you to be a part of this community, we want you to feel like it’s yours and we want to give you places to do that.”
Waldrup, who’s led the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership since 2011 and has seen every up and down of Downtown since, including a pandemic, said that “we want basketball courts in Downtown. We want places for kids to hang, we need more parks and open spaces that kids want to be part of.”
The funding used by the Pittsburgh Down town Partnership for the food and entertainment was from BNY Mellon, as part of their support of programming in Market Square.
TOBY, 17, A STUDENT AT CAPA, ENJOYING THE TEEN FEST. (PHOTOS BY ROB TAYLOR JR.)
Downtown Pittsburgh has fueled much debate lately. There’s the debate over increased homelessness, crime, whether or not workers want to return to the Downtown core, or whether or not the more than 25 businesses that have left Downtown since March 2020 will ever return.
There may be no more McDonald’s, just one CVS left, and a jewelry store on Wood and Fifth about to close its doors, but the schools that serve a primarily Black student body have stayed put. And from 2:45 p.m. to about 4:30 p.m. each weekday, Downtown is filled with students.
It’s important to note that while there have been two homicides inside Downtown so far in 2023, none of the victims or suspects have any link to the Downtown schools. Both homicide victims were 23 years old, and while one of the suspects in one of the homicides was 18 years old, police have not linked the 18-year-old to any Downtown schools.
DJ YOUNG OBAMA, CENTER, WITH JAYDE REED, 16, AND TYLER MOORE, 17
“I think it’s a different approach to how we deal with teens in our city,” DJ Young Obama told the Courier of the after-school parties. “Instead of looking at them (teens) as a problem or a nuisance, and wanting to get them out of the school and straight on these buses and out of here, for the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership to be able to put together a string of events that invites them into one of the most prominent and beautiful areas of our city, and provide them with free food, entertainment, wraparound services, having safety officers down here interacting with these kids, to me this is the responsible and right way to go about engaging our youth.”
Amare Gonzalez, a 14-year-old who attends City Charter, agreed.
“I like it because everyone’s here, everyone’s happy, it’s a good vibe,” he told the Courier.
Gonzalez said most times, a teen event in Pittsburgh is “very dangerous, so this is good for the community.”
Waldrup said plans are in the works to hold the same events in the spring of 2024. Waldrup said the events are open to any teen, not just those in Downtown. He said there are no exact dates set for the spring events as of now. But it’s a good bet that 17-year-old Tyler Moore and 16-year-old Jayde Reed, both University Prep (U-Prep Pittsburgh Milliones) students, will be there.
“This is a good way to bring the community together and have kids do non-bad things,” Reed told the Courier. “We’re not all out here doing just anything, we’re out here actually being kids and spending time with each other that’s our age range and doing stuff that’s in our age range.”
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