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Garfield Information
Garfield is a neighborhood in the east end of the City of Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, USA. Garfield lies about three miles as the crow flies from the
confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers at the City's heart. It
sits on a bluff above the Allegheny River. Garfield is bordered on the South by
Bloomfield and Friendship (at Penn Avenue), on the West by the Allegheny
Cemetery (at Mathilda Street), on the North by Stanton Heights (at Mossfield
Street), and on the East by East Liberty (at Negley Avenue). Like many parts of
Pittsburgh, Garfield is a fairly steep neighborhood, with north-south
residential streets running at about a 20% incline from Penn Avenue at the
bottom to Mossfield Street at the top.
Garfield, which had been a haven for working-class Irish-American homeowners, is
now called home by African-American renters, and the steady industrial jobs that
supported the older Irish-American residents are gone for good. Garfield's
current residents have established some of their own traditions, including the
"Turkey Bowl," a formal, full-contact football game on Thanksgiving Day played
in full pads by teams called the Old Heads and the Young Bucks. But some of the
neighborhood's current traditions are negative ones: drug dealing, prostitution,
and illegitimacy are not uncommon in today's Garfield, and children attending
the neighborhood's Fort Pitt School often fall behind their peers on national
tests.
To halt what they perceived as the neighborhood's decline, in 1975 parishioners
at St. Lawrence O'Toole founded the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, a Community
Development Corporation that uses private and government funds and activism to
encourage homeownership and business development. Over the years, the
organization has built or renovated dozens of housing units, and renovated
commercial properties for dozens of small businesses, from restaurants to art
galleries to theater companies.
In the 1980s, a similar group called the Garfield Jubilee Association formed,
with a goal of creating affordable housing. In recent years, the two groups have
joined together in a joint project to build dozens of new single-family homes.
In 2000, the BGC and Friendship Development Associates, Inc. formed the Penn
Avenue Arts Initiative. The PAAI encourages artists to live and work along the
Avenue by rehabbing properties, making small loans or grants for facade
renovations, and organizing joint marketing events such as Unblurred, held the
first Friday of each month, where the venues of Garfield and Friendship open for
special events.
Efforts by groups like these, along with a recent recognition that massive,
1960s-style social welfare projects often had negative consequences, have helped
to revitalize the neighborhood. Commercially, Penn Avenue is recovering from the
flight of local businesses in the 1970s and 1980s. Some bastions of the old
neighborhood remain, as groups like the BGC and GJA, and FDA have worked to keep
some banks and stores along Penn Avenue. Since 1990, these have been joined by
newcomers: African-American barbershops and salons, tiny family-owned Vietnamese
restaurants, and a series of arts-related businesses (e.g., theatres, galleries,
an architecture studio, a glass factory, a coffeeshop, and much more) attracted
by the PAAI. There has also been some positive residential development: the East
Mall and Garfield Heights Senior high-rise was razed in 2005, and the townhouse
units are scheduled to be demolished in 2007 -2008, and replaced with mixed
income units, as well as new replacement homes scattered through the
neighborhood. Visitors to Garfield today will see a neighborhood on the rise, a
formerly blighted community that is now becoming a vibrant community, with a
focus on the arts, while not forgetting its roots.
Some Things to Consider When Looking for a Place...
When searching for a new apartment make sure to take your time to think
through what are the most important things to you in an apartment and plan your
search based on those priorities. Here are some things to consider when planning
your move:
1. Consider the areas where you would like to live
* What is the crime rate?
* If you have children - what rating does the local school system have?
* Is there area convenient shopping, health and recreation services in the area?
2. Make a list of your housing priorities
* Do you have pets?
* Do you need parking?
* Do you need to be on the ground floor?
* What amenities are important to you - swimming pool, fitness room, in unit
laundry?
3. Evaluate the building
* What is the condition of the unit and building?
* Are the grounds maintained?
* Are windows, steps, and railings in good condition?
* View the property at night. Is it safe and well lit?
4. The security of the property
* Are there security service? When is the guard on duty?
* Does the building have controlled access?
* Does each unit have secure door and window locks?
5. Talk to the neighbors
* Ask other residents whether they are satisfied with the building.
6. Amenities
* Who is allowed to use the amenities?
* When are they open?
* Are the fees charged to use those facilities included in rent?
7. Ask about Utilities
* Does the owner or tenant pay the utility bills?
* Are any utilities included with monthly rent?
* Do units have separate thermostats to control heat and air conditioning?
8. Review the lease
* How much notice must you give before moving out?
* Can the rent be increased? If so, by how much and how often?
* Are pets allowed?
* What is the security deposit and cleaning costs upon move out?
* What is the responsibility of tenants for damage to property?
* Is there a penalty for breaking a lease?
9. Information too bring to a lease signing
* Credit Report
* Pay stubs/tax returns
* Reference
* Application
More Apartment Information
An apartment (or flat in Britain and most other Commonwealth countries) is a
self-contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building. Apartments
may be owned (by an owner-occupier) or rented (by tenants).
Some apartment-dwellers own their apartments, either as co-ops, in which the
residents own shares of a corporation that owns the building or development; or
in condominiums, whose residents own their apartments and share ownership of the
public spaces. Most apartments are in buildings designed for the purpose, but
large older houses are sometimes divided into apartments. The word apartment
connotes a residential unit or section in a building. Apartment building owners,
lessors, or managers often use the more general word units to refer to
apartments. Units can be used to refer to rental business suites as well as
residential apartments. When there is no tenant occupying an apartment, the
lessor is said to have a vacancy. For apartment lessors, each vacancy represents
a loss of income from rent-paying tenants for the time the apartment is vacant
(i.e., unoccupied). Lessors' objectives are often to minimize the vacancy rate
for their units. The owner of the apartment typically transfers possession to
the occupant by giving him/her the key to the apartment entrance door and any
other keys need to live there, such as a common key to the building or any other
common areas, and an individual unit mailbox key. When the occupant move out,
these keys should typically be returned to the owner.
Apartments can be classified into several types. Studio, efficiency, bed-sit, or
bachelor apartments tend to be the smallest apartments with the cheapest rents
in a given area. These kinds of apartment usually consist mainly of a large room
which is the living, dining, and bedroom combined. There are usually kitchen
facilities as part of this central room, but the bathroom is its own smaller
separate room. Moving up from the efficiencies are one-bedroom apartments where
one bedroom is a separate room from the rest of the apartment. Then there are
two-bedroom, three-bedroom, etc. apartments. Small apartments often have only
one entrance/exit. Large apartments often have two entrances/exits, perhaps a
door in the front and another in the back. Depending on the building design, the
entrance/exit doors may be directly to the outside or to a common area inside,
such as a hallway. Depending on location, apartments may be available for rent
furnished with furniture or unfurnished into which a tenant usually moves in
with his/her own furniture. Permanent carpeting is often included in an
apartment.
Laundry facilities are usually kept in a separate area accessible to all the
tenants in the building. Depending on when the building was built and the design
of the building, utilities such as water, heating, and electric may be common
for all the apartments in the building or separate for each apartment and billed
separately to each tenant (however, many areas in the US have ruled it illegal
to split a water bill among all the tenants, especially if a pool is on the
premises). Outlets for connection to telephones are typically included in
apartments. Telephone service is optional and is practically always billed
separately from the rent payments. Cable television and similar amenities are
extra also. Parking space, air conditioner, and extra storage space may or may
not be included with an apartment. Rental leases often limit the maximum number
of people who can reside in each apartment. On or around the ground floor of the
apartment building, a series of mailboxes are typically kept in a location
accessible to the public and, thus, to the letter-carrier too. Every unit
typically gets its own mailbox with individual keys to it. Some very large
apartment buildings with a full-time staff may take mail from the mailman and
provide mail-sorting service. Near the mailboxes or some other location
accessible by outsiders, there may be a buzzer (equivalent to a doorbell) for
each individual unit. In smaller apartment buildings such as two- or
three-flats, or even four-flats, garbage is often disposed of in trash
containers similar to those used at houses. In larger buildings, garbage is
often collected in a common trash bin or dumpster. For cleanliness or minimizing
noise, many lessors will place restrictions on tenants regarding keeping pets in
an apartment.
In some parts of the world, the word apartment is used generally to refer to a
new purpose-built self-contained residential unit in a building, whereas the
word flat means a converted self-contained unit in an older building. An
industrial, warehouse, or commercial space converted to an apartment is commonly
called a loft.
When part of a house is converted for the ostensible use of a landlord's family
member, the unit may be known as an in-law apartment or granny flat, though
these (sometimes illegally) created units are often occupied by ordinary renters
rather than family members. In Canada these suites are commonly located in the
basements of houses and are therefore normally called basement suites.
Staying in privately owned apartments rather than in a hotel is quickly becoming
popular with travelers.