The biggest gift in the history of American colleges went to a school in Oakland this week. Most of it is going to Miami.

Also: Pleasure Bar is for sale, the Steelers play on a Thursday, and a car landed on the Highland Park fountain. Thirteen years ago. We’ll explain.

Citadel founder Ken Griffin gave Carnegie Mellon $3 billion today. It’s the largest gift in the history of American higher education, a full billion more than the old record, Phil Knight’s $2 billion to a university in Oregon last year.

Where it goes:

▸ $2 billion to build CMU Miami, a new campus on 35-plus acres in Wynwood. Construction starts in 2027, the first students arrive in 2028, and it’s planned for about 3,500 of them. Griffin just closed on the land for $1.1 billion.
▸ $500 million to the School of Computer Science, which becomes the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science.
▸ $500 million in flexible money for the Pittsburgh campus.

Why Miami? Griffin told the Miami Herald that CMU “has really helped to drive a renaissance in Pittsburgh” and he wants the same thing there. Read that again. Pittsburgh isn’t losing out here. Pittsburgh is the pitch. Google in Bakery Square, Duolingo in East Liberty, the self-driving companies in the Strip: that’s the brochure a billionaire just bought a copy of.

The bottom line: the billion that stays here is real money, and the computer science school was already top-ranked. But look at the week it landed. The city is about to freeze its affordable housing money to close a budget gap (next story). CMU’s own pledge to the city this year is $3 million over five years. Griffin’s gift isn’t CMU’s to hand to City Hall, and nobody should pretend it is. It’s still fair to ask what a renaissance owes the city it happened in.

Mayor Corey O’Connor’s first full budget goes to City Council this week, and he’s been warning everyone it’s bad: a $30 to $40 million hole next year, $250 million over five. No tax hike this time. That was last year’s 20%.

So the cuts. The administration has floated freezing the roughly $20 million a year that goes to two things: the Stop the Violence fund and the Housing Opportunity Fund, which pays for affordable housing. It also wants to pay less into the pension than it does now.

City Controller Rachael Heisler backs slowing the two funds, since both are sitting on money they haven’t spent. “Hard choices are no longer optional. They are inevitable,” she wrote. She’s against the pension cut, which she called a bright spot in the city’s finances.

Unspent balances make a freeze easy to defend on paper. Violence prevention and affordable housing are also the two things nobody notices until the whole neighborhood notices. Council gets the details next.

Dr. Idris Evans, 46, took care of the sickest kids at UPMC Children’s as a pediatric critical care doctor, and he taught at Pitt. Early last Thursday, police say, a man came in through a back window and stabbed Evans and his wife while they slept. Evans died. His wife, critically hurt, got out to a neighbor’s house. Their kids, 8 and 12, got out safe.

The man police arrested, Elijah Hemingway, 32, had been out on nonmonetary bail on a burglary charge from February, with a court date the following week. He’s now charged with homicide.

A neighbor told WPXI that Evans used to help her carry her groceries. “They’re a wonderful family and they didn’t deserve this.”

The county Board of Health approved it Monday. If it passes, any employer with 15 or more eligible workers would owe new parents 12 weeks of paid leave after a birth or a stillbirth. The first draft said 18 weeks.

County Council gets it Tuesday, then it goes to committee. It needs eight votes. WESA says it would be one of the most generous in the country. If you’re planning a kid in 2027, watch this one.

Pleasure Bar has been on Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield since 1941, run by three families over 80-plus years. It closed without saying so. The website still says “temporarily closed for renovations” and promised a Sept. 13 reopening that never came.

Now the building is listed at $2 million: four apartments, two storefronts, two offices and an Allegheny County liquor license.

The liquor license is the part to watch. Somebody could be serving baked ziti in there by spring. Whether it’s still called Pleasure Bar is the only question Bloomfield cares about.

 

No Sunday game this week. The Steelers (2–1) are at the Browns (2–1) Thursday at 8:15, and it’s only on Prime Video. Whoever wins leaves at 3–1.

The offense finally showed up Sunday. Aaron Rodgers threw for 292 yards and three touchdowns in a 30–27 win over Cincinnati, his best game of the year. The worry is on the other side. Deshaun Watson, who won Cleveland’s job over Shedeur Sanders, has thrown four touchdowns and no picks the last two weeks.

Also: the Pirates finished 82–80. That’s their first winning season since 2018, and yes, it counts. Paul Skenes got to 200 strikeouts again, only the third Pirate to do it two years running. And the Penguins open at home Saturday at 7 against Montreal, with a 60th-anniversary ceremony before puck drop.

 

Past 7 days, residential. “Was” is last week’s issue.

What we’re seeing

More price cuts, fewer new listings, fewer deals. Last week’s thaw froze back over.

Why you’d care

 

“This one has a commanding presence. I didn’t know if there was any real history behind it. It just looks grand, with the kind of architecture you expect to find in a place like Shadyside.”

There’s history. In 1934 this was the home of George S. Oliver, who ran his father’s Pittsburgh Gazette, bought the Chronicle Telegraph and the Times, and sold all three to William Randolph Hearst in 1927. He moved in when he married in 1910. It was his wife’s childhood home. Her grandfather, a Civil War colonel, had lived here with two butlers, a housekeeper and a coachman.

One of those butlers, Emmett Davis, stayed on for decades. He became the chauffeur, and by 1923 he was advertising his own chiropractic practice at this address.

Today: a slate roof with five dormers, a circular drive on the corner of St. James Street, six fireplaces, curved staircases and an indoor lap pool downstairs. The lot next door is for sale too, if you want the whole corner.

Listed by Nevena Carrington, Coldwell Banker Realty.

 

Saturday was the 13th anniversary of one of the strangest things that ever happened in a Pittsburgh park, and City Paper did the math: Sept. 26 (13 plus 13), 2013.

Around 6 that evening, a driver clipped a parked car a few blocks away and kept going toward the reservoir. He crossed the sidewalk and the grass, shot between two stone pillars and hit the sloped wall around the reflecting pool. The wall worked like a ramp. The SUV flew, flipped and landed on its roof in the middle of the fountain, which was running.

Nobody else got hurt, in a busy park, at dinnertime. The driver went to Presby in stable condition. Unlucky 13 or the luckiest crash in city history? We can’t decide either.

 

 

 

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— Tim