Liberty Avenue turns into a jazz festival this weekend, and the part on the street is free. Sixteenth year running.

Pitt hosts Syracuse tomorrow night at 7:30 on ESPN, the ACC opener, with the Panthers 2–0. The Steelers are 1–0.

The Fed raised rates this afternoon, a quarter point and its first hike since 2023. Mortgage rates had already climbed six days in a row to their highest since January 2025.

Plus: no county in Pennsylvania has more license plate cameras than this one, and Pittsburgh Water has started erasing what people owe it.

Thursday through Sunday, the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival takes over the Cultural District for its 16th year. Friday night is the kickoff concert and Taste of Jazz at the August Wilson Center, which needs a ticket. Saturday and Sunday the whole thing spills onto Liberty Avenue and costs nothing, starting at 1 both days.

Lalah Hathaway, Lady Blackbird, Terri Lyne Carrington, Eric Roberson, DJ Kid Capri, Nate Smith, Orrin Evans and Sean Jones are all on it. Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, who has played on more records than almost anyone alive, is getting a lifetime achievement award.

Twelve days after that, a 4,000-seat room opens about a mile up the hill. Citizens Live at the Wylie has its first night Sept. 28. Donnie Iris and the Cruisers are playing it, along with NASH.V.ILL and a soul and funk party. Tickets start at $10 and the face value goes to the August Wilson Center.

Here’s why that address matters. From the 1920s through the 1950s, the Hill District was where the music was. They called it the Crossroads of the World. Starting in 1955, the Urban Redevelopment Authority declared 95 acres of it blighted and cleared the ground. More than 8,000 Black residents lost their homes. Hundreds of businesses came down. Much of that land was never built on again, and the Lower Hill has been cut off from Downtown ever since.

And last Friday, a few miles east, East Liberty Boulevard was renamed for Mary Lou Williams, the pianist, arranger and composer who grew up in Pittsburgh’s East End. That’s her above in 1947, standing at the piano in her own apartment while Tadd Dameron plays it, with Dizzy Gillespie lighting a cigarette in the corner.

Allegheny County has more automated license plate readers than any other county in the state, according to Finding Flock data mapped by Axios this week. Community trackers count about 609 within ten miles of the city.

They aren’t all police cameras. Businesses, homeowners associations and private owners run them too. Every one of them logs the plate, the time and the place, and keeps the record. That record is what the fight is about.

Harrisburg has noticed. Nine bills are now filed, seven of them in the past six weeks, and the split isn’t the one you’d expect. Sen. Dan Laughlin, a Republican from Erie, wants an outright ban: “once the surveillance network is built, there is no guarantee it will only be used in ways we find acceptable today.” Reps. David Rowe and Josh Bashline, also Republicans, would require a warrant to search the data and let towns vote the cameras out.

The legislature returns this fall to finish the session, so this is live. If you want to know whether there’s one on your street, that’s a question for your city or borough council, not Harrisburg.

If you’re behind on your water bill, the rules changed on Sept. 1 and they changed in your favor. Pittsburgh Water will now freeze what you already owe and forgive it a month at a time over two years, as long as you pay each new bill on time.

The old program made you chip away at the debt and keep current on new bills at once, which is exactly the thing people behind on a bill can’t do. Now the back balance just sits there and shrinks.

You qualify if your household makes 200% of the federal poverty level or less. For a household of four that’s $66,000 a year. Anyone already in the old arrearage or bill-discount programs got moved over automatically. Everybody else has to ask: enroll online, or call 412-255-2423 and ask for customer assistance.

Two things sit behind this. Rates went up in March, about $15 a month on a typical bill, and the utility is in the middle of pulling every lead service line out of the city.

The state Department of Health confirmed two more measles deaths on Tuesday, bringing Pennsylvania’s total this year to four. One was a 40-year-old woman in Jefferson County. The other was an 18-year-old in Mifflin County who died of a rare neurological complication called ADEM.

There have now been 693 confirmed cases across 38 counties. Health Secretary Debra Bogen called it the worst outbreak in the state in more than three decades. Cases have roughly tripled since July, and the thing driving it is low vaccination rates.

Nothing here is a call to panic. Most adults got their two MMR shots as kids and those hold up. But if you’ve been meaning to check whether your family is current, this is the week.

County Council wanted to ask you in November whether the controller, district attorney, sheriff, treasurer and council itself should be capped at three terms. Sheriff Kevin Kraus sued to stop the question. Friday, Commonwealth Court upheld the lower court, and on Monday Council declined to appeal. Four months of litigation, over.

The court never ruled on whether term limits are a good idea. It ruled on procedure: a change like that has to go through an elected government study commission first.

Eleven council members told their solicitor over the weekend to drop it. Bethany Hallam wasn’t one of them. “If it was up to me, I would have appealed it to the Supreme Court,” she said. She doesn’t want the study-commission route either, since its members would be elected independently and could bring their own agenda. She called that prospect a Pandora’s box.

 

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

What we’re seeing

More sellers cut their price this week than put a house on the market.

Why you’d care

 

“What was once a church is now a home. One of the more unique properties to hit the market as of late.”

It was built in 1905 as Sewickley Village’s Triumph Baptist Church. The stained glass is original. Somebody went to the trouble of restoring it and setting tempered glass over top of it, so it still throws colored light across the floor on a sunny afternoon. Which is a strange and very good thing to have in a living room.

The ceilings are the ones you’d expect from a church. The main floor is one open run of living, dining and kitchen, and a balcony runs the full width of the back. Upstairs there’s a lofted space that wants to be a library. Downstairs, somebody built a bar.

It’s a short walk into Sewickley village.

Listed by Adam Cannon, Piatt Sotheby’s International Realty.

 

The Pittsburgh Opera works out of a building in the Strip called the Bitz Opera Factory. The name is not decorative. It went up in 1869 as George Westinghouse’s original air brake factory, then the Westinghouse Machine Co. moved in, and after that it passed through the Pittsburgh Screw and Bolt Co., Vulcan Motor Trucks and the Otto Milk Co.

NEXTpittsburgh got somebody to climb the ladder into the attic. What’s up there: old jousts, doors that open onto nothing, and the remains of a pulley system nobody uses anymore.

The basement holds the prop collection and a large brick furnace that everyone agrees is deeply creepy and nobody can explain. Heating system? Garbage incinerator? Something to do with air brakes? Open question.

Also in there, for no reason anyone would guess: the largest collection of David Hockney work in the region. The Opera owns a production of The Rake’s Progress that Hockney designed in 1975, sets and costumes both. When the San Francisco Opera wanted to get rid of it, Pittsburgh sent a fleet of trucks across the country to go get it.

 

 

 

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— Tim