Happy Thursday! Somebody drove off with Mt. Washington's Star Wars vending machine and left a hand-painted fake in its place. The parks tax you approved in 2019 came in $36 million light. And PRT wants to delete twenty bus routes. Four-day weekend ahead, and the good weather holds off until Sunday, which feels about right.

The Phantom Menace Pepsi machine has stood outside Fire Station 27 on Virginia Avenue since 1999. It's been broken for about three years. People still drive up Mt. Washington to look at it.

Late last month it got swapped for a hand-painted replica, and the paint job is bad enough that a neighbor clocked it from the street. Then Braeden Days, a content creator based in Los Angeles, posted video saying he took the original.

The follow-up video has him in a Jar Jar Binks mask. Axios called it a video fit for a ransom demand, which is about right. He says he'll repair the machine and bring it back once somebody accounts for the $10,000 Pepsi gave the station in 2022 to keep it stocked. Nobody has answered him. Nobody has shown the money went anywhere it shouldn't have, either.

It wasn't stolen or sold. It's a stunt, and no investigation has been announced. A neighbor named Stephen Crnkovich got closest to what people are actually mad about: "The Star Wars Pepsi vending machine and the Terrible Towel are one and the same, all right? You just don't mess with them."

In 2019 the parks tax passed by about two thousand votes out of sixty-two thousand cast. Fifty dollars per $100,000 of assessed value, every year, on your house.

City Controller Rachael Heisler's five-year review landed Wednesday. From 2021 through 2025 the fund brought in $36 million less than projected. Over roughly the same stretch, the number of full-time positions it pays for went from 27 to 58.

She isn't saying the money vanished. She names real results: park upgrades, programming, a Public Works fleet that actually runs. Her problem is that nobody ever wrote down what the tax was supposed to achieve, so there's no honest way to score it. Revenue was overestimated, operating costs keep climbing, and there are no criteria for what the fund should be buying.

Her fix is a parks commission that meets in public and publishes what it spends.

Pittsburgh Regional Transit's final Bus Line Refresh draft touches most of the network: 20 routes cut, 14 added, 56 changed. White Oak loses service. So do parts of Penn Hills. The McKeesport Flyer goes, after weekday ridership fell from about 700 in 2019 to under half that.

PRT says 99.4% of riders keep a stop within a quarter mile of one they have now. Squirrel Hill, Manchester, Bailey and Shadeland are on the cut list. Millvale picks up a route into East Liberty, and the McKnight corridor gets a direct run downtown.

The part that decides all of it sits in Harrisburg. The workaround letting PRT spend $106.7 million in state capital money on day-to-day operations ran out in June, and the new state budget added no transit funding. Without it, 2028 brings the end of the Silver Line and no bus anywhere after 11 p.m.

Comment closes Sept 30. There's a hearing Sept 10, and the board votes in November.

 

More houses got cheaper this week than came on the market at all. That's two weeks running now. 883 price cuts against 817 new listings.

Thirty-three sellers raised their price. Eight hundred eighty-three went the other way.

It isn't a stall. 756 sold in the same seven days, a hundred more than last week. Rates went from 6.75% to 6.88% since the last issue, and that's most of the story. Money got more expensive, so sellers moved first.

 

"The most interesting basement on the market right now in Pittsburgh."

Full bar. A wine cabinet built into the millwork. A loft that looks down over the room, and a full bath so nobody has to come upstairs for anything. It reads like a room somebody designed on purpose, which is not the usual relationship between this city and its basements.

The house on top of it is a 1925 in Mount Lebanon's historic district, on a dead-end street a short walk from the library and Uptown. Build412 and Proper Interiors did the renovation. The primary suite has a closet loft. There's a dedicated office, patios front and back, a side yard running the full lot, and a detached garage off a private drive.

Listed by Alexander Farah, Realty ONE Group Gold Standard.

 

Pittsburgh International auctions off whatever nobody comes back for, and this year's list reads like a short story. Several Rolexes. A Casio G-SHOCK. A folding e-bike. A rice cooker. A pile of stuffed animals with a T. rex in it.

Also more than twenty cars, including a 2022 Honda HR-V, two 2007 Camrys and a 2005 Acura TL. Which means twenty-odd people parked at the airport and never came back for the car. Past years have included taxidermy.

Bidding closes Sept 8. You can go look at all of it in person Monday, 2 to 6, at the Joe R. Pyle warehouse in Washington.

 

 

🍖 Kickoff & Rib Fest at Acrisure Stadium (North Shore) · free, noon–10
Free to walk through, free the way the smells at Jimmy John's are free. You gotta pay to eat.
🍲 A Soulful Taste of the Burgh on Stanwix and Liberty (Downtown) · free, 11–10
🏛 Taste of Greece at Holy Trinity (McCandless) · through Sunday

🏈 Pitt vs. Miami (OH) at Acrisure Stadium (North Shore) · 12:30, CW · street party after, 3–6
🎭 Renaissance Festival Children's Weekend (West Newton) · through Monday
🎤 R&B Fest at Enclave (South Side) · 4–9

🎯 Cornhole Classic at Rib Fest (North Shore) · free, 11–10 · Jack Wharff Band at 9
🎷 Jazz Fest at Golden Age Beer Company (Homestead) · final day

🛠 Labor Day Parade steps off Centre Ave (Downtown) · 10:00 · 41st year
🏃 Steelers 5K Run & Walk at Acrisure Stadium (North Shore) · 8:00
🎺 BBQ & Blues Monday at Rib Fest (North Shore) · free, 11–8 · Billy Price

— Tim