hi i'm mandy pryor and welcome to spotlight on pittsburgh spotlight on pittsburgh is a program about pittsburgh's most fascinating people and what they do to make our city an amazing place to live and work when we come back i'll introduce you to rachel saul rearick the arts and culture manager for the allegheny county airport authority later on in the episode we'll introduce kristen seiners the principal transportation planner for the pittsburgh department of mobility and infrastructure family was drifting apart with all the connection you have the power to change your child's life the boy's town national hotline can help welcome back hi rachel how are you doing great how are you thanks so much for coming on today thanks for having me so what can you tell me about your background and what you've done so my background is that i have a undergraduate degree in print making with a minor in art history from edinburgh university and then i went on to get my masters in public administration from gannon and i did my research work on the effect of art in redevelopment so that's kind educational background i've worked mostly an arse nonprofit since then did a little bit of grant writing and then my personal time i'm on the board at artist image resource in your side and do some socially engaged art projects like pittsburgh women make it or garfield alive so i keep it yeah that sounds like a busy schedule and so tell me a little bit about what you do now so at the airport i'm the first full time arts and culture manager which means i manage the allegheny county airport authorities are in the airport program creating a sense of place the pit performing arts series and i have a lot of fun doing it what i really breaks down to is the temporary art exhibits that you see when you come through the airport the music that we have once or twice a week and then managing apartment our collections well and so what can you tell me about some of these collections that you've had so our permanent collection is not really that vast we have the culture which i think some people it's about to get cleaned so keep your eyes out for a sign sculpture and so what can people expect when they come to the airport so you have a lot going on right now one of the most exciting things is the summer i'm working with derek reset the office of public art he's at the airport two days a week and we are putting together a way finding pedestrian mural in our extended parking lot so what that means is that it's it's a mural that's going directly on the ground and the idea is that it helps circulate through the parking lot because right now there's not really any indicator where to go so definitely get lost there so that that is it a new thing for airports in general and then also we have a call that's going to be coming out in a couple weeks for some new three d work and then we just installed some urals in our transit level so right when you go post security there are some large they were paintings that got translated into vinyl so lot to new things new temporary spaces is open it'll be an exciting place and i six months jim i don't think people necessarily think of going to the airport and see art this is something that you're concentrating on and what you hope to bring to the well i think that my number one goal is really i'd like to see us have a high caliber like world class experience for passengers when they come through the airport i hope that we can grow that collection a little bit and that we can also really feature more local artists through our temporary art spaces and what do you find to be the importance of that so our airport is important i think for a number of reasons one is that i think that the airport kind of serves as the gateway t region so when you come through pittsburgh you feel like you're in pittsburgh i think it's important that when people step off of a plane they see the carnegie museum or the frick or the children's museum represented in our space and that they know they're in pittsburgh and then that it's also a platform for local artists to be seen and then there's a second layer that you know travel stressful right like you get anxious so it's a great opportunity to let people slow down and reflect while they're going through it and maybe enjoy yeah enjoy their time and i think the other thing for me that right left brain side i think that it's also it's great for economic value you know and companies are looking to rule like relocate people are looking to move they want to live where there's a robust arts community so having that in our airport shows people that pittsburgh supports the arts well and i think pittsburgh art and culture scene has grown significantly over the past fifteen years oh yeah i'm from when i was you know graduating college where it is today is leaps and bounds absolutely what we've been doing so i think i'd be a great addition for our airport to reflect that as well as we're always out there too and so what else can you tell me about some of the projects that have been coming through i think that people notice that we've put our temporary spaces on a quarterly rotation so we're keeping that work fresh or changing it more often with that new call i'm hoping that we'll have some new three dimensional work that people will be able to see and yes you know that mural is that that parking was going to be exciting and what is your what is your favorite piece of art i know i'm throwing her question there for my favorite piece of are at the airport wow i think that it would probably have to be the calder and i i feel like that's kind of like a clich answer but i just think that it's really beautiful and i think the history of it is also pretty exciting it was in carnegie international get to the airport it's seen a lot of things in  point was painted green and yellow so i think it's got a story and it's really it's beautiful and it's in a great location yeah it's like the center of the air yeah yeah and the airport now has artist in so he comes in he spends time with the staff he goes through behind the scenes like flight simulation how they test engineer to get to see things that people don't even know are happening and then the next phase is that he does community engagement period where he talks to passengers about their experience in the airport while they're flying how they're feeling about it and then all of that goes into testing some ideas for a piece that he will eventually create for the airport so right now he's in that engagement of the airports muse yeah yeah that's pretty amazing it is and he's seeing a lot of phenomenal photographs so if you have an instagram you can see literally behind the scenes in the tunnels everything that is air underscore pit p i t of talented people and i think that we have such a robust arts and cultural community that i hope to really have the airport be a canvas for really continuing to display that i think that being in that community for years now i see that there are so many people have made a career or later in their career who they like made in pittsburgh people know who they are in pittsburgh but having that opportunity to show their i mean above and beyond jeff  above and beyond jeff goldblum that is kind of the stage where people then find out about pittsburgh artists and they're able to go beyond that plateau and is there anything else that i haven't touched on that maybe you'd like to share about experience or what people should stop when they're in the airport watch they stop and do and focus on other than getting to that mcdonald's line so i guess two things one  what i share that i haven't talked about is i think everybody is probably right in the news that we're going to build a new terminal but i don't know anything i know right so the terminal modernization plan i think it's important to the arts and cultur community to know that they have a place and that so as we move forward and i'm like enough to help sit down some of those best practices panels and work with the architects to talk about how we're going to make sure we include the existing arts and culture community letting people build it and it has neighborhoods represented in there so it just takes some time to look at what's there and of course there's tons of local breweries that just came and so that's helped me so that you take your time  yeah great well if there's anything else i haven't touched on please feel free to share i'll be happy to put out more information about your how to connect with you and the experiences that you have so thank you so much th you and we'll be getting kristen out here shortly thanks a lot i can't wait to see these amazing projects in person and find out about these exhibits five pittsburgh dot com backslash art when we return we will turn the spotlight on to kristin in her role as planner sometimes it's hard to see where you're going but you have the power to change your problems all it takes and welcome back kristin thanks so much for joining from the city to say yeah you're welcome of course this is awesome thanks so what can you tell me about what you do well i am a principal transportation planner with the city of pittsburgh for a new department of mobility and infrastructure which is very exciting the city started a new department it's a department of transportation so we never really had a department to really concentrate on you know where all those  bike lanes and bus lanes and buses were going and how sidewalks are built that was sort of split into a couple departments so we created apartment to really develop some leadership as well as just better coordination between people to really concentrate on streets which is very exciting because i love street i think it's already important to go through and maybe revitalize that yeah and that's not going to when i was doing that work before it just we wanted to create a more you know streamlined process and point of contact for those things so drained it out and he left st which means yeah yeah i mean it really means that the city is saying that you know streets as a public space are really important to  us so yeah it's very exciting so what what are some of the upcoming projects they are working on well we we just completed the steps plan i don't know if you know this but city your city of pittsburgh has a lot of staircases  is very very hilly and we have over eight hundred public staircases so they are their public rights of way so they there are houses like for instance my street kind of deadens into a set of stairs and there's a couple houses that you can only access by that staircase yeah and we have over eight hundred of those it's a pretty big undertaking and we when i started at the city three three and a half years ago if people people would ask kind of what people give me a bunch of money to take care of one of those staircases i wouldn't be able to tell you which one was the most important you know the community could often tell me which one of the most important but i wouldn't be able to tell you which one of the support and so we so we went through a planning process to really understand each steps importance and sort of presence in the pedestrian network so how important is each set at each step to the pedestrian and to create kind of a hierarchy in  prioritized list for steps to repair which is really exciting does that mean when it is it means that we can do steps repair with confidence you know before we were just kind of patching things and fixing things but now we you know we really do have this list that we all believe are the most kind of important set of steps to repair first and then we can move on to the other do they start by like highly trafficked is going beyond that whatever i guess is where we live we looked at a ton of factors we looked at kind of all the bus rider ship nearby we know people lot of people a lot of people take the steps on a daily basis you know a lot of our kind of commercial court orders follow the river and they're kind of banked by really hilly residential areas so a lot of people take the steps on a daily basis to get to you know jobs daily needs transit things like that and so it's i mean essentially a piece of their day like their yeah your life yeah i heard from some residents of the south side slopes which is a neighborhood  in the city of pittsburgh pretty close to downtown that you know there they have a set of steps called eighteenth street and it was taken out for a couple days for repairs and a lot of residents told me that that was more impactful than when the road eighteenth street is out for repairs because they take  step you know they take that sort of thing down by every day all times a day to get down to that they are they all in like really good shape too no not at all i mean i feel like as a steward of those steps i should say that they're ok but they were all built and they were big pieces of infrastructure and they were all built in the fifty's and sixty's out of concrete and they are old they're old so it's time for them to get a little yeah so we we are rebuilding a set right now  oakland it's intially park it's off of john kerry street so that's the only set of steps that we've done kind of a complete major set of steps so we've done kind of a complete repair in the last couple years when it comes down to safety to which went people to be safe when they're not doing their daily tasks yet we also we want to encourage walking we think walking is very important the city of pittsburgh a lot of people i know this but eleven percent of people in pittsburgh get to work by walking and that's actually not including people you know people there's more people who take the bus and ride bikes and drive eleven percent people get to work every single day on the foot and we want that number to grow so we definitely want to purse that i used to have a few friends over in the north side who would be walking across this bridge is every morning yeah it's a you know one of our assets is that it's a very dense and denton walkable city and so we want to encourage that yeah well it's a beautiful city to walk through to and the steps are amazing and really you're doing some kind of a safety program yeah we're i work primarily in sort of bicycle pedestrian projects and so we are working on the steps plan working on a bike plan to really doesn't meet those routes that are best for bike riders in our city we want to see you know we want to see bike rider ship grow in your part of the initial type of bike lanes that are put in i move here in twenty fourteen so some of the sort of i would say the ones that people stand out in people's mind ca downtown like the penn avenue bike lane was installed just before i moved here but i've been part of every project sense and i'd say yeah it did yeah yeah as it develops and i you know personally i'm i'm not a car owner i walk bike and take public transit on a daily basis sometimes all three in the same day sometimes i take four different modes same day and so it is you know it's a think it's important to us as a growing city to consider bicycl exactly like we can't it's hard to grow without considering other modes we just can't i mean i formerly worked downtown yeah you know we can't fit all those cars on the streets you know it's very it's it's yeah because it's expensive did you and half the people downtown take public transit so people in pittsburgh are already used to taking other modes and we just want to make that a little bit better for them and easier to do so and accessible bikes and that wonderful  and pittsburgh i know it's i said whenever i work downtown you'll never know it by driving in it you only know if you walk it i love that it's the truth you because of all the one you do you get so confused by the time you're driving around if you just want you to really actually easy so you navigate city downtown is so compact and small and there's there's a ton of things you miss while driving i would love to hear your live and i would love a statement yeah it was kind of things that you miss when you're going to twenty five miles an hour you just can't you can't see one ninety percent of time you're looking for parking anyways you can't look at anything that's true it's true yeah it's sort of a great city to walk  n i recently because i am a transportation nerd but i recently walked all of penn avenue with some friends of mine just to which is seven point four miles a bit of a hike but it is you know it's so interesting to pittsburgh is a walkable neighborhood like it didn't take all probably the one i'm it has a set of steps on it the side the sidewalk is something called a jumper walk it's like a jumping sidewalk yeah really if you go to the direct yeah it's funny to go that's and be true and it's funny to go to that neighborhood like when you're poking around people are like oh do you what they like know that they have a this like sort of tourist attraction and are you looking for that yeah you know ok you know there's enough even though that was just about you know it's a residential street that's it that's a summer challenge right there that beach you make she get lined you know that there are a set but there are a couple of walking tours that are actually signed on steps there's the church route in the south side that takes you to see some amazing views and there's also the finding a fitness trail which is one of the north side neighborhoods great that has those like to go check out by foot by foot bike or whatever you want is there anything else that i haven't touched on that you'd like to share let me think i mean we were working on projects all the time i would say just you know i love this opportunity to kind of introduce our department and were here you know we're here for pittsburgh for completing really you know we're working on our streets in pittsburgh we are working on something that's very exciting to me which might not be exciting to all of you but to complete streets design guidelines are designed guidelines for streets or from the eighty's and so we're really you know taking this chance as a new department to really look at all of these things that haven't been done in a long time so yeah wonderful well thanks so much for coming on and ensure that the more information on your website showing up about all that a lot of information there yeah chris yeah thanks to find out more about christ and the few here's something we bet you didn't know nearly half of all cancers can be prevented mostly by making changes in your diet controlling your weight and of course by not smoking does it prevent fifty dot org and get a free thirty day planner filled with tips recipes and  all right and we're back so i am here with rachel and kristin and thanks again for coming on you two know each other so how do you two know each other well we both used to work at the department of city planning and now neither of us work but a lot of the department of city planning good and so what did you both read the kind of the same area or you were kind of in the same hallway i was in transportation planning and i was a public design and now you're still both working with transportation of course and seeing what you guys can do for the city and beyond yeah that's a very yeah well is there anything that you didn't know about what each other were doing that you know interest and now we're finding really interesting we talk about interesting it's one of those things that you don't want to think about but you have to and you have a big opinion about when it's wrong like yeah like i mean well you have to worry about how not what it's going to look like it could look great today again my bikes it's for way too long and i love big things ok well thank you both for coming on the show world time thank you hopefully i'll be in the city biking or out flying my husband knows i hate road trips and i love flying so