By Courtney Balestier, Contributing Writer
Megan Tuñón, executive director of the Etna Community Organization, stands in the nearly finished kitchen in one of the rental units.
Etna Center for Community
It’s easy to be charmed by Etna, a former milltown in Pittsburgh with walkable streets, small businesses, and historic architecture. But while the area has been revitalizing over recent years, it still lacked an accessible indoor third space (like a community center or library) where residents could gather. The nearest library was in Shaler, a short drive but dangerous walk up a high-traffic boulevard.
“We’ve had kids who’ve been found walking up there, so the police would help them get there,” said Megan Tuñón, executive director of the Etna Community Organization. “It was important to have a walkable library.”
These pain points came to the fore in 2019, during the creation of the organization’s Etna EcoDistrict Plan, a community-led roadmap for the town’s future. The EcoDistrict plan identified key needs to be addressed by future development, with an emphasis on social equity, community resilience, and environmental stewardship. “It was very clear that the number one priority was bringing back a library and community space,” Tuñón said.
The residents of Etna will get just that on October 17, when the Etna Center for Community opens. A three-story mixed-use redevelopment in the heart of Etna’s business district, the center will house a community space, library, offices for the Etna Community Organization, and four affordable rental apartments. For this ambitious renovation project, Bridgeway worked with the Etna team to provide both grant funding and bridge loan financing.
The project building needed a lot of work, but it was worth it: A piece of Etna history dating back to the 1870s, it was originally a grocery store and post office, and the double-height third floor was once a speakeasy. But after years of disinvestment, its condition had deteriorated. Before the organization acquired the building, it housed a vape shop and a furniture store with irregular hours, and the third floor had remained largely untouched since the 1920s. Some of the speakeasy’s fixtures were even still in place.
The redevelopment project required not only rehabilitation but also sustainability upgrades in keeping with the EcoDistrict mission, including improved energy efficiency, solar power, and stormwater management. It was a vision that would need significant work—and significant capital—to come to life.
“Pre-construction funds are pretty hard to come by,” Tuñón said, but that’s what this project needed to get off the ground. Bridgeway stepped in with a grant to cover preliminary work like architectural design and engineering, which the organization was then able to leverage into construction grants.
“The Borough of Etna and Etna Community Organization have been working to improve the quality of life for borough residents, bringing a library to the community as well as multi-purpose rooms that would meet community needs, plus affordable housing apartments,” said Reid Smith, Bridgeway’s Director of the Uniontown Office. “It met several mission criteria we search for.”
When the Etna Community Organization received a $1.5 million Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, they turned to Bridgeway again, this time for a bridge loan. As a reimbursement-based grant, RACP funding requires recipients to pay upfront for eligible project costs, which can create significant cash-flow challenges for organizations without sufficient capital available.
“We’re executing that right now, and the bridge loan is working out really clutch,” Tuñón said.
As one might expect for a building that’s more than 150 years old, renovation work has been extensive and ongoing. It includes everything from structural repair, including fully restored front masonry, to energy efficiency improvements and the safe removal of lead paint. Every painstaking detail, like the delicate process of installing new 7-foot- and 9-foot-tall windows, has been taken to both evoke Etna’s history and lay a solid foundation for its future.
Throughout the process, Etna Community Organization has continued meeting with community members for feedback, hosting workshops and conducting surveys and needs analyses at community events. With library and community spaces forthcoming, the number one need shifted to food-related programming. Etna struggles with food insecurity, and the organization has already begun piloting programs like cooking classes with the church next door, which has a commercial kitchen. Also high on the list were kids’ programming, mental health services, and a vaccine clinic.
“That’s outside the scope of a library,” Tuñón said. “But that’s always what we’ve known we’re gonna be.”
Tuñón is grateful to have a financial institution like Bridgeway that understands their commitment to community.
“Having organizations like Bridgeway has been really amazing for a community like ours,” she said. “It’s more like a partnership, and I appreciated that a lot. They were always willing to speak with me about what the needs of the community were and were easy to get in contact with. It’s beyond a bank transaction. They’re excited about the project and want to be a part of it.”
Learn More
Curious about what the bridge loan process is like? Bridgeway’s director of the Uniontown office chatted about Etna Community Organization’s lending journey for our Bridgeway in Action! series.
About Courtney Balestier
Courtney Balestier is a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of place and identity, particularly in her native Appalachia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, The New Yorker online, Lucky Peach, the New York Times, Saveur, Oxford American, New York, Wired, and others. Her writing has been anthologized in The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell (Ohio University Press, 2019) Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing (UGA Press, 2014) and nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award and a Pushcart Prize. She is also the creator and host of WMFA, a podcast about why and how we write.