Though built on a slag heap 25

Though built on a slag heap 25 stories high, houses in a 710- unit new urban development called Summerset at Frick Park are selling well to people in Pittsburgh. Detached dwellings fetch $200,000 to $700,000 on the 238-acre hill where 20 million tons of slag, a relatively benign combination of lime and impurities from steelmaking, was deposited decades ago. Thirty inches of new soil support grass along with maple, dogwood, laurel, and spruce trees. The city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority bought the site, near the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, for $3.8 million in 1995, and formed a public-private partnership to ready the land for development. Mayor Tom Murphy brought in the Rubinoff Company of Pittsburgh as developer. Jack LaQuatra of the Pittsburgh landscape architecture firm LaQuatra Bonci Associates, which did the planning along with Urban Design Associates, said, “A moonscape is being transformed into a great place to live.”