Over many decades, Panther Hollow has been a yo-yo of degradation, public outcry, cleanups and unrealized development.

Community groups have perennially decried the crumbling public steps, trail overgrowth, piles of dumped trash and a stagnant lake that people used to fish in. Public officials have perennially responded with plans to bring the steep ravine that touches on Oakland and Greenfield "back" to its former glory, but those plans that were achieved were never sustained.

Today, the goal is watershed management. A $1 million grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation will go part of the way toward an ultimate goal of restoring the watershed and preventing the stormwater runoff that has contributed largely to the degraded hollow and its man-made lake.

The Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy's receipt of the grant was announced Monday. The money will support ongoing restoration efforts, pilot projects and a watershed management plan.

The Panther Hollow watershed includes parts of Schenley Park, Squirrel Hill and Greenfield. The hollow is a deep ravine behind the Carnegie Museums and Carnegie Mellon University that extends to the part of Greenfield known as The Run.

Over the past six years, the conservancy and the city have been correcting flow problems in Phipps Run, part of the hollow's watershed, removing invasive species and planting native trees to stabilize the hillsides.

Stormwater runoff is a major culprit.

"The goal is to get the water out of the [storm sewer] pipe and into the environment," said Phil Gruszka, director of the conservancy's parks management and maintenance. "You can do that with retention basins, rain gardens" and other deterrents.

He said the overarching project will cost many millions and a "take a comprehensive approach to all the issues in the watershed."

The issue at Phipps Run was soil erosion, he said. "We did some hard engineering" by lining the stream channel with large rocks. "But our goal is to not hard-engineer everything in our parks. We want to be able to work with natural systems" such as a fallen tree, which "gives a stream the ability to meander, and that's a healthy thing."

The conservancy's stewardship plans to preserve and protect the natural order are a far cry from the now defunct Oakland Corp.'s plan in 1964 to build a research park in the hollow.

A 1964 article in The Pittsburgh Press gushed over a proposed project, stating that, by 1970, it would line the hollow with buildings "creating 75 acres of rooftop park lands," and describing it as an engineering "eye-popper" on a par with the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.

That project failed to secure financing and tenants.

In the late 1980s, a developer proposed a parking lot. Subsequent earth moving caused landslides that affected properties on Swinburne Street. The city revoked the developer's operations permit because more than the allowable amount of earth was removed and the work buried water lines and caused sewage problems.

The hollow has been a convenient place for dumping but an inconvenient place for the city. Contractors and others have taken advantage of its obscurity to dump truckloads of waste, while the city has perennially failed to control overgrowth and litter and maintain trails and steps.

Panther Hollow Lake, which was created in 1909 and became a recreational destination for fishermen, has been cleaned up several times, only to become an environmental hazard several years later.

In 1957, then Mayor David Lawrence announced a planned $125,000 renovation of the lake for ice skating and fishing, and in 1958 the renovation was completed. In 1983, it was cleaned of pollutants.

In 1993, then mayoral hopeful Jack Wagner proposed an all-volunteer plan to clean the 21/2-acre lake and reroute streams to feed it, making it suitable once again for fishing. Eloise Hirsh, then the principal consultant on a master plan for Schenley Park, called Panther Hollow Lake the most environmentally distressed part of the park.

It remains so. The conservancy today describes it as "unfit for human contact."

On Sept. 15 at 6:30 p.m., the conservancy will discuss its restoration work in a free public session at the Botany Hall adjacent to Phipps Conservatory. Seating is limited. RSVP to kayers@pittsburghparks.org or call 412-682-7275, ext. 220, to reserve a seat.

Michelle Adams, an engineer and the owner of Meliora Environmental Design, a firm near Philadelphia that specializes in water resources engineering, will speak to the public Sept. 15 about what residents can do to deter stormwater on its way to the hollow.

"There might be some opportunities for rain gardens to collect street run-off," she said. "You can also make tree trenches, and homeowners can disconnect their downspouts and collect stormwater in rain barrels."

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