PHOTO BY DAVE DICELLO

There’s construction underway on a 4-acre, $31 million outdoor entertainment area at Downtown’s Eighth Street, spearheaded by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. And there’s construction underway on a $5.4 million rehab of nearby Allegheny Riverfront Park, spearheaded by Riverlife.

Now, plans have been unveiled by the nonprofit Downtown Neighbors Alliance to focus on another area of the Golden Triangle — rejuvenating Liberty Avenue, which cuts right through the heart of the Cultural District.

Plans involve bringing in tech companies to the avenue, more boutique shops to fill empty storefronts, restaurants and possibly a comedy club focusing on stand-up. Plans also call for the alliance owning and operating a bookstore and cafe that would serve as a kind of community center for the area.

“We’re going to do panel discussions, book readings, author signings, poetry readings, acoustic music, trivia, chess,” John Valentine, executive director of the alliance, said about the bookstore “It’s going to be a lot of different things.” Once the bookstore opens, it hopes to start scheduling activities at least four nights a week.

Valentine said about eight or nine months ago, a jeweler along Liberty Avenue reached out to him and said, “You know, John. Liberty Avenue needs help.”

“And I agreed with that,” Valentine said. So alliance leaders met with small business owners, and then later residents and other stakeholders, to listen to their concerns, which involved mostly safety, cleanliness and the prevalence of vape shops along Liberty Avenue, which can create nuisance problems.

The alliance created a plan, got feedback from the stakeholders and announced it at its annual dinner on Monday night.

The nonprofit is working with JLL commercial real estate firm to attract tech companies, as well as to create the bookstore. He said he won’t reveal the bookstore’s location until the deal is finalized.

In other initiatives, the Alliance is hoping to attract a restaurant as an anchor tenant to a row of new storefronts that has been created at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Liberty. There also is space for three boutiques there, he said.

Valentine said he hopes to bring in more ethnic restaurants to the avenue. The Alliance has been exploring options with several Mediterranean restaurants in Philadelphia, including Zahav, the acclaimed Israeli restaurant helmed by Mike Solomonov, a Pittsburgh Allderdice grad.

He’s also talking with a Filipino restaurant for a space possibly in the 800 or 900 block of Liberty, as well as a Greek restaurant for the avenue.

Currently there are five vape shops along Liberty Avenue, and he’s working with city and state officials to study how that number could be reduced or eliminated. Among the options is looking at their proximity to schools.

The alliance, which has helped bring in 39 retail outlets all over Downtown over the last several years, recently won a $250,000 grant from the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership to focus on more retail recruitment throughout the Golden Triangle — with $50,000 being distributed annually. It received the first disbursement in March.

As far as Liberty Avenue, Valentine said he hopes in five years to have new streetscapes with better lighting, and that the focus of the street would be more on the arts. “I would say if the Cultural Trust is more big theaters or Broadway, this would be more off-Broadway.”

And he sees more restaurants, especially more ethnic restaurants that would draw in young professionals. “I think that’s important,” he said. “I think ethnic restaurants would bring some diversity, not only in people but in the food offerings.”

The identity that the alliance hopes to create with Liberty Avenue is more of an arts corridor frequented by sophisticated business professionals, especially if developers are successful in drawing more tech companies to the area.

“I find this whole project exciting,” Valentine said. “But I’m excited about the bookstore, too.”