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This country celebrates great Spencer. A Black History Month community. It was once the most powerful and feared nation on earth. Wealthy respected remarkable life there was obsessed with increases or SEST with the sweat of slaves and statesmen to create a civilization in the world. Explore the majesty of the Jews. Wednesday night at 9:00 here on WQED 13. Hi everyone I'm Bobby Vinton. Join me for an evening of fun and musical memories. I'll be singing all of your favorite songs including Ross red Mr. Ali and many many more songs from my heart. Monday night at 10:00 here on WQED 30. Next on cue we find out how a Pittsburgh based research team is trying to make life easier and

safer for people who use wheelchairs. And the governor's race is heating up. How will the primary election unfold. Well our newsmaker is a political analyst. Plus a new look for the old Allegheny County jail it has undergone an architectural facelift and the last prisoner left. We'll take you inside next. Good evening and welcome to On Q magazine. I'm Stacey Smith. For most people catching a bus or taking a cab ride is a simple activity. But for thousands of disabled people using public transportation is not so easy. Better wheelchairs could make a difference into Pittsburgh based research teams are working to make that happen. Tonight on to medical contributor and post visit health and science writer Dr. Anita Camas

Warren reports on how innovative wheelchair research happening right here in Pittsburgh may help thousands of people across the country. It is tonight's cover story. To most of us riding a bus is simple. You climb on pay the fare and if you're lucky grab a seat at some bus riders bring not only a singer but an entire chair that moves. Then things get even more complicated on Access vans at Port Authority buses a special lift the wheel chair user up the steps the passenger maneuvers into a special area so the chair can be strapped into place. It's called a secure Miss system. Sproull of Squirrel Hill has used a wheelchair for almost 40 years.

The seats in the bus actually secured to the bus quite safely for everyone else. I'm actually in a moving seat a seat that on Wheels has the ability to move. That's the purpose of it. So when I get in a boss I have to use a very cumbersome security and system in order to secure my seat restraining straps that hold wheelchairs in place on buses can be dirty or broken sometimes impossible to find and worse the system makes people with disabilities dependent on others. It requires that the driver leave his seat and come back to the wheelchair station and go through a process that could take maybe four to eight minutes and four to eight minutes on a bus route is really a long time. This is the rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on wheelchair transportation safety at Pitt. Researchers here are hoping to solve problems for people

like Lucy. So this is basically what the motor vehicle operator would have to do. And again two in the front two in the rear and Juniper Toci is the center's director. Right now she's demonstrating the type of restraint system typically found on buses and wheelchair bags. So is there something better than this. There definitely is and I'd like to show you a docking system that we're actually working on that we're hoping that will move to it in the future. Dr. Vin Rousillon will actually assist us today to direct your model will back up into or mocked up which are securely station. In this interview a little bit noisier because it is a prototype that relies upon an air compressor. The South. So basically the loser flips a switch and the docking system and the chair actually the key to this system is a cross bar on the back of the wheelchair with the docking mechanism. Grab then lock onto it. Researchers are not

only building better chairs but wheelchair standards that all manufacturers must conform to. The businessman and you know few years down the road your docking system becomes available that people will have to get their will chairs not necessarily your hopes are that this universal interface will be something that will be able to be adapted to wheelchairs that are that are already in the field. We spend a substantial amount of time actually going out and looking at all different sorts of wheelchairs. And we've looked at a number of different options for him for more than Universal Interface and keeping a wheelchair stable in a moving vehicle is only one part of the picture. The pit group is working with the University of Michigan conducting crash tests on wheelchairs and carefully going over the remains. What is this. This is actually a series of seating systems that we have tested in typically what you find is a frontal crash the occupant provides a downward load to the seating systems. Most people don't

realize is that a lot of the systems are really just made of plywood with a cushion on them and you can see here this is an example of a seating system that has been tested that obviously failed for the most part. The sheer bulk of buses and vans makes them pretty safe in collisions even if passengers aren't buckled in. But for the disabled community traveling more easily and comfortably could translate into a more enjoyable life. Lucy is among the people who use wheelchairs and she's optimistic that research like what's going on in Pittsburgh will help everywhere. When I first came to Pittsburgh there were virtually no requirements that buildings or anything else be accessible and for the most part many of them weren't at most major public places will be pretty much fully accessible and I can take a bus or an airplane or a train and I can assume the transportation will also be accessible

so that I can use it. So it's the difference in the last 40 years that's been very dramatic. Mr used to be the coordinator of the American Disabilities Act for the city of Pittsburgh so she is well acquainted with the needs of the people who live here. Pitts will chair Transportation Safety Center was established for the five year 4.5 million dollar grant. The school of rehabilitation was awarded an earlier 4.5 million dollar grant to improve Wiltshire seeding systems and designs. Keep in mind that the new docking system is a prototype which means it could be several years before something like it is approved. Is there such a thing Doctor as an ideal wheelchair. Well you know the best situation would be sort of a wardrobe of wheel chairs you know something rugged for outdoor activities something light and comfortable for travel maybe something snazzy for parties. But even a simple manual wheelchair can cost about $200. The more sophisticated ones many thousands of dollars. Most people can't afford though they can't afford to have just one let alone that that many. And now how

does Pittsburgh rank or compare or maybe is a better word with other cities as far as accessibility for the disabled. Well according to Lucy sprawl Pittsburgh is doing great she says that she can get to almost any public place and know that it has at least a limited accessibility. And of course this is a hotbed of research in this arena so innovation comes here. Doctor thanks so much. Thank you. Still to come the governor's race is heating up as the candidates vie for an open seat. Chris Moore checks in with political analysts and on cue contributor John domino. It's coming up next. A startling discovery possible through a fossil the likes of which

never be found anywhere in the world. New clues in a 400 million year old mystery are shaking up long held beliefs forcing scientists to rewrite the story of life on land. People have been looking for this ever since. Could this be the missing link next time. A nova. You're watching a historic election for the Pennsylvania governor's seat without an incumbent that is. The seat is wide open and the race is heating up. Joining us now is political analyst

contributor John Delano. Well is that there is no incumbent in the race. What happens at least every eight years in Pennsylvania because candidates for governor really for two terms so I guess it's historic in the sense that we haven't had this since 1904 or maybe the first time that our former governor outgoing governor had a national poll. No well it is indeed and in fact you know a lot of people thought Mark Schweiker who is now the governor might run for this but he decided not to so we don't really have that could have been an unusual circumstance where you had an incumbent by virtue of a resignation. But we don't have any of that we just have a plain old battle going on and particularly in the Democratic primary. All right let's look at the Democratic primary today. Mr. Rendell an important endorsement from Mayor Murphy. Will this help him in this area he needs more name recognition on this side of the state. Well he certainly hopes it will help him. But let's face it most times that we have

lots of endorsements that occur in a political campaign. The fact is that there were some 17 Ward chairman in Philadelphia who just endorsed Bob Casey and now you can debate whether that's of any value. But the honest truth is that I think most people don't pay a whole lot of attention to these kinds of endorsements. Now Tom Murphy's endorsement of Ed Rendell I think is important in one respect and that is that it frees up a lot of people who support Tom Murphy to help raise money for Ed Rendell. I don't know that there's a grassroots level of support for the mayor here in this city as there might be in other or cities in terms of political organization. Mr. Rendell already had a big war chest didn't he he's outspent Mr. Casey a lot in terms of the advertisement I've been seeing Rendel ads for a while now. Well Chris you can never have enough money in politics. And this is so true in this election where you have a candidate of two candidates for governor one has raised 10 million the other has raised eight and a half million and Bob Casey has raised 8 1/2 million. They need more

money because they're spending it out the was it. You can't turn on broadcast television without seeing a commercial unless you have the smarts to watch WQED. Well I haven't seen many ads on the other side of the ledger for Mr. Fischer the Republican candidate. Is it because he has no competition in his hay for a drop out. That's part of it Chris but it's also true that Mike Fisher has two and a half million dollars he has nowhere near the money that the Democrats have and he is his people say to me we're just going to save our money we're going to hold on to it. Because once the Democrats get through with this brutal primary which is 12 weeks from today once they're through with their brutal primary they're going to have zip in the bank. And Mike Fisher the Republican is likely to have four five six million. It is that for all for a Republican candidate here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania they have a smaller war chest than to Democrats. Well it is in some respects but you know part of this is that there's the eight year Jinx anybody who follows politics closely knows that in Pennsylvania since

World War Two every eight years the party out of power gets power. So after eight years of Republicans it's the Democrats turn to win and I think a lot of people think that whether it's Bob Casey or Ed Randell it's much more likely that one of them will become governor than Mike Fisher. Now let me back up and say that in my view though Mike Fisher has as certainly as good a shot as anybody to be elected governor. Why. Because the Democrats are in this death row. They're going to be attacking each other we haven't seen the negative commercials on TV yet. But believe me in the e-mails that go back and forth in the in the attacks in the print media they're there and we're going to see a lot of that on television and they're going to brutalize and beat up on each other. And you have to wonder whether the Democratic nomination will be worth a whole lot. So Mr. Fischer may be able to break like that Sports Illustrated jinx the eight year jinx that you do not to be on the cover there. Now there's some Lamport in congressional races. And it depends I guess if you're a Republican. You might call it redistricting if you're

Democrat you might call it gerrymandering in congressional districts right. That's exactly right Chris we have in this area some very strange looking districts the first district. We should talk about is really now called the 12th district that stretches from Greene County includes all of Green County half of Washington County little pieces of Fayette a huge chunk of of Westmoreland County into cambric County. Jack Murtha Congressman John Murtha of Johnstown is the current congressman. But Congressman Frank mascara of Charleroi says I'm going to go at this. So we've got two Democrats who are going to run against each other in the primary. And who knows what's going to happen in that race. What are the polls saying about the governor's race and the congressional race. Well we haven't don't know the polls don't vote. Yeah the full right and there is no polling yet on congressional races. But I tell you in the governor's race the most recent poll which is a KDK TV poll suggests that Ed Rendell because of his massive spending on television out here has really begun to knock away at the KC lead that we saw for the last two months. Right

now Ed Rendell is ahead by four points which is really a statistical tie given margin of error. Most importantly for Ed Rendell in this area he's now getting about a third of the vote. He's got a win in my view about 40 percent or better to win the primary come May 21st. But it's good news for him. Mind you his ads were run before and the poll was taken before Bob Casey's commercials really were getting going. Right now we've seen a lot of KC commercials. So I think the next poll in a couple weeks will have a better feel now on the state Senate level. Longtime Democratic leaders Senator the limit Beau to act is stepping down. It's left the field wide open his son is enter the race right. And a lot of other people too what's going to happen there. Well that's a very interesting race because it's again a district that includes part of Pittsburgh but goes all the way up now the Allegheny Valley up into Armstrong County. So it's a very big state senate district and it's the only one that looks like it's wide open no incumbent running for re-election and let me Vote Act Junior wants this but so does Councilman

Jim furlough of the city of Pittsburgh. Bonnie DeCarlo an activist Democrat who has run several times before. She's going to run against. An African American by the name of Warner Macklin is going to run in that seat and we hear possibly State Representative Frank Dermody we hear all kinds of names out there. But you know the petitions have just started to be circulated and we've got two more weeks before all the petitions will be in so that we'll have a better feel for who the candidates are. This is however the time that anyone out there wants to run for a General Assembly State House state Senate the U.S. Congress. You have until the 9th of March even I mean the person is there. There's been a lot of young people get involved in those races. You know the Democratic Party in particular has had a lot of older folks as their Democratic committee men and committee women. So Councilman Bill Perdue Joe from the shady side Squirrel Hill area and the youngest member of city council says hey young folks if you're under 35 now's the time get in Iraq get those papers and I'll give this a special election March 5th the city council turnouts used to count a small and so maybe 15

percent. Most of us will stay home on the OK thank you. We appreciate you being here. Now you can look for updates on the key issues facing the gubernatorial candidates throughout the month of March right here on cue. And for more information check out the Pennsylvania economy league's web site issues p. a.. That net. Coming up the old Allegheny County Jail has a new look. Carol ESPN has the story next. Want to know more about on Q magazine. Recent stories upcoming guests the on q community calendar and of course viewer feedback. It's all on our website. WQED dot org. Just follow the links to on cue. It's one of the city of Pittsburgh best known landmarks and associated with some pretty famous scandals. But most people have never been inside the old Allegheny County Jail. Well there aren't any prisoners there these days and even though it still looks like the same on the

outside the old jail has undergone a complete overhaul on the inside. It's an architectural transformation made in Pittsburgh. Before after most of us have been outside of these prison walls but few of us have been inside until now. This Pittsburgh Landmark has a new life and doors that now swing both ways. Even before the last prisoner left for the new jail in 1905 plans for a rebirth were in the works.

We looked at the possibility of converting it to a hotel and office building but none of that really panned out. And then it became very clear that the juvenile courts and the courts in general needed more space. My goal as an architect was to see something that would go into this building that would maintain the building for the next hundred years. And when I heard that a court facility was it was intended for this building. I thought that would pose a great idea. Henry Hobson Richardson of Boston designed the Allegheny County Jail. It was completed in 1885 and his work was so admired it actually inspired a period in the late 1880s known as Richard Sonny and Romanesque Richardson was influenced by eleventh century French and Spanish architecture. He used around arches rough cut stone walls turrets and recessed windows. The jail and its sister building the Allegheny

County Courthouse are considered to be Richardson's finest work. It was an unbelievable designer and I don't know if you've seen the very famous church of Boston and the Trinity Church. Yes I have. Fabulous. And this building as far as he was concerned was actually one of the best things he's ever done. And now Allegheny County has done the best thing to by restoring and preserving an architectural treasure. But it wasn't without obstacles. Just when the plans were finished there was a change in county administration and a change in funding. So they tried a new financial arrangement. The jail was sold to developers who did the renovations and then leased it back to the county. There was special legislation that was passed that allowed us to become the developer. We were able provide a guarantee. Right. For 20 years. It turns out the county is paying approximately $350000 less per year for crew here

as opposed to the other facilities at hand. So together construction along with the architectural design firm I k m pursued a daunting task. The building was in very bad shape by the time we took over. At the time the construction took over the building had been sitting here for a while and it was not maintained so the pipes would water it would burst. The place was an unbelievable disaster. One of the biggest challenges to the demolition was that there's a limited number of openings and access into the structure because it was a jail. So we had to create a couple of openings on the side of the building for huge machines to come at once the machines were in. Workers first had to remove the jail cells and they were made of steel and covered with layers of lead paint. They were cut and taken out section by section working now with an empty interior. Contractors had to squeeze five stories into the building. They had to dig down two more feet sometimes by hand to avoid hitting the subway line

below. Originally before miscarriage got involved the concept was to frame the building of structural steel structural steel is an excellent way to frame a building except in our case the roof stayed on and we didn't have an open openings through the side of the building. So we developed a technique called post tension concrete and eliminated the structural steel because the structural steel unit cranes and rigs and things like that. Well with that with the post tensioning method you don't need those types of cranes unless I'm a woman. The jail's exterior was different as a historical landmark. It couldn't be changed and there are very large windows as you can see and you notice that the bars are still in some of these windows. Yeah because we we were supposed to leave the bars because of the building on the outside as he was kept basically the way it was all along we didn't touch the outside except for the fact that we cleaned

it. We pointed the stone. We replaced the windows. These used to be with Windows but they were exactly the same section the same size as they are now. The other exterior renovations included replacement of the roof tile they installed replicas of the original copper gutters and downspouts and the court yards are prisoners once walked are now open to the public. A new archway was built matching the rest of the architecture. Even the leftover granite stones were made into benches the floor tile that you're standing on. It's called a Milford plank granite and that's really interesting because this new floor tile came from the exact same quarry that the original building stone came from. So all the stone that you see on the outside of this building as well as the court house across the street came from the Korean Milford Connecticut. We were able that Korea still in operation. So we were able to get this tile from that same quarry.

Inside 10 court rooms now serve the Family Division of the Court of Common Pleas. The designers keep security in mind. There's a two hallway system one for the public and another for the dependence on the judges. The fact that we place the courtrooms on the fifth floor was originally intended to give a specific judge a specific court room but to keep it flexible so they could have just the air in their trials rather the size of the trial that's that's taking place with the size of the court room be available. It's worked out very well in that respect that we have a suite of chambers on what you can the obvious to see as as were required floors in a jail being a jail came with a foreboding lock. So designers look for ways to soften the building's personality and still keep some of the original design. The old granite columns remain but new supporting columns sport a reflective coating to appear invisible. Designers also use Richardson's original color

scheme green rustic red and gray for the furnishings and people waiting to testify. May be surprised to know that they're sitting in what used to be the warden's house once the home of the infamous Mrs. awful the warden's wife who helped the middle boys escape. Something I would normally associate with partners or jails or any daycare children such a wonderful one I think it is a beautiful way to counterplay it against the severity of what happens in this place because people bring children when they go to court. And the idea of having a place for children is is wonderful. We have a function a facility and the feedback from the public has been great so there's a lot of reward so to speak for all the efforts that went into the past seven years developing this project.

Now as you can kind of see in our story there are still a few cells in the old jail and they will eventually become part of the museum display inside the building. Now here's a look at what you'll see tomorrow on cue. Our cover story tomorrow is a look back at this year's award winner Fred Rogers and Barbara Bush were honored for their commitments to community and children. And we'll take you inside the Elysee award ceremony tomorrow night. We'll also check in with the community of Somerset high atop the Squirrel Hill Tunnel. Find out how this new developments coming along and we hope that you will join us again live at 7:30 tomorrow night. Good night. Through

watching on Q magazine because of these foundations they are not about local programming to help the Howard hunting down with the Everly today show the Richard Keeneland foundation the Nicky foundation the Pittsburgh foundation the Henry L. Gilman foundation the Jewish Health Care Foundation and we couldn't do it without the members of the community.