On a mid-July afternoon in Pittsburgh’s Lincoln-Lemington neighborhood, at the crest of Highland Drive and pinched between a U.S. Army Reserve Center and the Southwestern Veterans Center, is a sprawling fence guarding a complex some worry could become Pittsburgh’s “Cop City.”
The fence, marked distinctly by several signs that read “No Trespassing,” covers the entire roughly 70-acre perimeter of the old Veterans Administration Hospital, where, in 2019, former Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto proposed reconfiguring it into a center for all things public safety.
The hospital was purchased by Peduto’s administration from the GSA in 2021 — at the behest of both FEMA and the DOJ — for $1…