[PRCo] Re: McKees Rocks?~?~?

[Fred Schneider]

I think most of the PRR steam was gone in Pittsburgh with that  
massive purchase of diesels in 1952.

Funny how fast the city changed after we moved in 1949.   Dad was  
heating the house in Crescent Hills (Penn Township) with run of the  
mine coal at some ungodly cost like $3 a ton.   I think the new  
owners were forced to install a gas furnace immediately because of  
smoke control.   When we left the city was dirty.   The Bessemer had  
one diesel.   The Pennsy had diesels on the Detroit - Harrisburg  
passenger train.   I remember that the B&O had some Baldwin Sharks  
based at Glenwood.   That guys was it in 1949.   The rest was  
steam.   Thanks to smoke control, by 1952 the only steam left in  
Pittsburgh was on the Best and Only and then only on the passenger  
trains to Buffalo and Kenova / Louisville plus an occasional through  
freight.  By 1953 there wasn't a hot steam engine on the B&O east of  
Cumberland.

And downtown was being torn down rapidly.   The world was changing.    
The Pittsburgh that I lived in until age 9 was one where you shopped  
in Wilkinsburg or East Liberty or downtown.   If we went out on a  
Saturday night to eat, there were restaurants in Wilkinsburg.   But  
there wasn't anything in the suburbs.   Suburbs were where you lived  
and slept.   You went back into Pittsburgh or the older boroughs to  
dine or shop.   You wanted a sandwich, you went to Isalys.
For the first couple of years when we went back, my parents still  
went to the old haunts but then things seemed to change.   They  
weren't the same places.

A dozen years later, by the time I was driving, nobody went to  
Wilkinsburg or East Liberty any longer.   There were malls at  
Monroeville and Northway and Century III in West Mifflin and another  
one down on Fort Couch Road up the hill from the Drake line.   Well,  
I thought noboody did.   They still did but today I guess they  
don't.   Today there are 18 malls in the area.

Actually, in 1959- 1962 some of those smaller boroughs were still  
quite vibrant.   I have pictures of McKees Rocks with the streets  
just jammed with shoppers.   And I remember downtown Homestead in the  
late 1950s filled with active stores.   It was East Liberty and  
Wilkinsburg that collapsed first, perhaps because we felt that skin  
pigmentation rubbed off.   Or maybe because, in the case of East  
Liberty, because some fool urban renewal expert decided that the  
European plan would work in the United States.

(That ought to stir the pot just a little....)

I can also remember how the smoke just lingered in the river  
bottoms.   The day I rode the interurban to Charleroi ... it was  
March 31, 1953.   I had turned 13 about three weeks before.   I left  
downtown Pittsburgh in a cloud of orange smoke.   By the time I came  
out of the tunnel at South Hills Junction, "The Lord sayeth let there  
me light and there was light."   The sun was shining and it shone all  
the way to Elco loop and all the way back to South Hills Junction.    
And then I emerged from the tunnel at Carson Street that afternoon,  
the lights went out again.    You could not blame it all on the  
railroads.   U. S. Steel, Jones and Laughlin, Mesta Machine, and the  
other industries had a lot to do with the smog in Pittsburgh.


On Sep 4, 2007, at 10:17 AM, Derrick J Brashear wrote:

> On Tue, 4 Sep 2007, Fred Schneider wrote:
>
>> Very interesting picture.
>>
>> Derrick:   When did the Pennsylvania Railroad close down the round
>> house on the North Side?   All I ever saw there were rows and rows of
>> dead steam engines which I photographed in 1955.
>
> I'd guess early 50s, but to be honest i have no idea. (basically, when
> you have most of your steam going out of service, and you aren't  
> building
> a diesel shop there, why bother?)
>
>