[PRCo] Re: P-r-w, housing, cities, etc.

[Schneider Fred]

Certainly.   Any buildings are clues.

Downtown buildings are probably better clues because they tell when  
the city was built.   Western cities (Phoenix, San Jose, Los Angeles  
are much newer than eastern.   Seattle and San Francisco are somewhat  
older than Phoenix and San Jose and Los Angeles and you can see it in  
the principal downtown buildings.)

But the best clues are still private homes along the older streets.    
For every school or store or factory, there are probably 50 houses  
that will confirm the age of an area.

But a school is not reflective of neighborhoods in general because  
they do tear them down and replace them with newer buildings, because  
there are few of them, and because they reflect legislation more than  
demand.   High schools were common in cities while rural kids did not  
often go to high school.   My mother, who went to Perry High  
(Perrysville Avenue and East Street) had rural friends who came in on  
the Harmony interurban because there were no high schools out near  
Warrendale.   My late mother-in-law grew up in southern Lancaster  
County in a town called Kirkwood; she moved in with relatives in  
Lancaster City to go to high school.  My high school in Manheim  
Township was not built until 1930 until an older 1st through 8th  
grade building was destroyed by fire in 1928 or 1929 and that became  
the reason to finally extend  public education beyond the 8th grade  
in that rural township of 6,300 people.   (By the way it was up to  
about 8,000 when I graduated in 1958 and today the township is larger  
than at least eight cities in the state ... about 37,000 ... more  
populous than Easton, New Castle, Sharon, Johnstown, Chester, Lebanon  
and a couple of others whose names I've forgotten.)

If we were to only look at schools in my township, one would get the  
false impression that no one lived here before the 1930s.   Why,  
because in the 1930s we went from small elementary schools that  
everyone came to on foot to four elementary schools and school  
buses.  It was a massive building program that also included the high  
school.   Seven or eight or more one to four room schools were  
recycled as housing.   Some you can easily identify today.   Some  
have been torn down.   However, we had our first streetcar service  
(the Lititz - Lancaster interurban) in 1895, the second service (the  
Ephrata -Lancaster interurban and New Holland - Lancaster interurban)  
in 1900, the third (the interurban to Manheim) in 1901 and a Rossmere  
city car sometime after 1907.  We even used school streetcars until  
1931 when the township bought a fleet of school buses.   But existing  
school buildings give very few clues.

George, you understand that Fred is trying to nudge railfans into  
looking beyond the just the trolley car and into making it what it  
really was, a part of an entire community.   It was only a
part of history ... something we used to shop every day because we  
had ice boxes instead of refrigerators and freezers; something we  
used to go downtown to the cinema because we didn't have this box  
that flashed inane pictures of people trying to vote each other off  
an island; something you used on All-Saints day to go to Homewood  
Cemtery to put flowers on Uncle Harry's grave; something you used to  
go to Oakland to view the Pirates in a winning streak; something you  
used to ride to the mill in Homestead or the Strip District or East  
Pittsburgh; something we used to go to Gimbels or Rosenbaums or  
Kaufmans or Hornes or Boggs & Buhl for the kids back to school  
clothes; and something you rode to the school picnic at Kennywood.

And to understand it well, you need to know more than a smattering  
about history.

Look at the streetcars in the south.   The Birney cars almost always  
had doors at both ends.   All the cars had doors at both ends except  
perhaps Birmingham which ran a large fleet of center door cars.    
Why?   Jim Crow laws.  It was considered socially improper for a  
black person to walk twice past a white person.  So after entering  
the car and paying the fare, the white man or lady had to get off the  
rear of the car.   History is something you need to understand to  
comprehend the hobby.   The more of it you learn, the more of the  
hobby you understand.

But after a while all that history becomes a lot more fun.

On Dec 11, 2008, at 10:12 AM, Gray, George wrote:

> One can also look at the age of schools.  Brookline School opened in
> 1908.  (I suppose it had a centennial this year.)  It had a major
> expansion about 10-15 years later.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
> [mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org] On Behalf Of
> Schneider Fred
> Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 5:07 PM
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Subject: [PRCo] P-r-w, housing, cities, etc.
>
> Uh huh.   That's because the city was unsettled then.
>
> In 1700 the frontier was Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Boston,
> Charleston, Baltimore.
>
> In 1750 the frontier was Lancaster or Charlottesville.
>
> In 1800 Pittsburgh was indian territory.
>
> In the 1880s people were beginning to move up into what is now Perry
> Hilltop.   My grandmothers neighborhood by Riverview Park off of
> Perrysville Avenue was a Watson land development from the teens of
> 1920s.
>
> West View Park was built in 1906.   The land around it was developed
> in that period.   Nothing was there.
>
> The older homes in Brookline and Mount Lebanon and Dormont are
> largely teens, twenties, a few thirties, forties.
>
> Penn Hills?   After World War II Levittown in Bucks County was the
> fastest growing part of Pennsylvania and Penn Hills (Penn Township,
> Allegheny County) was second.   My parents bought two adjoining  1/4
> acre lots in Crescent Hills in 1937 and built a house on one of
> them.   Meadow Gold Dairy gave customers an aerial photograph of the
> neighborhood ... about one lot in six or seven was filled in by
> 1940.   The rest didn't fill in until the 1960s.    It's solid
> today.   But in the 1940s only the area around Black Ridge above
> Wilkinsburg was really filled in.
>
> Those perfectly symmetrical square brick houses that you see all over
> Allegheny County ... walk in the front door and the living room is
> either to the right or left, the dining room is on the other side
> with the kitchen behind it.   The stair case goes up from the front
> door. with three bedrooms and bath upstairs with the bath over the
> kitchen.      The basement had a single car garage under the
> kitchen.   They are purely late 1940s.   Memorize the design and you
> can see what filled in after the war.   Go up the hill from Linden
> Grove on the interurban and you will find that area filled with
> them.   That's where John Swindler's parents moved after leaving
> Edgewood.    A lot of homes in Penn Hills are like that ... the post
> war ones.
>
> If you local hysterical society has a person qualified to teach the
> basics of architectural history of housing, I would suggest that it
> is something any railfan interested in something more than just the
> trolley cars should attend.   Once you know the housing styles and
> when they were built, then you can tell what houses were there when
> the streetcar lines were there.   You tell which homes were there
> before the trolleys, which were build because of the convenience of
> the trolleys, which post dated the trolleys.   You will come to
> recognize trolley suburbs, bus suburbs.   You can take such a course
> in European universities but unfortunately it is very uncommon in the
> U. S. A.   However, I did find one offered by the Lancaster County
> Historical Society and you may equally lucky in your area.
>
> You can also, with greater effort, do some of it on your own just by
> working with maps.   If this street appears first on a 1922 map then
> none of the houses could be earlier than that.   If you have enough
> maps and enough street references and you look long and hard enough,
> you will become the expert.   Sears Roebuck used to sell houses in
> their catalogs.   Bear in mind that they were never ahead of the
> curve, always a little behind it.   So if you saw something in a 1915
> catalog, it was probably at the peak of its popularity a few years
> earlier.
>
>
>
>
> On Dec 10, 2008, at 4:37 PM, Barry, Matthew R wrote:
>
>> A lot more private right of way that I had previously thought.
>> Note where the line comes off of Woodlawn Ave, crosses Forbes and
>> goes into what is most probably private right of way.   It moves on
>> in to areas that I don't think any other carline really ever  
>> replaced.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
>> [mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org] On Behalf Of
>> Derrick J Brashear
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 4:07 PM
>> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
>> Subject: [PRCo] old maps of Pittsburgh and elsewhere reveal...
>>
>> http://lnk.nu/images.library.pitt.edu/r8v
>>
>> note the location of the trolley line through Schenley Park (also the
>> inclines at the foot of S 21st St and the J&L Coal incline by S
>> 30th St.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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