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

[Ken and Tracie]

Churches may be a better indicator than school buildings as to the age of a 
neighborhood.

K.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Schneider Fred" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 8:03 AM
Subject: [PRCo] Re: P-r-w, housing, cities, etc.


> 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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