[PRCo] Re: Glassport abandonment

[Derrick Brashear]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:12 PM, Fred Schneider
<fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> These are the things we all too often miss in our quest for streetcar history.   We search for trolley information but we miss factories, mines, theaters, amusement parks, stores, churches .... all those places to which the trolley cars carried their passengers.    Of course when the mines and factories went down, the riding on the cars went down too.

I'm slowly piecing together the history of the South Side. Slowly is
the operative word.

The Pitt Digital Library includes a shot of the Mission St Bridge
(which connected to South 18th St Extension and thus the 51 and 77/54
lines) being erected in September, 1939. The steelwork is from
Bethlehem, perhaps an oddity in a U.S. Steel city, but perhaps not
given that McClintic-Marshall had a Rankin plant and by then E.G.
Grace had already proclaimed that company be recast as Bethlehem
Fabricated after the semi-well-known Golden Gate Bridge incident.

Well, in the valley below the bridge, in the hollow at the top of
South 21st St which other research already told me earlier had a
narrow gauge railroad and an incline to a coal mine, were several
buildings. One was labeled "Calig Steel Barrel". The name was news to
me, and there was no mention of them in the South Side later.

Little wonder. Working a bit harder, their building there burned just
a few weeks later, nearly taking the uncompleted bridge with it.

U.S. Glass, the company whose Glassport plant went dark due to the
storm and which is written about in that article, was founded by the
owners of a number of smaller glass companies, several of them from
the South Side. The wikipedia article on the same was created because
I was able to gather a list and some basic data.

I know of the old water treatment facility now about 105 years gone
which when water-borne illness (typhoid, I think) was being
transmitted was part of the impetus for a real city water system.

And with some legwork, an old photo, some old maps, and some basic
data, I know where the lot Gwen's house is built on came from, an
approximate date of construction at least 8 years earlier to the one
Allegheny County claims, and know what it looked like around 1885 and
that it was not at the time the last house in the row.

At some point, when life is a bit less hectic, my hope is to lead a
historic photo tour of the South Side as a benefit for the Brashear
Association food bank, sharing details of what was where, why it was
there if those details can be rounded up, and where it went.