[PRCo] Fwd: PITTSBURG PA PHOTO ARCHIVES

[Derrick Brashear]

Begin forwarded message:
*From: *"Frank Pfuhler" <pfuhler at msn.com>
*Date: *October 12, 2012 10:09:01 AM EDT
*Subject: **Fw: PITTSBURG PA PHOTO ARCHIVES*

Comments from Fred Schneider
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net>
*To:* Frank Pfuhler <pfuhler at msn.com>


*CAPTIONS ADDED UNDER THE PICTURES.   You might find the comments of a
former Pittsburgher of interest.YOU MAY FORWARD IF YOU WISH.*

Begin forwarded message:

*From: *"Frank Pfuhler" <pfuhler at msn.com>
*Date: *October 11, 2012 8:22:12 PM EDT
*Subject: **PITTSBURG PA PHOTO ARCHIVES*

PITTSBURG PA PHOTO ARCHIVES     FINISH


FRANK


I was always somewhat amused that the guy who was in charge of PAT's
rebuilding program for the PCCs had the initials P. C. C.   His name was
Philip C. Castellano.


Photo looks southwest on Liberty Avenue.  The Diamond Bank was in what was
then called the Diamond Building where 5th Avenue curved across Liberty
Avenue.   The hill in the background is Mount Washington.

Your caption says at Pittsburgh and West Virginia Railway, aka Wabash
Terminal.   Not quite.   That's it a block away down Liberty Avenue Avenue
with the Doric columns in front of the 2nd and 3rd floors and strange
open-air cupola on the roof.   The name Wabash Terminal came from the
original name Wabash - Pittsburgh Terminal Railroad.   Today it is Wheeling
and Lake Erie but most of the bridges have not been repainted in years and
still have the name of a previous lessor painted on them: Norfolk and
Western.

This is the only picture I have ever seen showing a train on the bridge
over Liberty Avenue in the distance.  That was the freight interchange
track between the P&WVa and the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Hidden behind the Diamond Building was a huge trainshed behind the Wabash
Terminal.  The railroad never had an extensive passenger business but they
still ran a daily commuter train to the western suburbs into the 1930s …
Jim Shuman remembered seeing a couple of coaches out there on a early visit
to the city.  Then it was used simply as a downtown LCL terminal.   The
entire lower end of the point was freight terminals … the P&WV facility and
the PRR freight terminal.   Until 1941 the trolley company was using the
old exposition buildings as their freight terminal too; then the city
condemned that building and used it to store impounded automobiles.   You
went there to pay parking tickets.    Well in 1946 the P&WV shed caught
fire.   Afterwards my dad took me up into a nearby office to look down on
the ruins … I vividly recall two things … the twisted rusty rails and the
fact that the next day I was in the hospital to have my tonsils removed.
That terminal separated downtown from the lower point.  That accidental
fire made redevelopment so much easier.  Ten years later there were four
brand new office buildings in the point, a new Hilton Hotel.   The Pennsy
was also evicted to a new freight house in the strip district … only lasted
about ten years until LCL ended completely … and Point State Park was
created where the LCL sheds used to be.




Above picture looks south on Wood Street from Liberty Avenue.
 Monongahela National Bank was in the triangular block between Wood,
Liberty and 6th Aveune.  In my youth, Max-Azen Furs was there.   Today
there is a PAT subway station there.   The POST merged with the Gazette and
later with the combined Sun Telegraph.   Eventually the Pittsburgh Press,
during a strike in the 1980s or 90s, disappeared too, leaving the
Post-Gazette as the only newspaper still standing.


Looking up Wood Street (north) … the almost hidden 11-story white building
on the right side between 6th Avenue and Oliver Avenue was McCreary's
Department Store.   It later became a Gimbel Brothers store.   The
streetcar is at 5th and Wood.  The problem I am
having is that the old maps show that Germania Savings Bank was on the near
corner of Diamond Alley, and in this picture it is on the
far corner (north side of Diamond) at Wood.   Diamond Alley was renamed
Diamond Street and them Forbest Avenue but it never became any wider!

The Germania Savings Bank here and the German National Bank up at 6th
Street were typical at that time when the immigrants from
that part of the world lived downtown including my great grandpa who ran a
tailor shop on Virgin Alley,  renamed Oliver Avenue by the time
this picture was taken.   The German population eventually moved the
Allegheny City (became Pittsburgh's North Side in 1907), settling in both
the lower North Side and on Troy Hill.   When my great grandpa's clients
moved across the river, so did he.   By the way,
a lady who is a waitress in a restaurant on the North Side tells a
wonderful story about prejudice … she was also German … her ancestors had
to lie about where they came from in order to enroll their child in school
… Germans initially not wanted.   Judging by her age and which ancestor it
was, that might have been around World War I.


The second 6th Street Bridge across the Allegheny River between Pittsburgh
and Allegheny City, erected in 1892.   Because of the increasing weight of
traffic (reads streetcars), this replaced an original John Roebling
suspension bridge.  This was probably taken about two or three years after
Allegheny merged into Pittsburgh, a merger that was orchestrated by the
bigger city to its south.   The state set up a popular vote … winner takes
all.   Of course Allegheny was set up to lose because they had the wealthy
people and Pittsburgh had the population and the votes to force the
annexation.   The bridge disappeared in the middle 1920s when three
identical suspension bridges were built at 6th, 7th and 9th Streets.   This
one was actually floated down the Ohio River and placed on new piers about
1926 to connect Neville Island with the south side of the Ohio River.
 Tracks in foreground are owned by the *B*est *& O*nly RR.   The elevated
structure on the far side of the river was the Pennsylvania Railroads
elevated branch to connect the tracks leading onto the Fort Wayne Bridge
with the LCL sheds down in the Point … it lasted until redevelopment in the
early 1950s and even longer as far as the PPG building at 6th St. to serve
that one customer.

There was a great story about my grandmother teaching my mother human
nature.   Grandma was alleged to have walked her young daughter out on this
bridge and suggested they have a little fun.   Grandma then stood at the
railing and pointed down at the river and told mom to look down and keep
looking down.   Grandma kept pointing and they kept looking.   Mom said by
the time they left, a crowd had accumulated looking down at nothing.   :<)


I rearranged the pictures because this is the replacement bridge for the
previous image …this is the 1927 version of the bridge.   The Pittsburgh
Plate Glass building with its arched alcove is visible in both pictures.
This is not a true suspension bridge but a self-anchored bridge.  It also
uses eye-bars instead of cables.   By self-anchored, instead of anchoring
the main suspension cables to concrete abutments at the shore as a true
suspension bridge would do, on these bridge, the cables are achored instead
to those huge I-beams that run the length of the bridge between the roadway
and the sidewalk.

Route 22 Crosstown was simply a downtown circulator route that connected
the stores downtown and the stores on the North Side.   It was the only
route that I can remember that was pay-as-you-enter in all directions.



Northbound rush hour Charleroi interurban at Smithfield and Carson Sts.,
Pittsburgh … I suspect this is a newly designed program to distort images
being advertised on-line for sale.   The Charleroi sign signified express
to Frederick St. in the rush hour.   Of peak cars were signed
Shannon-Charleroi.





-- 
Derrick


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