[PRCo] Nice photo in the UofPittsburgh library...

[Fred Schneider]

This is an e-mail to my sister who lives in Pittsburgh but it is also worth forwarding to some others … everyone gets a blind carbon so you will not forward and drive the others nuts.   

There is some interesting stuff in the Pittsburgh City Photographer's file of the University of Pittsburgh.    

You know why I liked this?   Because we regularly shopped at the Sears Roebuck store in the background.   The preferred route (fastest) in the 1940s to East Liberty Presbyterian depended on traffic … it was often down to Nadine, in Ohio River Boulevard, up through Highland Park and in Highland Avenue so I saw this view many Sunday mornings or Saturdays in route to Sears, the model railroad store or the barber shop.   

The other intriguing thing is the sign above the parking lot on the right saying it is Free Parking for Kroger Customers Only.   What the hell does it matter.   There are no cars on the street.   There's gas rationing.   The picture was taken in September 1944.   The average bloke got 3 1/2 gallons a week.   If the police caught you using it to go to a movie or Kennywood or West View, you were in very deep shit.   Dad remembered picking up a guy on Frankstown Road who was walking out to the golf course …there were only two legal ways he could get there … walk or take Deere Brothers' bus.    The man told him that the police were checking the cars parked at the golf course.   

Most of these buildings are not there today.

In the 1930s, 1940s, and well into the 1950s, 'sliberty was a viable shopping area.  Penn Avenue had numerous movie palaces.   Seems to me I saw Cinderella there as a kid.   All the east end auto dealers were over on Baum Boulevard.   While the majority of the department stores were downtown, this area had Sears and one other locally owned one at the northwest corner of Penn and Highland.   Then, in the middle to late 1950s, the suburban shopping centers began to open.   Instead of shopping in East Liberty or Wilkinsburg or East Pittsburgh, we went to Rodi or Monroeville.  And the older places collapsed of their own weight.   

NOW LOOK AT THE BUILDINGS IN THE PICTURE….

The Barrack Obama Academy of International Studies (a public 6-12 school), formerly Frick Pittsburgh and a merger with Schenley High School, sits where the Kroger's food store was.   

All the buildings on the left have been leveled.   See the Lorraine Hotel at the end of the block?   There is a Sunoco filling station there today at the north east corner of Highland and what is today East Liberty Boulevard (It was Rodman St. in 1944).   

A Home Depot sits on the site of the former Sears store but it is not the same building.   The Sears Roebuck store was torn down.  

The church right over the front of the streetcar was the Emory M. E. Church.   It was torn down and replaced circa 1991 by the Crossroads United Methodist Church, without a steeple.   

The only identifiable object in the picture that remains is East Liberty Presbyterian, opened in 1935 down at Penn and Highland.  Between Emory ME and East Liberty Presby there were three other smaller churches when this image was exposed and they do not exist today:   6th United Presbyterian, hidden behind Sears at Station Street; East End Reformed Presbyterian (on the right - SW corner Highland and Harvard), and Bethany Evangelical Lutheran (at Kirkwood, one block this side of Penn Avenue).   One would think the existence of so many Presbyterian houses of worship might indicate a lot of Scotsmen living in Highland. 

My father's 1939 Chevy was all rust by the late 1940s but that 1939 or 40 Buick at the right curb looks like it was pulled out of the garage only for special occasions.        


                                            Credit:  Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, Univ. of Pittsburgh


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