History Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

August Wilson and the Joe Louis-Billy Conn Title Rematch

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

Pulitzer prize-winning dramatist and Pittsburgh native August Wilson dramatized the modern history of African-Americans in 10 plays, often called the Pittsburgh cycle, for each decade of the 20th century. In “Seven Guitars,” set in the Hill District in the 1940s, the key historical moment comes when his characters gather to listen on the radio to …

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Make No Little Plans

by Melanie Linn Gutowski

World’s fairs seem a quaint remnant of generations past, or perhaps a childhood memory of visiting New York in 1939 or 1964. In a world where news is literally at one’s fingertips, traveling hundreds of miles to marvel at the latest food production techniques seems unnecessary. And yet, world’s fairs live on. Though the U.S. …

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Buying a Company Town

by Andrew Moore

Joseph Meyer lives in the former manager’s home of an abandoned company town, where there is no running water, no cell service, and until recently, there was not a single resident. On this cold Saturday in December, 63-year-old Meyer splits wood to heat his three-story home. The scene would be a common one in rural …

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New Long Stairway in Mill District, 1940

by Jennifer McNulty

Perched atop a network of stairs, photographer Jack Delano captured this snow-dusted Hazelwood scene in 1940 for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). A Russian native who settled in the Philadelphia area around age 10, Delano studied art and music at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Known primarily for his dramatic images, Delano, who …

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Beechwood School Garden, 1916

by Jennifer McNulty

Over the past 10 years, school gardens have been cropping up across the Pittsburgh region. Spurred by chef-activist Alice Waters’ 1995 Edible School Yard, the school garden movement has been praised for yielding both a harvest bounty and hearty educational benefits. In these outdoor classrooms, students learn about everything from summer squash to science to …

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The Egg Route

by Sherrie Flick

My dad likes to reminisce, and after most of our 22 family members had moved to the living room after a holiday dinner to nap or watch sports, I learned how the desire for farm fresh eggs connected my parents to both the city of Pittsburgh and their rural roots in Tionesta, for their first …

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Sept. 17, 1862—The Day Pittsburgh Exploded

by Kellie B. Gormly

“Tread softly, this is consecrated dust. Forty five pure patriotic victims lie here, a sacrifice to freedom and civil liberty. A horrid memento of a most wicked rebellion. Patriots! These are patriots’ graves.” –Inscription on the memorial at Allegheny Cemetery The only trouble with the inscription is that the people who rest here weren’t “planning …

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Pittsburgh to Gettysburg

by Kellie B. Gormly

During a muggy June in 1863, Civil War-weary Pittsburghers panicked at rumors that Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was marching his Army of Northern Virginia toward Pennsylvania. The rumors, as we now know a century and a half later, were indeed true—although Pittsburgh was about 200 miles west of the small farming town of Gettysburg …

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South Park Cascades, Circa 1931

by Jennifer McNulty

South Park, a 2,013-acre Allegheny County Park in the South Hills has all the features one might expect: trails, picnic groves, ball fields, and even a golf course. In more recent years, modern updates have included a wave pool, ice skating rink, skate park, nature center and a dek hockey rink—expanding the recreational offerings. However, …

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New Housing, 1951

by Jennifer McNulty

Photographer Clyde “Red” Hare moved to Pittsburgh in 1950 to work on the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, covering the city’s Renaissance I, with noted editor Roy Stryker. Hare had his own car and camera and Stryker offered to pay him $50 a week to photograph the city. During that time, Hare made this photograph of new …

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Christmas in Utopia

It’s early morning on Christmas Eve in the town of Economy, Pennsylvania. The year is 1828. Twenty-seven-year-old Catharina Langenbacher awakens to the five o’clock gong of the grandfather clock in the sitting room downstairs. By the time she clambers down the crude staircase, her widowed mother is preparing breakfast. Catharina’s 35-year-old brother, Romelius, is milking …

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Thanksgiving in Greensburg

by Dan Reynolds

Childhood expands and does not measure. Adulthood counts and contracts. To me, as an eight-year-old boy considering the width of Pennsylvania—from my home in York to my grandmother’s house in Greensburg—geography was impressionistic. Somerset County held cold, incalculable risks. The rest of the landscape was relatively flat, passive and non-threatening. As a Thanksgiving trip to …

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Molded Tooth Staggered Gear and Worker, 1913

by Jennifer McNulty

The Mesta Machine Company churned and smoked on more than 20 acres of land along the Monongahela River. Though its central product was steelmaking equipment—supplying some 500 mills around the globe—Americans had Mesta’s 3,000 employees to thank for their working cars and refrigerators, ship hulls and power plant turbines. During the Depression, then-president Lorenz Iversen …

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Once Upon A Tunnel

The calamity began at the stroke of midnight on May 10, 1924, when Pittsburgh Street Railway Company employees walked off the job. The streetcar strike threw commuters into a tizzy, and the following morning South Hills commuters jumped into their cars and headed for the recently opened Liberty Tunnels. Between 7:30 and 8 a.m., a …

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Oakmont Camping, circa 1910

by Jennifer McNulty

For Pittsburghers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Oakmont offered the next best thing to paradise. During the summer months, while the city baked in heat and soot, visitors set up camp on the banks of the Allegheny River, relaxing in the fresh air and making merry on the water. Oakmont boasted a …

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What Happened at Thompson’s Island?

Were you to launch a canoe at the U.S. Forest Service Buckaloons boat ramp, where Brokenstraw Creek enters the Allegheny River, then float down toward the borough of Tidioute, the setting would appear much as it must have to a party of Seneca Indians paddling the same route in the late summer of 1779. Carried …

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Elie Wiesel and the One Indestructible Human Quality

by Douglas Heuck

In each issue of Pittsburgh Quarterly, I write obituaries of notable Pittsburghers, and over the past 10-plus years, the percentage of those whom I knew in life – some very well – has been growing. Last week came the news of the death of Elie Wiesel, who steadfastly bore witness to the Holocaust for more …

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Exploring the Maridon

by Barbara Eichenlaub

Most people do not associate Asian art with Butler, Pa. However, the only museum dedicated to ancient and contemporary Chinese and Japanese art and culture in western Pennsylvania is tucked away on a residential street in this city of around 14,000 — epitomizing the concept of “hidden gem.” The Maridon Museum is home to the …

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Mount Oliver Incline, Circa 1895

by Jennifer McNulty

When the mount oliver inclined railway was built in 1872, it was Allegheny County’s second incline, and an average one-way ride cost six cents. Its cars traveled from 12th Street, South Side, to its eponymous height— from which this photo was taken—gaining 377 feet of elevation over 1,600 feet of track and depositing riders at …

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Light in Darkness

I can’t really say if I found Ernie, or if Ernie found me. When I volunteered for a writing project at the Pittsburgh Holocaust Center in 1992, he was the first person I met. An engaging, bespectacled gentleman in his early 70s, Ernie was one of about 200 Holocaust survivors living here at the time. …

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Wabash Park ice skating, 1917

by Jennifer McNulty

On the wintry afternoon of Jan. 20, 1917, pittsburghers of all ages enjoyed ice skating at Wabash Park in Pittsburgh’s West End. Regularly a grassy swath, it was apparently flooded and frozen for the season. The park is still there, as are a number of the park-facing homes along Wabash Street. An icy Sawmill Run …

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Home Library Group

by Jennifer McNulty

Coke oven smokestacks loom as members of a boys’ reading club pose in an what is likely a factory slum along the Monongahela where workers lived to be near their jobs at the Jones & Laughlin Steel Mill in Hazelwood. Six years earlier, steel titan Andrew Carnegie, himself a self-educated working boy who found inspiration …

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