Since 1985, Pittsburgh has been hailed as a model of the livable city. Just like in the heady days of the steel industry when delegations arrived to learn industrial secrets, today they come to learn the secrets of civic rebirth. Tracy Neumann’s Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America is part of a growing historical literature that challenges a popular narrative of postindustrialism which treats the recent transformation of cities as an inevitable outcome of modern capitalism. Neumann persuasively argues that in the United States and Canada the remade city is the product of intentional actions by elite growth coalitions that “narrowly focused on creating the jobs, services, leisure activities, and cultural institutions that they believed would attract middle class professionals. In doing so, local officials abandoned social democratic goals in favor of corporate welfare programs, fostering an increasing economic inequality among their residents in the process.”
In 1945, when Nat Youngblood left his pre-law studies in Indiana to pursue an art career, he dreamt of beautiful landscapes and cultures that would inspire his work. At art school in New Mexico, he experimented with abstraction despite his inclination towards realism, exercised his eye for color and shades of light, and hastened his techniques in figure drawing. Little did he know that in five years, he would be a full-time artist in Pittsburgh, a city whose beauty and people were often hidden under a blanket of soot and smog.
In 2012, shortly afer Gina and Corey Grone moved to James Street, a neighbor invited Gina to attend the Community Council meeting for the neighborhood of East Allegheny, also known as Deutschtown. “I thought it might be a group of people sitting around in a church basement, but I went and it was so eye opening. There were updates about things I never would have found out about. They were talking about landscaping at Giant Eagle and I thought ‘these people have impact on what kind of plantings the grocery store has!’” Gina joined and is now the president of the East Allegheny Community Council.
In 2017, Western State Penitentiary—the state’s colossal stone prison on the banks of the Ohio River—closed afer more than 130 years of use. It had shut down before, in 2005, only to reopen two years later in response to the state’s growing population of inmates. This time, the closure is final, and the state will soon begin the process of selling the property. Whether the facility will be repurposed, redeveloped, demolished, or some combination remains to be seen.
I’ve lived in Deutschtown on the North Side for 16 years and I knew nothing about the many adjacent neighborhoods, except one. I knew the territory around California Avenue and Brighton Road that I had staked out as a child on summer vacations with my grandmother. Now I know more than a dozen neighborhoods, from Perry Hilltop on down to the Allegheny River, and especially the ones in between, after taking two tours last summer. “Spotlight on the Heartland, Quality of Place on Pittsburgh’s North Side,” sponsored by the Allegheny City Society, focused on five of these communities.
In 1918, economist Abraham Epstein conducted and published a study of the experiences and conditions of life among southern African American migrants in Pittsburgh. Epstein was a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, earning a bachelor of arts in social economy in 1917 and a graduate degree the following year. His graduate work centered on the topic of African American migrants and the sociological study was his thesis. Over the next 100 years, his work became an authority for understanding the conditions faced by African Americans during the Great Migration. Epstein analyzed various aspects of the migrant experience and offered statistical data to drive home certain points that outlined the influx of African Americans, mainly to the east side of the city.
In a history-rich American city like Pittsburgh, important pieces of our past are often unearthed right in our backyards. A backhoe operator excavating the site of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Arsenal recently uneathered hundreds of Civil War-era cannonballs. The contractor alerted the bomb squad and precautions were taken to keep Lawrenceville residents near 39th and Foster streets safe from the 150-year-old artillery projectiles.
On a stretch of West Carson Street on Pittsburgh's South Side, residents seeking redemption in the late 1920s put their faith in a soldier-turned-evangelist who preached like a wild-eyed Old Testament prophet from a rough-hewn wooden building known as the Glory Barn. Hell's punishment exceeds all other punishments as there are no joys like the joys of heaven, so there is no pain like the pain of hell, warned John W. Sproul. The evangelical movement in Pittsburgh in the early 20th century was a reaction to changes in society, culture, and science. The city was becoming an industrial power, and people drawn to preachers like Sproul found a deeply emotional experience through evangelism that they didn’t feel during mainstream religious ceremonies.
The road trip, that modern American icon of carefree adventure, was a far more arduous matter 200 years ago. Then, people traveled under their own power, or that of horses, averaging fewer than 15 miles per day over uneven, unpaved paths. Taverns and inns were located at frequent intervals along these routes to offer rest and refreshment to weary travelers.
An anonymous letter to the editor in the July 27, 1989, Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh announced the existence of a new Jewish congregation. A group of “gay and bisexual Jewish women and men” had recently begun meeting for prayer and fellowship under the name Bet Tikvah, or “House of Hope.” As the writer explained, “Bet Tikvah is a place where gay Jews can unite two areas of importance in their lives; a place where they can begin to heal the wounds of separation from their heritage. The views of people who believe we should not exist pains us but will not make us go away. For too long we have let others define the terms of our religion. We have chosen to no longer participate in their dictates and have created a community for ourselves.”
For nearly a century, Lawrenceville's Doughboy stature has been the Colossus of Rhodes for one of Pittsburgh's largest neighborhoods. The details of the dedication of its replacement bas containing the Sixth Ward Honor Roll have been lost to history - until now.
In the early 1920s, two immigration acts, the Emergency Quota Act in 1921 and the Johnson- Reed Act in 1924 (later known as the Immigration Act of 1924), placed quotas on immigrants entering the United States. Quota numbers were determined by the National Origins Formula, which restricted the number of incoming migrants based on ethnic populations in 1910 and 1890, respectively. This policy was in use from 1921 through 1965, instituted to curtail the high number of unskilled laborers immigrating from Southern and Eastern Europe.
In 1903, aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright made four powered fights at Kitty Hawk, N.C., successfully inventing the world’s first successful flying machine. To avoid weighing down the airplane, the Wright Brothers’ historic Flyer featured an aluminum engine block and crankcase supplied by The Pittsburgh Reduction Company, later known as Alcoa.
On May 30, 1969, just seven weeks before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed safely on the moon, Meadowcroft opened its doors to the public for the first time. A lot has changed since that time and now Meadowcroft is celebrating its 50th season!
The involvement of the people and corporations of this region in the space program did not end with the Apollo 11 mission. It continues to this day at companies such as Astrobotic, a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff. Recently the History Center had the chance to work with Jay Apt, acquiring artifacts and his personal papers as well as conducting a taped oral history. An astronaut and educator, Dr. Jerome (Jay) Apt grew up in Pittsburgh during the dawn of the national space program. He developed an early passion for flight and space exploration inspired in part by his father.
Fifty years ago this fall, the United States began its campaign to send astronauts to the Moon. On October 11, 1968, the Apollo 7 crew—Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham—became the first to fly the command and service modules, nearly two years after the original crew had been killed in a devastating launch-pad fire. Two months later, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders of Apollo 8 became the first humans to approach the Moon, circling it 10 times on Christmas Eve. Then on July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts carried out the landing that was the central objective of the program President John F. Kennedy had set in 1961. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface while Michael Collins orbited above in the mothership, Columbia. The direct exploration of the Moon by humans ended with Apollo 17 in December 1972, concluding a program that not only met Kennedy’s Cold War objective of beating the Soviet Union, but also yielded an enormous trove of scientific information and samples.
Willa Cather lived in Pittsburgh from 1896 to 1906, and returned frequently to write in her study at her friend Isabelle McClung’s house until 1915 when Judge McClung died and the house was sold. As an enduring gift to the literary life of Pittsburgh and to honor her 20 years of writing in the city, Oresick has collected Willa Cather’s six Pittsburgh short stories for the frst time in one volume. This is the second volume of the Marianna Brown Dietrich Notable Book Series featuring another female author of national import. Gifford Pinchot may not be a household name today, but this Progressive-era figure would arguably feel comfortable in at a modern political debate. As the first Chief Forester of the Forestry Service, a Progressive Republican, and a two-term Governor of Pennsylvania, Pinchot’s exhaustive career spanned many decades and encompassed numerous issues. In Gifford Pinchot: Selected Writings, editor Char Miller has chosen a broad range of the eclectic conservationist and politician’s writings and speeches that tap into the mindset of an early 20th-century social, political, and environmental activist. A scholar on both environmental history and Pinchot, Miller rightly argues that Pinchot’s writings are worth analyzing today, particularly as climate change and humanity’s relationship with the environment continue to be argued.
From the moment people realized that the brightest object in the night sky was a solid body rather than just a glowing orb of light, they began envisioning ways to get there. Dreams of using a cannon to reach orbit around the Earth can be traced to 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton included the example of an “orbital cannon” in his milestone work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica [Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy]. But Newton’s idea presumed that the cannon would be set atop a high mountain, one so tall that its peak reached above Earth’s atmosphere.
Tempted by the lure of being their own boss, many dream of opening a business. Few will follow through, perhaps warned of by statistics detailing the high percentage of businesses that fail within their frst years. Maude Y. Hawkins took this risk, seizing the opportunity to create a better work environment for herself. A small group of archival materials held by the Detre Library & Archives documents the challenges faced by Hawkins as repercussions from tumultuous events placed obstacles in her path.
Thousands of people around the world have been working for a century to answer the most basic questions about outer space: what is out there, how can we get there, and what can we learn there that will make life better on Earth? The first federal agency to institutionalize aeronautical research was NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, in 1915. With the shift from air to space travel, NACA was superseded in 1958 by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), established to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.
