Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Pitts­burgh’s Bridges: Architecture and Engineering By Walter C. Kidney Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, 1999 (235 pages, cloth, $49.95) For many, it’s surprising to learn that Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County are linked together by a vast network of sixteen hundred bridges. These spans make places accessible that would otherwise remain inaccessible and result,...
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Shorts

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Shorts An intensive eight-day study tour examining the England of Pennsylvania founder William Penn (1644-1718) will be conducted under the auspices of the Pennsylvania Heritage Society in Octo­ber 2000. Participants, led by historian Larry E. Tise, will visit the Church of Ail Hallows Barking, where Penn was bap­tized and where, in 1999, Governor Tom Ridge and PHMC Chairman Janet S. Klein presented a...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Pennsylvania Architecture: The Historic American Buildings Survey, 1933-1990 By Deborah Stephens Bums and Richard J. Web­ster, with Candace Reed Stem Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 2000 (629 pages; cloth, $85.00; paper, $65.00) This hefty volume befits its subject: it is a landmark book devoted to landmark buildings. Copiously illustrated, Pennsylvania Architecture: The Historic...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Grown and Sown For two centuries following the founding of Pennsylvania by William Penn in 1681, the lives of most Chester County citizens were tied to the land. “Grown in Chester County: The Story of Nineteenth Century Farming,” mounted by the Chester County Historical Society at its History Center in downtown West Chester, tells the story of early countians who accepted the...
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Wyck: Witness to a Way of Life

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Wyck: Witness to a Way of Life Relatively few in Great Britain might think much about a house occupied by one family for nine generations, yet for many in the United States several generations seems an eternity. Wyck, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, is a rare example; it is a residence inhabited continuously by a single family for nearly three centuries, from 1689 until 1973. Moreover, it’s furnished with...
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Keeping the Torch of Justice Burning Brightly: William P. Young

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Keeping the Torch of Justice Burning Brightly: William P. Young He faced criticism at his appointment, confronted adversity in his duties, and battled poor health in his later years, but he kept the torch of justice burning brightly for all to see, maintaining his dignity and poise at every turn. He was William Pennington Young (1895-1968), the Keystone State’s fifteenth secretary of labor and industry, from 1963 to 1967, during the administration of...
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Hummelstown Brownstone Quarries

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Hummelstown Brownstone Quarries Two miles south of the Dauphin County community of Hummelstown remain indelible reminders of one of Pennsylvania’s most recognized contributions to nineteenth-and early twentieth-century architecture,the gaping quarries of the Hummelstown Brownstone Company. Between 1863 and 1929, the company excavated the peculiarly colored sandstone, formed millions of years ago, which is among the finest...
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Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School Celebrates 100 Years of Magic

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School Celebrates 100 Years of Magic One hundred years ago, in 1908, two community-minded, socially-conscious single young women, Philadelphians Jeanette Selig (1886–1965) and Blanche Wolf (1886–1983), unwittingly created a school that’s become recognized as the largest community arts school in the United States, serving more than fifteen thousand students. In 1982, as the Settlement Music School observed its seventy-fifth...
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Birthplace of Commercial Ice Cream Production

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Birthplace of Commercial Ice Cream Production The small southern York County borough of Seven Valleys – which counted a population of 517 residents in the 2010 Census – has a lengthy history dating to the earliest German settlers in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1838 after the Northern Central Railroad Company’s line linked Baltimore, Maryland, with York, Jacob Smyser and John E. Ziegler opened the first store and...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Sweet William: The Life of Billy Conn by Andrew O’Toole published by the University of Illinois Press, 2008; 253 pages, cloth, $32.95 An Irish working-class hero of Pittsburgh, William David “Billy” Conn (1917–1993) captured the hearts of his contemporaries with his stellar boxing record, ebullient personality, and good looks. A lightweight boxing champion, Conn had defeated nine current or...
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