Roads and Rails in Pittsburgh’s North Hills: How Transportation Fast-Tracked 20th-Century Suburban Development

Posted by on Feb 24, 2025 in | Comments Off on Roads and Rails in Pittsburgh’s North Hills: How Transportation Fast-Tracked 20th-Century Suburban Development The North Hills of Pittsburgh today resembles the suburban landscape clustered around many other American cities, dotted with housing subdivisions, roadside shopping centers, schools and too many traffic lights to count. But a little more than a century ago, this part of Allegheny County was like a rural outpost, a sparsely settled land of forested hillsides, rolling farmers’ fields, and the...
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Editor’s Letter

Posted by on Feb 21, 2025 in | Comments Off on Editor’s Letter In the Spring 2024 edition of Pennsylvania Heritage, we looked at the World War II experience of Steelton’s Thomas Mosley, one of the first Black men to serve in the U.S. Marines since the Revolutionary War. In this issue we continue our focus on World War II as we approach the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge and highlight the role of Pennsylvanians in that decisive conflict. In the...
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Pinchot Roads: Paving the Way for Progress

Posted by on Jul 24, 2023 in | Comments Off on Pinchot Roads: Paving the Way for Progress In the early years of travel, Pennsylvania’s roads were difficult and even dangerous to navigate. Margaret van Horn Dwight struggled to traverse the roads of Franklin County by carriage. She wrote in 1810, “I was so lame and so [tired] that for an hour I did not know but I must set down and die — I could not ride — the road was so bad, it was worse than walking.” A few weeks later she had a...
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The Early Days of the William Penn Highway: How Present-Day U.S. Route 22 Got its Start

Posted by on Nov 30, 2021 in | Comments Off on The Early Days of the William Penn Highway: How Present-Day U.S. Route 22 Got its Start At the dawn of the automobile age, the major roadways crossing Pennsylvania were rutted, dusty, farm-to-market thoroughfares traveled mainly by horses and wagons. Many of these were still privately owned turnpikes, some with wooden-plank road surfaces. Most towns had improved streets, but the paving, if any, usually ended at the city line. Stagecoach lines still operated here and there, but...
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Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern by Edward K. Muller and Joel A. Tarr

Posted by on Feb 17, 2021 in | Comments Off on Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern by Edward K. Muller and Joel A. Tarr Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern Environment, Landscape, Transportation, Energy, and Planning by Edward K. Muller and Joel A. Tarr University of Pittsburgh Press, 504 pp., hardcover $40 Discussions of “modern” Pittsburgh often begin and end with the Renaissance, the rightfully lauded postwar effort to spruce up the city’s tarnished image and clear its smoky skies. But there is so much more to...
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WWII Target: Altoona

Posted by on Jun 8, 2020 in | Comments Off on WWII Target: Altoona The tale of the bold but fizzled 1942 Nazi plot to sabotage the Horseshoe Curve railroad landmark near Altoona, Pennsylvania, has been told in books and articles almost since the day the spy-thriller story began to unfold. First came a juvenile-fiction account in 1944 titled The Long Trains Roll by Stephen W. Meader. It recounts the story of Operation Pastorius, a wry allusion to the theme of...
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Editor’s Letter

Posted by on Jun 4, 2020 in | Comments Off on Editor’s Letter With the recent premiere of Country Music, director Ken Burns has launched another epic PBS TV docuseries that amplifies the significance of an enduring American institution. In this issue’s cover story, “High on a Mountain,” we follow up with a look at Pennsylvania’s key role in the evolution of country music and the state’s later contributions to the genre. Author Joe Baker takes us on a...
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The Frankford Avenue Bridge over Pennypack Creek

Posted by on Mar 13, 2020 in | Comments Off on The Frankford Avenue Bridge over Pennypack Creek In 1830 a Philadelphia journal dedicated to literature and the arts included a lithograph by William Breton (c.1773–1855) featuring the Pennypack Creek Bridge, also known today as the Frankford Avenue Bridge. Breton was based in Philadelphia and focused his work on local landmarks and bucolic settings. The bridge satisfied both inclinations. As described in the journal, it was already recognized...
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Bubley by Greyhound: Photographing Wartime Rationing

Posted by on Feb 3, 2020 in | Comments Off on Bubley by Greyhound: Photographing Wartime Rationing Most photographs from World War II document industries or overseas military activities. Rarely do we get a look at daily life on the home front. One young woman who was documenting ordinary lives at that time was Esther Bubley (1921–98), who became known for taking intimate photos of people despite lugging around a large camera. There’s no better example of that than a story from her niece Jean...
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Editor’s Letter

Posted by on Feb 3, 2020 in | Comments Off on Editor’s Letter “You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically.” So wrote American philosopher William James in an address he delivered in 1907. Even such disciplines as “geology, economics and mechanics,” he continued, are “humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being.” By extension, the features in...
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