Trip Report: May 12 - June 2, 2002
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
SPRING JOURNEY ACROSS THE CONTINENT AND RETURN
CLEVELAND TO PITTSBURGH
Friday, May 18, through Saturday May 25, 2002
Thursday evening we attended a concert of the Cleveland Orchestra at the newly restored art deco Severance Hall, also originally opened in 1930. Excellent program, acoustics, and performance. We were unable to obtain reservations at the Severance Restaurant and opted for the Terminal City Food Court. It is raining cats and dogs this evening as we taxi the five miles to the Case University campus for the concert. Having been stranded before at out-of-the-way concert halls at night, we had the Ritz-Carlton concierge arrange for a limousine pickup. It is with a sense of relief and pleasure as we exit the concert hall with 3000 other patrons to find not a cab in sight, but our driver waiting with a black Town Car at the curb. The hotel doorman assists us out of the Town Car with the comment, "Hey, man, out in a taxi, back in a limousine!" "Upward mobility," I explain.
After an excellent breakfast at Century at The Ritz-Carlton, we spend Friday morning touring Terminal Tower City just one more time, then check out of our room. Our bellman, Pablo, takes us to the concierge floor, where we enjoy a light gourmet luncheon with a view of Lake Erie, after which we make the short walk from our hotel to the downtown Hertz location across the street from the Sheraton Hotel. After picking up a Mercury Grand Marquis, we collect our luggage and proceed on our drive to Pittsburgh, 126 miles to the southeast. Avoiding the Interstates and Turnpikes, we follow Ohio Route 14 through the countryside. However, there is very little countryside anymore on this route. Other than a few miles of farmer's fields, it is an endless strip development between Cleveland and the Pennsylvania border where we join up with PA Route 60 through the wooded hills to the Greater Pittsburgh International Airport .
We check into the Four Points Sheraton Hotel and set up our portable offices so we can keep in touch with clients and make bookings for them while we're here. We are now traveling with two laptops and printers, and the hotel obligingly sets up a second desk in our room for our eight night stay. I was expecting a noisy, congested location, but find that our room overlooks a quiet wooded hillside, just like they describe in their website. Ask for a hillside room when you book this hotel, as the other side faces the Parkway as well as the airport runway approach path.
We've come here to visit Ted's mother.
To Sylvia's western eyes, a place where large rivers and multi-track mainlines appear every few miles is amazing. To Ted, born and raised in the suburb of Ambridge, it is quite normal. There is still a four track mainline of the Norfolk Southern, formerly the Ft. Wayne Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, passing through town. Across the Ohio River, the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie four track mainline, now the CSX, has been reduced to a single track, but a work train is in the process of laying a ribbon rail second track.
Ted's younger brother is in town, and we join him in some industrial archeology tours of the Pittsburgh "rustbelt" artifacts:
PENNSYLVANIA STATION AND YARDS
The site of the 1877 Pennsylvania Railroad strike, when management introduced double heading of all freight trains and lengthened work days, thus firing scores of engineers, firemen, conductors, and brakemen, then reducing the hourly wages of the surviving employees.
In a time when European immigrants were competing for jobs and there was no such thing as discretionary income, the workers rebelled. Several locomotives and hundreds of cars in the freightyards, as well as the passenger station, went up in flames. The strikers drove the Pennsylvania National Guard out of town, but were finally quelled by the United States Army.
PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD FRUIT AUCTION
In the days before motortrucks delivered all of our food directly to supermarkets, the Pennsylvania Railroad delivered fresh food to Pittsburgh, where is was sold at auction to distributors at the PRR Fruit Auction. Initially the produce was sold right out of the refrigerator cars. Later, immense facilities were constructed in what is called the Strip District, a narrow sliver of land north of the passenger station and between the Monongehela River and the hillside. The facility is now abandoned.
THE HOMESTEAD WORKS
The largest steel mill in Pittsburgh, Carnegie's Homestead Works, was a location of a sit down strike in the late 19th century, in a dispute for better wages and working conditions. This was a time when steelworkers worked under extraordinarily dangerous conditions, where losing a limb or a life, with no monetary compensation, was not at all uncommon. Hundreds of armed Pinkerton detectives were hired by management to break the strike. They attempted to land by barge at the mill site to drive out the strikers. Instead they were driven away in a pitched gun battle, led by a steelworker's widow who now operated a saloon, called the Rolling Mill, in the town of Homestead. But again, the military was called in, and the strike was quelled.
I had heard that the Homestead works was now closed. We visited the site, expecting to see a typical rust belt ruin. But it was worse. The enormous plant, which once produced battleship armor and cannon for two World Wars as well as the Spanish American War, had been torn down and replaced by an endless shopping mall for the pleasure of the consuming generations. We enjoyed an excellent lunch here. Afterwards we inspected the beginnings of a historical display at the site of the battle with the Pinkertons at the mill's pumphouse. Here are several industrial artifacts demonstrating the enormous scale of steel production.
CARRIE FURNACE
Carnegie's Carrie Furnace, is a bank of blast furnaces which produced 600 tons of steel ingots per day in its 100 years of operation. Twenty two million tons of steel! The hot ingots would be carried on special railroad cars across the Monongehela River to the Homestead Works mills, to be rolled into steel plate. Now it is a rusting, vandalized hulk.
THE EDGAR THOMSON WORKS
The Edgar Thomson Works, over 100 years old, has been reopened after a several year hiatus, and is cranking out steel again, but with a greatly reduced work force. We have seen steel rails in Klamath Fall on the abandoned logging railroad, the Oregon, Pacific, and Eastern, with the ET stamp, and a date of 1902. The City of Braddock, where the ET Works is located, is a virtual ghost town, with every store front shuttered except for an auto parts store.
H. J. HEINZ 57 VARIETIES
The H. J. Heinz food processing plant, was first opened in 1869, and changed food consumption habits forever. The present buildings were completed in 1930. Tours of the plant are available to the public, and are topped off with a sample plate of Heinz products in the tasting room. Ted can remember being taken here by his parents in the 1940s, and can still remember the aroma of the steaming soup cauldrons. No tourist leaves the tour without a Heinz pickle pin.
HEINZ PITTSBURGH HISTORY MUSEUM
Across the Allegheny River from the Heinz Plant is the Heinz Pittsburgh History Museum, located in a restored seven story ice plant. Of the many interesting displays here, we were drawn to the stainless steel bodied 1938 Ford sedan and the 1948 Pittsburgh Railways PCC streetcar.
Photo Note: Ted is photographed in the operator's seat of a Pittsburgh Railways PCC streetcar, one of the batch delivered by the St. Louis Car Company in 1948, and now on display at the Museum. These cars had sealed windows with forced air ventilation, and were probably the smoothest and quietist PCC cars ever constructed. These cars ranged over the entire system from Sewickley, through Pittsburgh, to Charleroi, Pennsylvania, a distance of over fifty miles from end to end.
BUHL PLANETARIUM
AND INSTITUTE OF POPULAR SCIENCE
One of Ted's favorite places to visit during his growing up years in Pennsylvania, the planetarium housed one of just a handful of precision Zeiss projectors in the world. The skyshows were narrated by the director, Mr. Hamilton Lyon, and were unforgettable. The arc deco building also housed hundreds of science displays, including the world shipping map from the 1939 World's Fair of New York, a Foucault pendulum, and a Van de Graf generator. There was also an annual Christmas Lionel Train Display and an annual high school science fair. The facility was build and paid for by one of the founders of the Boggs and Buhl Department Store and deeded to the city for all time for the education and enjoyment of the children of Pittsburgh. It has been abandoned, the projector in disrepair, in an act of civic vandalism. The building has not been torn down, but has been surrounded by the new development of Allegheny Center and is very difficult to find. Where there was an open view of the building from surrounding streets, now vegetation is growing up around it, making it appear somewhat like a lost Mayan ruin.
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