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I. HISTORY OF THE WEST END-NORTH SIDE BRIDGE

A. Introduction

On December 1, 1932, amidst news of hunger marches, "share-the-work" campaigns, and exhausted local relief funds, Pittsburgh celebrated the opening of the $3,640,000 West End-North Side Bridge. The opening of the bridge was the culmination of twenty-five years of agitation for a bridge to link the city's industrial North Side with the growing newer communities of the West End and the South Hills (Pittsburgh Post Gazette, December 2, 1932).

On the eve of the bridge opening, the North Side-West End Bridge Celebration Committee, representing twenty Allegheny County civic organizations, hosted a gala banquet at the Fort Pitt Hotel that was attended by the county commissioners, Pittsburgh and South Hills businessmen, members of the West End Board of Trade, the South Hills and North Borough Highway Association, and members of the Pittsburgh City Council. The master of ceremonies was Henry Tranter, a prominent Pittsburgh manufacturer, a lifelong resident of Greentree Borough, the former head of the West End Board of Trade, an active member of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce's Bridges and Highways Committee, and the moving force behind the building of the West End-North Side Bridge. Tranter called the bridge opening "an epoch in the history of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County." Confessing the obvious, that the new bridge saddled the depression-torn county with an untimely tax burden, the incurable booster Tranter said, "in view of the return of prosperity which I believe is now approaching," the debt is bearable (Pittsburgh Press, December 2, 1932; Post Gazette, December 1, 1932; Post Gazette, December 2, 1932).

At the bridge-opening festivities on December 2, 1932, Tranter's seven-year-old granddaughter, Mary Hershberger, cut the ribbon, officially inviting traffic across the new West End-North Side Bridge. Next, a cheering convey of three hundred vehicles motored across the new bridge and, taking Main Street and Noblestown Road, toured the boroughs of Crafton, Greentree, Carnegie, Dormont, and Mount Lebanon before the motorcade returned over the Saw Mill Run Boulevard (Pittsburgh Press, December 2, 1932).

In historical perspective, the West End-North Side Bridge opening had both symbolic and paradoxical significance. Indeed, as Tranter hoped, the bridge did link North Side and South Hills, a marriage symbolically consummated by the route of the motorcade. Contrary to Tranter's dream, however, the prosperity conjured up in the hyperbole surrounding the completion of the bridge never materialized. Instead, as this brief history indicates, a decade of decline for the North Side and Chateau areas followed the construction of the four elevated pony truss bridges that form the northern approach.

This study focuses first on the decision to build the West End-North Side Bridge. It looks briefly at the construction of the bridge and then explores more closely the history of the industrialized Chateau area, that is, the Twenty-First Ward, which was the section most directly affected by the building of the bridge. This study shows that the four pony truss bridges, which constituted the northern approach to the West End-North Side Bridge, sliced through a historically industrialized neighborhood, the Chateau or shorefront district of old Manchester. This neighborhood also had a large residential component and thus illustrates the historic nexus between work and residence that characterized late nineteenth and early twentieth century urban industrialism. Although the bridge disrupted the residential character of the Chateau area in 1930, it is more fair to argue that the bridge oversaw rather than precipitated the eventual decline of the neighborhood (Rimmel 1969; Hershberg 1981:3-35).

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