#Pixburgh: The 'Burgh

For more than 100 years, Pittsburghers have gathered under a clock at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street. To many, it will always be the “Kaufmann’s Clock,” regardless of the name on the building.

Legend claims that a public outcry put the clock there in the first place. The story goes back to the 1880s, when a freestanding, four-faced clock stood at the intersection of Fifth and Smithfield in connection with Kaufmann’s “Grand Depot.” The clock became a popular meeting spot. Some accounts even suggest that it included a sign that read “Meet Me Under the Clock.” Alas, when Kaufmann’s new addition was completed in 1913, that clock was removed. Customers protested and a new clock was added on the side of the building at the same corner. Whatever the real story, the slogan continued to appear in advertisements for the next century, and the clock became part of the culture of Pittsburgh.  

Oh those tunnels. Every Pittsburgher knows that the best way to complicate a morning commute is to add a tunnel to the drive. But they are also part of what makes the city unique.

Of all the tunnels in Pittsburgh, none was more anticipated than the Liberty Tunnels. The “Tubes” opened to cars in 1924 after four years of construction and many more of debate. Viewed as a crucial link between downtown and the South Hills, the route of the tunnels was a hot topic for years before their groundbreaking in December 1919. Pittsburghers watched as excavation crews blasted, drilled, and carved more than 400,000 tons of dirt and broken rock out of Mount Washington. Critics disparaged the project as “the cave in the hillside.” But when the Liberty Tunnels opened—5,889 feet from portal to portal—they were the longest concrete traffic tunnels in the world designed for automobiles. The “cave” put Pittsburgh on the map and signaled the Steel City’s modern progress.

No image symbolizes Pittsburgh’s cycle of change and rebirth better than the Point. This confluence where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio has witnessed intrigue, industry, demolition, and redevelopment since the 1700s. 

Early images capture the Point when barges and steamboats still lined the city wharfs, and the old wooden Union Bridge (1875-1907) crossed over the Allegheny River to the North Side. Structures such as Pittsburgh’s first Exposition Hall can also be seen. What these images don’t show are the warren of small residential streets that lined the interior of the Point into the 1920s.

Later photos capture the area’s dramatic rebirth after successive layers of demolition, clearance, and development. Changing land use and demographics made Point neighborhoods slums by the 1930s. Beginning in 1945, it took more than three decades of work, including the removal of railroad tracks, the reconfiguration of streets, and the demolition of hundreds of structures, before the new Point State Park was officially dedicated in 1974.