By William Curvan
This one’s a bit of a ramble, but I have a lot of pictures (you like pictures, right?), and some really neat art from Sam Bates, so take a moment and let me tell you a truncated, picture-based history of the land our campus sits on.
Following the Civil War, as the furnaces of Pittsburgh started to roar and Andrew Carnegie accrued his fortune, the newly minted upper class of Pittsburgh began to buy expansive homes on the broad, straight(ish) avenues of Fifth and Forbes. If you look at maps from the late 1800s and early 1900s (no really, look at this and marvel, it’s an amazing tool), you’ll see a lot of familiar names occupying plots of land that will become the Carnegie Technical Schools. You can find Donner and Mudge (interestingly, the Mudge estate was previously occupied by the significantly cooler-named Dilworth family), but you can also find the estates of Margaret Beeler, two relatives of Henry Phipps, Mary Schenley, and Chris Magee.
That last one is the most interesting, actually. The aforementioned were all notable members of the gilded-age Pittsburgh upper crust, but Chris Magee was actually a political boss who effectively ran the city of Pittsburgh for a little while. More than a few properties in this neck of Oakland bear his name on the late-1800s maps, including the Pittsburgh Golf Club (a still-active club whose members included such scoundrels as Henry Clay Frick and Andrew W. Mellon). This is, in fact, the same Magee who philanthropized the construction of UPMC Magee Women’s Hospital right down the street, which was built on the site of another of his estates. That blurry photo of a mansion shows one of his estates, located where Hamburg Hall currently stands.
So the city was expanding, the rolling farmland to our east was slowly turning into Squirrel Hill, and the speculators were speculating. The big new tech of the day was streetcars (or trolleys, if you’re freaky like that) which were beginning to spread from downtown along major routes of travel. One ambitious individual, whose name has been lost to history (I didn’t look) thought it would be really neat if somebody could take a train from Oakland to Squirrel Hill, and so they made it and called it the Squirrel Hill Railroad. This train line, which ran single-car electric trolleys, traveled directly through our current campus. It started on the Pitt side of Junction Hollow, ran through the basement of what would one day become Scaife and Hamerschlag Halls, hooked a right at Wean, and then ran parallel to the creek which formed the Cut. (Did you know the Cut used to be a ravine?)
A city ordinance sent to me by Helen Wilson of the Squirrel Hill Historical Society grants to the “Squirrel Hill Railroad Company … the right to construct and maintain a railroad in the fourteenth and twenty second wards of the city”.
Sadly, this railroad ceased to be, even before Andrew Carnegie decided to build his technical schools. According to a writeup on LinkedIn by Robert Carlson, this railroad encroached on the recently-donated estate of Mary Schenley, which was under the purview of the city’s parks director, Edwin Bigelow. He sued the company to scare off investors and Pittsburgh lost one of its railroads.
If the railroad had stuck around, it’s unlikely that it would have survived the construction of the Carnegie Technical Schools 10 years later, and even less likely to have survived the decline of the streetcar in Pittsburgh. But just maybe, there’s an alternate universe where you can pick up the train in front of Donner and make it to your 8 a.m. in Wean.
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