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 occasional wayside tavern.

About 1912 the term “North Hills” began to appear in newspapers to describe the 1-mile-square community of West View and its chief public attraction, an amusement park and dance hall named West View Park. Later, the term grew to apply to most of northern Allegheny County, ending at the Butler County line.

Early in the 20th century, and again in the economic boom of the 1950s after World War II, the North Hills mushoomed with population growth that in some places grew thirtyfold. Making it all possible were millions of dollars’ worth of transportation infrastructure improvements, first by rails and then by modern highways.

 

Early North–South Highways

Known since 1926 as U.S. Route 19, Perry Highway formed the major north–south gateway leading from Pittsburgh to Erie. Its life story followed the same course as those of dozens of other Pennsylvania roads, starting as an Indian trail and becoming a farm-to-market, privately operated plank toll road. In the auto age, it took on a national-trail-movement name and identity and finally gained a federally sanctioned route number designation as part of a seven-state roadway that reached almost 1,400 miles from Erie to the Gulf of Mexico.

Originally called the Venango Trail in Pennsylvania, it became the Franklin Road and then Perry Highway, or Perrysville Plank Road, to honor Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (1785–1819), victor over British naval forces in the Battle of Lake Erie, a campaign of the War of 1812. Historians debate how much Perry actually traveled over the route on his many trips between Erie and Pittsburgh, but chances are good that he used some portion of it. In any case, a century later — about 1917 — energetic good-roads boosters succeeded in naming the road after him.

From Pittsburgh, the route crossed the Allegheny River to Federal Street on the North Side, which was then a separate municipality named Allegheny City, annexed by Pittsburgh in 1907. In the 21st century, the neighborhood is termed the North Shore. From there, the route climbed a steep, winding path toward the Fineview neighborhood via Perrysville Avenue. Past the summit, the road continued a twisting course for a few miles before making another tortuous hairpin turn as it descended into West View. From there, it proceeded toward Perrysville, Wexford and Warrendale before leaving Allegheny County on its way north to Zelienople, Mercer and Erie.

As the state highway department took over more roads, highway builders improved Perry Highway through the 1910s and 1920s, upgrading both the pavement surface and the alignment. Some historians claim that the early private owners in plank-road days deliberately routed the road in looping bends to add mileage, thus artificially but legally boosting the amount of toll they could charge.

Whether that’s true or not, the state improved the road in piecemeal fashion over time, bypassing the curves. Local officials and motorists alike celebrated each newly rebuilt stretch with parades and opening ceremonies, as on September 13, 1930, in Ross Township when former and future governor Gifford Pinchot served as a speaker.

Although the road was a two-lane affair, crudely paved in some stretches, it represented a great leap over the 19th-century days of Commodore Perry, when a Pittsburgh-to-Erie journey took three days. As in other parts of the state, plotting the final route became a source of controversy, with competing towns vying to be included. In the end, Perry Highway ran mostly straight north–south, avoiding time-consuming diversions into Butler, New Castle and Greenville, all of which tried to lure the decisionmakers to include them.

To the east, another Pittsburgh-to-Erie roadway was developing, the William Flinn Highway, better known as Pennsylvania Route 8. But it took a more meandering path, diverging to touch more population centers, including Butler, Franklin, Oil City and Titusville. Flinn (1851–1924) was a state senator, state representative, Republican political boss, and contractor whose firm Booth & Flinn worked on major bridge and highway projects, including Pittsburgh’s Liberty Tunnels (or “Tubes”) and Wabash Tunnel and New York City’s Holland Tunnel.

 

The Harmony Route

Into this picture stepped an entrepreneur who was not a transportation professional but instead a successful area merchant. In 1869 Russell Hurd Boggs (1844–1922) and Henry Buhl Jr. (1848–1927) started a dry goods and notions store in Allegheny City, or what was known as Pittsburgh’s North Side, north of the Allegheny River.

The pair had become brothers-in-law in 1866 when Boggs married Buhl’s sister Marie, and the men remained lifelong friends and business partners. They developed their retail enterprise into the highly successful Boggs & Buhl Department Store, which one historian described as serving the “carriage trade.” Some called it an “equal of Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia and Marshall Fields in Chicago.”

 

Both men were natives of Butler County who had relocated to the city to make their fortune. With more than three decades of retail success behind him, Boggs now looked to his roots, envisioning opening up the rural territory north of Pittsburgh with an electric interurban railway — a high-speed trolley line that ran between cities.

Interurban cars were self-propelled motorized coaches, usually operated singly and typically of wooden-body construction. In those pre-automobile days, such railways became a popular way to tap travel markets where traditional steam railroads had neither the capital nor the interest to do so, or where interurbans saw an opening to offer more frequent and faster service. Cheaper to construct and more flexible to operate, they flourished between about 1890 and 1930. They died off at the hands of automobile competition, the rise of government-funded good roads and, to a lesser extent, the Great Depression.

The late author and historian William D. Middleton (1928–2011), who wrote a book titled The Interurban Era, said these cousins of the established steam railroads affected transportation infrastructure in two ways. “First, it is a shaper of new growth and development,” he wrote. “The transcontinental railroad is a good example; its construction provided the transportation framework that made the development of the West possible. Second, it is a response to existing needs that are unmet, or that are met in a better way. By doing so, of course, it also becomes a shaper of growth and development.” He added that interurbans could compete with established railroads by “typically offering lower fares and providing more frequent and regular service.”

Boggs’ Pittsburgh, Harmony, Butler & New Castle Railway was a poster child for the interurban era. In full operation, it ran cars over 90 miles of track in four counties — Allegheny, Butler, Beaver and Lawrence.

 

A Railroad Vision

Chartered in 1906, the $3.1 million PHB&NC moved quickly to acquire right-of-way and land for bridges, depots and power substations. Later that year, contractors employing 2,000 men were at work on what would become initially a 75-mile system to link the cities listed in the corporate name.

Its route map formed a Y, with the main stem running north from Pittsburgh to Perrysville, Wexford, Warrendale and a junction at Evans City. There it split, with one leg running northeast to Butler, the seat of Butler County and home of a steel mill and an enormous railroad-car manufacturing plant. The other line extended northwest through Harmony Junction (site of its car barn and powerhouse) and Zelienople to two major manufacturing centers, Ellwood City and New Castle, the seat of Lawrence County.

 

With early utility companies’ power lines not yet serving rural areas, Boggs set up the Harmony Electric Co. to both electrify his railroad and to sell electricity for home use. He negotiated many right-of-way easements for the line by offering farmers a $1 fee, a connection to his electric grid, and a flag stop (meaning that cars would stop to pick up or drop passengers on demand, but otherwise barrel on through at track speed).

Boggs announced that cars would run directly into downtown Pittsburgh over rails of the city streetcar system, Pittsburgh Railways Co., operated by PRCo motormen. It was no coincidence that, in Allegheny City, PRCo rails ran directly in front of his Boggs & Buhl Department Store.

Observers excitedly speculated that trolley connections at New Castle could make possible a trip through to Cleveland or even Detroit, all by clean, efficient electric railway.

Construction continued through 1907 and workers completed enough of the track and overhead wire system that Harmony Route officials rode a short test run on June 19, 1908. Regular service on the northern end, from Butler to New Castle, opened on July 23, with hourly service from 7 a.m. to midnight, at a fare of 70 cents. One reporter deemed that to be “considerably cheaper” than by the competing Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

It was also orders of magnitude faster, taking an hour and 52 minutes to run the 40 miles and making it possible, with a quick turnaround, to complete a roundtrip in four hours. “It was only by lucky connections and the most careful figuring that the trip [via B&O] could be made . . . in less than two full days,” wrote the New Castle News. “For that reason, New Castle and Butler have been as distant in their relations as if they were as far apart as New Castle and Harrisburg.”

Painted maroon with gold striping and lettering, the interurban cars offered riders plush seats, with furnishings trimmed in “leather, old oak and brass” and crowned with stained-glass clerestory windows. Besides a 40-passenger coach section, they offered a smoking salon and a toilet. A compartment near the motorman carried baggage, express shipments, milk and merchandise, so that farmers could transport fresh fruit and vegetables to Allegheny City, where PHB&NC laid a 150-foot-long spur specifically to serve a produce market on East Diamond Street.

Foreshadowing airlines’ in-flight movies by several decades, the Harmony Route equipped one of its cars — the “Harmony Party Car” — with a movie projector to show films en route. It also included such amenities as “luncheon and card tables, artistic seat coverings and accessories, and individual electric lights.” Groups such as sports teams, civic clubs and church Sunday Schools could charter a car for $55. Work on the south end, from Evans City to Pittsburgh, proceeded for another three months before all was ready to open the full system.

 

An Opening Reception

On November 12, 1908, the company ran a special for Boggs and other company officers from Evans City, some 25 miles out, entering Pittsburgh via Evergreen Road, East Street, North Avenue and Federal Street, crossing the Allegheny via the Sixth Street Bridge. Then it turned onto Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Way, looping through the city on Fifth Street and Penn Avenue. Boggs welcomed guests aboard for an inspection during an hour-long reception before the car headed back. “The theater crowds were coming out as it went down Sixth Street and headed back to the North Side and many turned to observe it,” the Gazette-Times reported.

With an initial complement of 12 cars built by St. Louis Car Co., the road started public service over the entire system two days later. “Passengers made the journey through tumbling snowflakes seated in trolley coaches, big, warm and elegant,” reported The Pittsburg Press. The first timetable called for cars to leave Pittsburgh every 90 minutes. Fare between Pittsburgh and Butler was 70 cents or $1.25 roundtrip; to New Castle it was 90 cents or $1.60 round-trip.

 

PHB&NC was no side-of-the-road country trolley bumping along the track. Boggs built it to high engineering standards, all on private right-of-way (running on public streets only to enter the major towns) with long stretches of straight, level track that allowed cars to easily reach 75 mph. Sturdy steel trestles carried the line over many valleys, with one bridge near Pittsburgh measuring 1,100 feet long and another near Perrysville 990 feet long and 140 feet high. The line was double-tracked from Pittsburgh to Bradford Woods, about 15 miles.

Popular demand for the service soon pushed the railroad to order four more identical cars in 1909, then two additional cars from the Standard Steel Car Co. in Butler in 1911. Ever resourceful, the company built seven more cars in its own shops in 1914, giving it 25 passenger cars. In addition, the road had six freight “motors” or electrified cargo carriers, two each built by the Niles Car Co. in Ohio, St. Louis Car, and the company shops.

Importantly, PHB&NC was self-sufficient in other ways as well. Its powerhouse stood on land that included a coal mine, thus providing fuel on site to generate the 1,200-volt DC current to energize the overhead copper wire and propel the cars.

 

Doing a Land-Office Business . . . Literally

But moving people and goods was only half of Boggs’ vision. The railroad incorporated a subsidiary, the North Pittsburgh Realty Co., to buy land, subdivide it, and sell lots to prospective homeowners. Even as construction of track was under way, the real estate company had bought 75 farms along the route for resale for “summer homes, poultry and fruit farms,” in the words of a Gazette Times reporter in 1906. Property values for such tracts had tripled, the writer added, jumping from $50 an acre to $150 in many areas, and in towns they had risen from $200 an acre to $500.

“Live in the Country and Work in the City — the Ideal Life,” shouted a headline from a 1910 North Pittsburgh Realty Co. advertisement. In an unpublished manuscript, Pittsburgh-area trolley and interurban historian William Fronczek, a longtime member and officer of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum at Washington, Pennsylvania, offered this analysis: “North Pittsburgh Realty Co. was ‘actively . . . buying choice real estate along the lines for the purpose of developing . . . subdivisions which would encourage passenger traffic on the line. Some of these developments turned into very prosperous, suburban bedroom communities. Others failed because of location, inaccessibility by other means of transportation, lot sizes too small, or the geography simply [was] unsuitable for building.”

He continued: “The most important of these . . . was the Bradford Woods Plan, which was initially laid out in April of 1910 . . . These lots varied between one and three acres and were in an attractively wooded site once known as Bradford Camp. As the lots developed, this became a popular summer home area for Pittsburgh people. Commuting was very easy by trolley . . . many beautiful homes were built.”

Sales of property at Bradford Woods — which seceded from Marshall Township in 1915 over issues of school policy — grew to be brisk, and the company expanded its operations by adding Bradford Woods Addition and Bradford Heights. In addition, North Pittsburgh Realty developed successful housing developments near Ingomar (the Highland plan in McCandless Township) and at Butler and New Castle.

Fronczek notes that “various promotions were used to get people to leave the city and come out to visit these subdivisions. On occasion a lot was given away in a raffle. Some of these lots were so narrow that it was almost impossible to build a home on one. So the lucky winner of one lot would have to purchase an adjacent lot in order to build himself a bungalow. In several locations along the line the company contracted to have stone bungalows built to stimulate lot sales.”

Another source of passenger traffic was recreational summer camps for both children and adults, including privately operated sites as well as a YMCA encampment along Conoquenessing Creek.

 

Other prospective passengers were pupils attending high school. Most townships in the North Hills maintained only elementary schools, some of them being of the classic one-room variety. Townships subsidized students wishing to pursue higher education by paying tuition at the nearest high school, with students riding Harmony cars to and from classes.

Indeed, the interurban permeated almost every aspect of daily life. Real-estate advertisements for farms and homes routinely touted their location on the Harmony line as a valuable asset and selling point. Funeral directors offered to pick up mourners at the nearest stop to their establishments for those attending memorial services for the deceased.

In operation, the Harmony Route proved to be a well-oiled and profitable transportation, utility and real estate machine. In its first full year of operation, PHB&NC cars racked up 835,100 miles in passenger service and 8,722 miles in freight service. In the 1910s, it adopted an expansionist mood, extending its Ellwood City branch to Beaver Falls in 1915 (which expanded the network to 90 miles), surveying a proposed branch into Ohio in 1916, and buying a weak interurban competitor to the east, the distressed Pittsburgh, Mars & Butler, for $670,000 in 1917. Nicknamed the Butler Short Line, the PM&B ran via Etna, Glenshaw, Allison Park, Wildwood, Gibsonia, Bakerstown and Mars, roughly paralleling both the B&O Railroad and the state highway that became Pennsylvania Route 8.

By 1920 the Harmony Route was carrying 4.1 million passengers a year and earning revenue of $1.2 million. Hourly cars linked Pittsburgh with Butler in 1 hour and 35 minutes running as limited expresses, matching the best times of the coordinated steam trains of the B&O and Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh railroads, but those schedules ran only four times a day each way. Between Pittsburgh and New Castle, the interurban made it in 2 hours and 25 minutes, slower than the Pennsylvania Railroad steam trains via Sewickley and Beaver Falls, but again, interurban frequency was twice or more that of the 10 trains a day each way via the PRR.

By this time, the twin burdens of aging and the loss of Boggs’ wife prompted the line’s founder and patriarch to bow out. In May 1919 his wife Marie died and a month later, now aged 75, he sold the Harmony Route, the electric utility, and the realty company for $4 million. Buying the properties was investment lawyer and University of Pittsburgh utility-law faculty member David I. McCahill (1884–1971).

 

The Auto Age Arrives

But the day of the affordable automobile soon reached full bloom. In 1908, the year PHB&NC opened, Americans owned 194,000 cars. By the 1920s the number had grown to 8.1 million, and by 1930 it reached 23 million. That trend, plus the onset of the Great Depression, competition from a growing bus industry, and municipal, state and federal aid to highway construction, ended the era of the interurban electric railway in America. People chose the convenience of the auto.

As happened with interurbans everywhere, Harmony Route patronage fell off and deficits rose. The line lost nearly $56,000 in 1923 and $246,000 in 1927. By early 1931 the road was losing $4,000 a day and its management was not maintaining the cars and track to their previous high standards. A federal judge named a receiver, and in an effort to survive, the company retrenched, discontinuing service to Beaver Falls and closing the Butler Short Line route entirely. On-line communities mounted a last-ditch effort to buy and save the line, but another federal judge ruled against them, allowing abandonment to proceed. On August 15, 1931, the final car ran from Pittsburgh to the car barn at Harmony Junction, carrying a handful of passengers who rode for sentimental reasons.

“The Harmony Route once formed the major link between a score of small agricultural and industrial communities and [the] heart of Western Pennsylvania,” editorialized The Pittsburgh Press. “As the years passed and autos began spreading over modern roads that were wilderness trails 25 years ago, the cars of the Harmony Route passed at longer intervals, with fewer passengers. The income . . . last year was $22 less than the payroll alone, and there was nothing left to pay for electricity, depreciation, and other expenses. So the Harmony Route was junked . . . It died of an overdose of gasoline.” It had lasted just 23 years.

In a 2016 retrospective, Ellwood City Ledger columnist Louise Carroll wrote: “When it opened in 1908, it was the beginning of an era of suburban living between urban centers. Until then, people usually lived in the city or town where they worked or in a place connected by the railroad. The Harmony Line made it possible for people to live in the country and travel to the city in a short period of time. [It] filled an important need in an era when a car was a luxury and roads between communities were poor, particularly in wet weather. But in the 1920s, cars became more common, roads were being built and repaired, and the need for the Harmony Line diminished.”

Fronczek, the historian, observes: “There is no question that communities such as Ingomar, Wexford and Warrendale owed much of their growth to the Harmony Route trolleys which faded into oblivion in 1931.”

The railway had started a bus and truck subsidiary, the Harmony Short Line Motor Transportation Co., which tried to compensate for the loss of the interurban cars. But the company’s motor vehicles drove over highways that skipped many of the farming communities served by the railroad. They, too, eventually faded away.

Planners looked at the abandoned Harmony right-of-way, thinking to resurrect it as a highway, but those plans never went anywhere. The rails were ripped up and the tons of steel in the railway’s finely engineered, soaring high bridges were sold for scrap.

 

McKnight: A New Way North

The Great Depression precipitated many social and economic hardships, but it also gave birth to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program of government infusions of aid to kick-start a sluggish national economy. U.S. unemployment spiked at 25 percent, or more than 8 million Americans out of work.

Even earlier, the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County governments aggressively pursued major public works ventures. In the 1920s the county built such projects as the Liberty Tunnels and the associated Liberty Bridge over the Monongahela, which opened up the South Hills to thousands of commuters; the Washington Crossing Bridge and the Sixth, Seventh and Ninth street bridges over the Allegheny; and the McKees Rocks Bridge over the Ohio and North and South parks. The coming of the New Deal served only to intensify this emphasis.

Since at least 1911 one of the highways owned by the county was McKnight Road, named for a family of early settlers. It extended north, much as the Harmony Route interurban had, from the point where East Street approached the boundary between the City of Pittsburgh and Ross Township.

In 1930 the county public works department set aside $250,000 to improve 58 miles of county roadways “to relieve the unemployment situation in the county.” Included was 3.2 miles of McKnight Road. In the mid-1930s some parts of this highway were still described as rural and “lonely.”

 

Some proof of this came in 1937, when drillers struck oil on the 23-acre Ernest Werner farm — which grew tomatoes, leeks and cabbages for the Pittsburgh produce market — at McKnight Road and Babcock Boulevard. The resulting gusher, the first in Allegheny County in 26 years, spewed 500 gallons of crude before it was capped. The financial windfall, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote, would allow the family to “soon have modern comforts, electricity, bathtub.”

That same year the county commissioners laid plans to spend $800,000 to widen and improve part of McKnight Road in Ross and McCandless townships. As a result, workers in 1938 started on a project — funded by the New Deal’s Public Works Administration — to build a four-lane, median-divided expressway from a point near the city line at East Street about 6 miles to a planned connection near Ingomar with the existing Pittsburgh-to-Erie road, Perry Highway.

By January 1940 the county was running full-page ads to publicize the project, which in photos resembled the then state-of-the-art, 160-mile-long Pennsylvania Turnpike that would open later that year. Planners viewed McKnight Road as a way to unlock the North Hills for residential growth.

A parallel goal was to improve public access to the county’s North Park. Opened in 1931, the sprawling, 3,094-acre recreational property offered dozens of picnic pavilions, a boathouse, two lakes, a golf course, fishing, tennis courts, ballfields and nature trails.

During the Great Depression, Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal programs improved the park facilities. In 1937 the county completed a swimming pool that once ranked among the largest in the United States, containing 2.2 million gallons of water and capable of holding 5,000 people. County officials were eager to maximize residents’ use of the park and saw highway access as the key to doing so.

In all, McKnight Road would cost some $4 million. Part of the right-of-way traced some of the route of the Harmony interurban line, abandoned a decade earlier.

 

Start-and-Stop Progress

From 1941 to 1945 the work jerked along in frustrating fits and starts, as two separate wartime federal oversight panels, the War Production Board and the War Manpower Commission, halted progress, then gave it a green light. But by then, a contractor was demanding more money for the project, which one account called “the county’s $4 million off-again-on-again model highway.”

Finally, on December 30, 1946, the county completed the road as a four-lane divided, limited-access expressway. It was as different from the old hairpin curve–riddled Perry Highway as the Pennsylvania Turnpike was from the two-lane Lincoln Highway draped over the Alleghenies.

County Commission chairman John J. Kane (1890–1961) praised the new road, saying that it “will do as much to open up the North Hills as the Liberty Tubes did the South Hills.” It was, he added, “one of the most beautiful, enjoyable drives in the state, through . . . unspoiled country. We want to keep it that way.”

To do that, Kane and other elected officials considered ways to tighten zoning laws. In a February 1947 story headlined “New Road Bars Honky-Tonks,” the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph reported that the county and the Ross Township commissioners planned to rewrite land-use ordinances to “prohibit honky-tonks, night clubs and hot dog stands from lining the landscape along new McKnight Road.”

Kane also said that he expected the road “to stimulate a great deal of attractive residential development.” He didn’t have to wait long. Apartment complexes and housing subdivisions sprang up rapidly to accommodate the swarms of returning World War II servicemen and women who were eager to start families and resume their peacetime lives. Many real estate ads for home sales bore the headline, “GIs Only,” a restriction that would be illegal today.

A real estate spokesman noted that “this whole area . . . is now several road miles — and many minutes driving time — closer to the Golden Triangle,” Pittsburgh’s name for its three-sided downtown business district created by the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. By 1948 one subdivision, McKnight Village, offered two-story, three-bedroom homes, equipped with a living room fireplace and all appliances, for $12,850 to $15,000.

 

Opening the Floodgates

Three years later, the growth had exploded. The Pittsburgh Press called the highway a “speedway to suburbia” and its reporter, Edwin H. Beachler, wrote breathlessly, “Some 20,000 suburbanites have climbed on the ‘magic carpet’ of McKnight Road and settled in this vast scenic wonderland of Allegheny County since the war.”

The influx had prompted local officials to organize the North Allegheny School District to educate children of the returning GIs. Until local townships founded the district in 1948, students wanting a high school education commuted to Pittsburgh — much as they’d done earlier on the Harmony Route cars — or Sewickley.

In late 1953 the state completed two important projects — a three-mile extension of McKnight Road to connect directly with Perry Highway at Pine Creek Road, including a cloverleaf giving direct access to North Park, and a four-lane widening of several more miles of Perry Highway from Wexford to Warrendale.

In December 1953 developers opened the $1 million McKnight Shopping Center — the first in the North Hills — with 17 stores at the intersection of McKnight and Peebles Roads and Babcock Boulevard. In less than a decade, this site would become famous for other reasons.

In 1955 a $3 million housing complex opened near this center. Occupying 26 acres, it consisted of five buildings containing 176 apartments and 19 more buildings containing 98 single-family rental houses.

 

A second retail complex, North Hills Village Shopping Center, opened two miles south of there in November 1956 with 44 stores. Included was a major anchor tenant, Gimbel’s department store from downtown Pittsburgh.

The lion’s share of suburban retail expansion followed the new expressway, not the historic Perry Highway. A very mature artery of constricted capacity and mostly of obsolete design, it was largely hemmed in by older houses and existing businesses. Just one shopping center grew up along that road — the 12-acre Pines Plaza, opened in June 1956 with 30 stores and a bowling alley.

Making the biggest news of all in area merchant circles was an April 1961 announcement that developers would reconfigure and expand McKnight Shopping Center to create Pennsylvania’s first all-enclosed, air-conditioned retail space, the $10 million Northway Mall. With 62 stores, 300,000 square feet of shopping area, and parking for 8,000 cars, it was truly a retail megacenter.

Its anchor tenant was Horne’s, another of the legacy downtown department stores. Expanded to two levels, the mall boasted a 300-seat community center and the state’s first glass-enclosed elevator. “A park-like setting complete with pools, fountains and trees has been provided,” wrote the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “More than 7,000 tropical and semi-tropical plants, together with an aviary [stocked with tropical birds], also will be on view.” It opened on August 1, 1962, with Gov. David L. Lawrence as keynote speaker.

Mall expansion was not over. In August 1986 officials opened the $82 million Ross Park Mall. With full occupancy, more than 170 stores filled its 1.2 million square feet of retail space. It sprang up midway between North Hills Village and Northway Mall. It, too, was the child of transportation improvements, benefiting from the construction of Interstate 279, the Parkway North, a three-mile segment of which replaced East Street in Pittsburgh, feeding into McKnight Road.

As for McKnight Road itself, Allegheny County on May 1, 1965, turned over ownership of all of its portion — about 4½ miles — to the Pennsylvania Department of Highways, now Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, or PennDOT. Including PennDOT’s 3-mile stretch, opened in 1953, the 7-mile road serves one of the most built-up residential and retail areas of Allegheny County. Although the north and south ends remain as limited-access highways, traffic lights and direct business access now dominate its center portion.

 

Coming Full Circle: Russell Boggs’ Legacy

In 2003 historian Ruth McCartan wrote of merchant Russell Boggs in the Allegheny City Society’s Reporter Dispatch newsletter, “His most ambitious business venture, one that was the most important to the development and growth of the northern suburbs, has all but faded from our collective memory. A few pole bases and scattered rights-of-way in various northern townships are all that remain of the Pittsburgh, Harmony, Butler & New Castle Railway, financed and built by retailer Russell H. Boggs.”

In 1958 Boggs & Buhl announced that it was closing its department store, a North Side institution for 89 years, driven out of business by the North Hills suburban shopping centers spawned by the postwar economic boom. Unlike Gimbel’s, Kauffman’s and Horne’s — the Big Three downtown department stores that adapted to the times by moving out to the suburbs — Boggs & Buhl was hobbled by its North Side location and an inability to relocate.

A survey found that 24 percent of the housewives patronizing North Hills Village Shopping Center had previously shopped on Pittsburgh’s North Side. And of them, 60 percent were former Boggs & Buhl customers. The store estimated that it lost $1 million a year in sales just to that one shopping center.

Since 1941 the store had lost money, and in 1948 local investors rescued it at the last minute. It struggled on for another decade before the suburban flight sparked by one of its founders and his Harmony Route interurban railroad caught up to it at last.

 

Sidebar: What’s Left of the Harmony Route Interurban?

Hundreds of interurban electric railways linked cities across America as a “logical development from the electric street railway,” in the words of the late historian, author and civil engineer William D. Middleton. They were an exclusively American form of transportation, from the first one in 1893 to two survivors today, the Chicago South Shore & South Bend Railroad and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s Route 100 line between Philadelphia and Norristown.

At their height, some 10,000 cars ran over 18,000 miles of track, much of it in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, where flat ground made construction easy and inexpensive. Pennsylvania boasted nearly 80 interurbans, among the most notable of which were Lehigh Valley Transit, whose “Liberty Bell Route” linked Philadelphia with Allentown, and West Penn Railways, which blanketed the coke region in the southwest.

Many of these carriers made connections with local trolley systems. So pervasive was the route network that at one time, it was possible, by changing cars countless times, to hopscotch from Mount Holly Springs, Cumberland County, to Philadelphia entirely by electric railway. The route was circuitous, and the ride would have taken many times longer than a trip on the Pennsylvania Railroad, but it could be done.

With the coming of affordable automobiles and better highways, these systems died off one by one, including the Pittsburgh, Harmony, Butler & New Castle Railway, which quit in 1931. Nationally and in the Keystone State, most of the rest were gone by 1950.

For the PHB&NC, some evidence remains in the form of crumbling bridge piers, graded cuts and fills where it traveled through hills and over valleys and present-day streets that follow the old right-of-way. Some of those streets are named Harmony, others not.

But more tangible reminders luckily survive in the collection of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum (PTM) in Washington, Pennsylvania. When the railroad stopped running, its Wexford station became the local post office, then an antique store, then a craft shop, and finally a deli. In 2015 PTM rescued and relocated it, then restored it as part of its complex, and you can visit it today. A much smaller waiting shelter, named West for the family on whose Cranberry Township, Butler County, farm it was built, also was restored and stands beside PTM’s active preservation trolley line.

Perhaps most remarkably of all, one of Harmony’s 25 wooden-bodied passenger cars — No. 115, built in 1909 — escaped being torched with the rest after abandonment. One of the Harmony motormen, named Clark, bought it and placed it along a road between New Castle and Ellwood City. There, it became Clark’s Diner, then the Ranch, and finally the Dew Drop Inn. PTM acquired the car in 1986. It is, as yet, unrestored but is kept under roof as a proud member of the museum’s collection of several dozen streetcars and interurbans.

 

Sidebar: Population Growth in Pittsburgh’s North Hills, 1900–2020

Through the 20th century, the transformation of northern Allegheny County forests and farmland into the suburbia known as the North Hills was nothing short of explosive. This mirrored the residential, nonprofit (hospitals, schools and churches) and retail-sector growth, all fueled by public and private investments in transportation. In the case of McCandless Township, the order of magnitude of the increase approached thirtyfold.

Location                                         1900     1920     1950      2020     Increase
McCandless Township                     1,034      1,465      6,488    29,709    2,773%
Pine Township                                   658         685         1,732     14,691     2,132%
Franklin Twp./Franklin Park*       726          847         2,314     15,479    2,032%
Ross Township                                  2,671       4,949     15,744    33,176    1,14 2%
Marshall Township                           799          1,140       1,745     10,173     1,173%
Bradford Woods**                             —            213          458         1,183      455%
West View***                                     1,626^    2,797       7,581      6,685     311%

This compares to a doubling of Pennsylvania’s population from 1900 to 2020 (6.3 million to 13.0 million, or 106 percent growth) and roughly a doubling of Allegheny County’s population (775,058 to 1.6 million by 1960—116 percent growth—now declined (2022) to 1.2 million.

Sources: Pennsylvania State Data Center at Penn State Harrisburg; U.S. Census Bureau

* Franklin Township became Franklin Park Borough in August 1961.

** Bradford Woods seceded from Marshall Township, incorporating as a borough on May 3, 1915. Its population growth is constrained by its geographic area, just .89 square mile.

***West View seceded from Ross Township, incorporating as a borough in 1905. Its population growth is constrained by its geographic area, just 1.02 square mile.

^Figure for 1910; borough organized in 1905.

 

Dan Cupper is a transportation historian from Harrisburg and a retired locomotive engineer for Norfolk Southern Railroad. He has written numerous books and articles on railroad and highway history. His previous contributions to Pennsylvania Heritage include “The Battle of Lancaster Station” (Summer 2023) and “The Early Days of the William Penn Highway” (Winter 2022).