The New York Times remembrance of George Westinghouse Jr. which ran that sad day eloquently captured the essence of “one of the best assets of a nation.”
A broad view of the park
History Happens Here
Thanks for the coverage to the kind people at Print – Pittsburgh’s East End Newspaper.
In the pink!
Spring comes to Westinghouse Park.
A wonderful turnout last night. A full house.
posted by Frank Kurtig
George Westinghouse is not given his due today and has not received it for decades, being overshadowed by his rival. Thomas Edison, an inveterate self-promoter who outlived Westinghouse by seventeen years. Tonight’s presentation in the East Liberty Valley Historical Society’s Marilyn Evert Lecture Series was a double-billed effort to begin to restore some of the inventor-businessman’s luster.
Christine Davis spoke about the archaeological discoveries she made at the site of Westinghouse’s East End home, “Solitude.” One of the most fantastic subterranean finds was a 200-foot tunnel that once connected the basement of Westinghouse’s home to a private experimental laboratory secreted beneath his stable!
David Bear followed by talking about the park itself and how he would like to see it come alive through preservation, interpretation and activities. Living nearby, the impetus for his drive to call attention to Westinghouse and his property was the recent centennial of the park. He organized the Westinghouse Park 2nd Century Coalition to bring his ideas to reality.
I’m sure this will happen. How can I be sure? Well, of course, we all know: “You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse!”
Foamers Point
Few visitors to Westinghouse Park notice the sign located in its back, northwest corner.
That’s not surprising since the message on it faces toward the railroad tracks, the same right of way over which trains have run daily for the last 165 years.
The sign may be a mystery even for those who see it.
Well, perhaps not that much of a mystery.
Foamers, a little internet research reveals, is one, slightly derogatory term for people who like to watch trains.
There are others terms, delineated as follows by one avid railroader’s reckoning.
Rail-fan – An otherwise normal person who enjoys the pursuit of railroad related activities. That could involve sub interests including but not limited to observing trains as they pass, photographing, researching, studying, discussing, modeling trains, not to mention the railroads of the past, present or future.
These people are hard to spot in other circles as they are functional in normal society.
Foamer – A person who apparently loses all mental control when in the presence of: an actual train, railroad tracks (and in some places railroad property, an item of railroad memorabilia, conversation or other communication related to the subject of railroading.
They are easy to detect as most of them are social disaster areas anyway.
Railroader – There are three categories.
- Non rail-fan – A person who could care less what the rest of us who fall in any of the above categories think about them. They are there to do a job, earn a living, and make it home safely every day till retirement.
- Closet rail-fan – A person who typically enjoys their job whether they admit it or not. They are likely to be industry insiders and participants of railroad related forums. They are easy to spot as they typically use aliases or nicknames but are otherwise forthright with their experiences and opinions, regardless of what foamers think.
- Rail-fan – A person who enjoys their profession and is willing to share their experiences and/or wisdom with the rest of the railfan community. They are easy to spot due to their honesty, integrity, and passion for railroading and railroad related subjects while feeling no need to hide their identity.
At any rate, Dick Wilford, longtime superintendent of the park, remembers that early in his tenure, an employee who was a true rail-fan who put the sign.
Whether or not this corner of Westinghouse Park actually served as a meeting place for generations of foamers remains something of an open question.
Anyone with personal memories, please get in touch.
Where the Natural Gas Industry Started
2nd Century to present at East Liberty Valley Historical Society
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – February 20, 2019
Pirates, Presbyterians and Westinghouse are topics of lecture series
Westinghouse Park: A Bird’s Eye View Through Time
Today’s Westinghouse Park is situated in Pittsburgh’s East End area, in the neighborhood of Point Breeze North and adjacent to Homewood.
Here’s how the park looked from above in 2018.
At 10.2 acres, Westinghouse Park covers an entire city block, bounded on the north (top) by the rail line/busway, Thomas Boulevard on the south (bottom), North Lang Street on the east (right), and North Murtland Street on the west (left), both of which run one block more to Penn Avenue.
But that’s not the whole picture of course. While Westinghouse Park is now more than 100 years old, its history can be traced back more than 150 years. Using the excellent on-line tool Pittsburgh Historic Maps, which correlates historical city plat maps over a Google overlay, one can easily peel back the layers of time.
Here’s how that same acreage was allocated in 1862, when the earliest map of this part of then semi-rural East Liberty Valley was recorded.
The Civil War was raging and the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which has ever since defined the real estate, had been laid down less than a decade earlier.
Yet, ten years later, the area was already being defined and updated, if somewhat belatedly.
Here’s how the property was recorded on the 1872 plat map. Although other records show that the then 21-year old George Westinghouse purchased the 5-acre parcel along the tracks in 1871 (that’s the unassigned square), his name did not appear on the map drawn the following year.
At this point, Lang Avenue and Murtland Street run from Penn Avenue to level crossings at the rail tracks into Homewood, but neither McPherson nor Thomas Boulevards have yet to appear.
During the ensuing decade, as Westinghouse’s fortunes ballooned, so did his real estate holdings.
By 1882, he owned not only the full 5-acre rectangle between the tracks and McPherson Boulevard, but also half of the 5.2 acre tract on the south side of McPherson, which now appears on the map as a proposed street, along with Meade Street two blocks south.
Furthermore, Westinghouse has acquired all of the property between Murtland Street and Dallas Avenue from the tracks to Penn Avenue.
By the time the next plat map was drawn in 1890, the Solitude estate has been defined in its entirety, with the grand house, the stables (with underground laboratories), and a garden conservatory, and several outbuildings. The block of Macpherson Boulevard that previously crossed the estate has been turned into a “paper street.”
Interestingly, there is no indication of the three natural gas wells Westinghouse had drilled in 1884 on the south strip of the property along Thomas Boulevard.
Still no sign of the Heinz estate, Greenlawn, which would be created in the block across Thomas Boulevard to the north of Solitude.
Solitude remained unchanged on the plat map of 1905, but other transformations are happening in the area.
North Lang Street now has an arched stone bridge over the tracks into Homewood.
The property between Murtland and Dallas has been divided into lots for residences, and several homes have been built. Note Gordon Street, which now runs from Murtland west along the tracks.
And there’s Greenlawn, the Heinz estate which took root in 1892 when H. J. purchased a house and parcel along Penn Avenue and starts to steadily expand its footprint on that block.
By 1910, the neighborhood has reached its zenith.
In addition to Solitude, H. J. Heinz’s Greenlawn has taken over nearly the entire city block, boasting its own three-wing conservatory and large stables.
A string of handsome homes have been erected along nearly the entire east side of Lang Avenue from Penn Avenue to Homewood station.
And while the housing development envisioned for the Westinghouse plan is still on the map, few of the lots seem to have been purchased.
Yet the area’s gilded age didn’t long endue. In fact, by the time of the next plat map was drawn in 1923, much of its the grandeur was already gone.
In 1914, both George Westinghouse and his wife Marguerite died, and their son and only child, George III, inherited Solitude, along with the rest of the family’s fortune. Four years later, on November 30, 1918, the property was transferred to the city, via the Western Pennsylvania Engineers Society, to become a park in Westinghouse’s name and under the condition the house be torn down within 6 months. Solitude was razed the following summer.
H. J. Heinz contracted pneumonia and died in May 1919. The next year, while his heirs squabbled over the property, a blaze broke out and, despite being adjacent to Engine House 16, the Greenlawn mansion suffered significant damage. The structure was torn down shortly afterwards, and by 1923 when this last plat map was drawn, plans for what would become the residential block of Meade Place were already on record, including the transformation of the estate’s garage and servant quarters into residential apartments.
In 1939 the city stopped using drawn plat maps and turned instead to aerial photography, which although offering advantages, provides no indication of property boundaries or ownership.
Still there are changes to be observed.
Westinghouse Park generally conforms to its original configuration, but the Lang Avenue bridge over the tracks has been replaced with a narrow pedestrian walkway.
And Gordon Street has disappeared, replaced by the row of warehouses built along the tracks and Lynn Way.
Finally the transformation of the Heinz estate into a residential block doesn’t seem to have advanced much, with most of Meade Place still largely empty.
There’s a 20-year gap before the next photograph.
This image from 1957 did offer evidence of change in the park. The foliage in the center is more dense, while the field along Thomas Boulevard, now wooded, was then mostly open. The old Westinghouse stable building has now served the park for over four decades.
Across the tracks in Homewood, a factory has appeared.
The most salient change the next time the image was taken a decade later in 1967 is that the Westinghouse stable building has been replaced by the utilitarian, cement block structure which has served park users ever since.
By 1993, the park and its foliage appear fairly bare. Perhaps the picture was taken in late fall.
The most significant development is the string of suburban-style home on the new Parkland Way on the north side of the tracks.
Westinghouse Park looks much more colorful in this image from 2018, only partly because its foliage is full. The introduction of color and interactive detailing make a world of difference.
And the park has changed. Now there’s a circular children’s playground near the center, and an asphalt basketball pad near the tracks.
As the neighborhoods around the park get more prosperous and new developments at Stargell Field (immediately across the tracks) and Lexington Technology Center (one block away), the 2nd Century of Westinghouse Park promises to be bright indeed.
Westinghouse Park – History Happens here
Westinghouse: A Giant among Inventors
Ask the man on the street who he should thank for the electricity that lights his way and he’s likely to say “Thomas Edison.” But the name Westinghouse, to most laymen, conjures up little more than images of 1950’s fridges and toasters.
But George Westinghouse was a giant among inventors, and if there’s any one person who’s responsible for powering our world, it’s him.
By the age of 13, Westinghouse was working in his father’s shop, helping to make steam engines and agricultural equipment, for 50 cents a day. After serving the Union cause at the age of 17, he went to New York’s Union College. But the president of the college soon explained that courses in classics and the like would be a wasteful digression for a young man of such obvious talent. Instead, he should drop out and start with the inventing.
That’s just what he did. In a year he’d been granted his first patent, for a rotary steam engine. The engine was never used but it was the start of a lifelong interest in rotary power. It was also the start of a lifelong series of patents—he was awarded, on average, a patent every month and a half. Two other early Westinghouse patents were put to immediate use: His “railway frog” allowed trains to smoothly cross other tracks, and his “car replacer” guided derailed cars back on the tracks.
If there’s any one person who’s responsible for powering our world, it’s George Westinghouse.
The reason so many cars needed to be re-railed was the primitive braking systems of the time. Each train had a brakeman who rode on top, whatever the weather. When a train needed to stop, the brakeman would turn a wheel, hop to the next car, turn its wheel, and continue down the line braking each car individually. A train needed a full two miles to come to a halt. The process made being a brakeman one of the most dangerous jobs in the world—in one year 5,000 of them were killed.
Westinghouse had read about European air drills used to make holes for dynamite inside long tunnels—they worked with thousands of feet of tubing. Why not put the same system to use on trains? He patented the idea at the age of 22. With it, a train’s engineer could control the brakes of every car from his seat in the engine. Despite the initial reluctance of much of the railroad industry (it was cheaper to continue to risk the lives of brakemen than to pay the $50 for the Westinghouse brakes), they were eventually adopted everywhere.
The air brake business, with Pittsburgher Ralph Bagaley as backer, became Westinghouse’s first big business and he would continue to perfect the brakes over the years. Air eventually would be used to keep the brakes off the wheels rather than push them on; that way a failure would mean a stopped train rather than a runaway train.
Trains played a large role in his personal life as well. He met his wife on one. He sat next to the future Mrs. Westinghouse on a trip to Schenectady. After a short chat he realized he wanted to marry her, so, before departing, he gave her the addresses of several of his friends so she could write to them for references. Once married, he built her a summer home in Lennox, MA. It would soon be home to the world’s largest private power plant as well a private natural gas derrick.
Power was becoming Westinghouse’s obsession. He was quick to realize that Edison’s DC current, which would need a power station every mile or so, would not be a practical way to wire the world. He threw himself into developing a transformer that could ramp up (and down) AC current. When he joined up with Nikola Tesla in 1884, the intellectual side of the AC/DC war with Edison was over. But the media war continued. Edison began backing public electrocution of animals as well as the electric chair, to prove the dangers of A.C. current. He even coined a new verb to discredit his competitors: To kill someone with an electric chair was to “Westinghouse” him.
At the 1893 World’s fair, Edison lost the publicity battle as well. Westinghouse won a contract to light the fair, underbidding Edison by half a million dollars. Westinghouse chalked up any possible losses to the cost of good publicity. Edison countered with a patent challenge on the kinds of bulbs Westinghouse intended to use. But Westinghouse was ready for that as well, and turned to a secondary, somewhat inferior, bulb he had patented. At the fair, the 250,000 lights–25% of the bulbs in the world at the time–wowed visitors for whom night had previously been a much darker affair. Skeptics and doubters soon switched their support to Westinghouse and AC power. Westinghouse soon harnessed the power of Niagara Falls to power cities many miles away.
By the turn of the century, Westinghouse had some 60 companies to his name. He would borrow from one to fund another as he saw fit. But in 1907, with the country in a depression, he had to borrow from banks, and soon saw those loans called. As a result he lost much of his business, including his prize electrical works. After 1907, he could not pass those huge structures in east Pittsburgh without turning his face away. He continued to invent, however, and was named President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1910. Four years later he was dead, his designs for an electric wheel chair on a desk by his side.
Edison looms large in the public consciousness in part because he wanted to loom large in the public consciousness—and, arguably, because he was a less generous man. His record 1,093 patents included the inventions of his employees, patented under his own name. Westinghouse, famously good to his employees, preferred to let his workers patent their own inventions. Had he behaved otherwise his number of patents would easily have surpassed that of Edison.
Michael Abrams is an independent writer
westinghousepark.org 