East Liberty Commercial Historic District

About this property

East Liberty is a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's East End. It is bordered by Highland Park, Morningside, Stanton Heights, Garfield, Friendship, Shadyside and Larimer, and falls largely within Pittsburgh City Council District 9, with a few areas in District 8. One of the most notable features in the East Liberty skyline is the East Liberty Presbyterian Church, which is an area landmark. Around the time of the American Revolution, East Liberty was a free grazing area in Allegheny County located a few miles east of the young, growing town called Pittsburgh. (In older English usage, a "liberty" was a plot of common land on the outskirts of a town.) Two farming patriarchs owned much of the nearby land, and their descendants' names grace streets in and around East Liberty today. John Conrad Winebiddle owned land west of present-day East Liberty, in what are now Bloomfield, Garfield, and Friendship, and his daughter Barbara inherited a portion close to what is now East Liberty. Alexander Negley owned a farm called "Fertile Bottom" north of present-day East Liberty along the southern bank of the Allegheny River. Negley's land included some of present-day East Liberty and much of nearby Highland Park, Morningside, Larimer, and Stanton Heights. Alexander Negley's son Jacob married Barbara Winebiddle, built a manor house, and developed a village that he called East Liberty after the old grazing commons. In 1816, Negley saw to it that the Pittsburgh-Greensburg turnpike was built through East Liberty, which made the area a trading center and ensured its future growth. East Liberty truly began to develop as a commercial area in 1843, when Jacob's daughter Sarah Jane Negley married the ambitious lawyer Thomas Mellon. Mellon had first visited the area of modern-day East Liberty in 1823, when as a 10-year-old he saw the Negley mansion for the first time and decided he wanted something like it. He achieved this goal and much more: after first becoming a prosperous lawyer, he made his true fortune by marrying Sarah Jane Negley, selling or renting the land near East Liberty that she inherited, and using the proceeds to finance Pittsburgh's nascent industries. Like Jacob Negley before him, Thomas Mellon worked to make East Liberty a transportation hub: Mellon convinced some of Pittsburgh's first trolley lines to pass through East Liberty. East Liberty developed more or less independently of Pittsburgh until the Pennsylvania Railroad opened the East Liberty station in the 1850s. This passenger depot served to connect East Liberty to the city; twenty-six trains transported people to and from downtown on a daily basis. The rail connection was of crucial importance for the area's future development, because Pittsburgh was just about to enter its industrial boom period that would last between the end of the Civil War and World War I. As the city's population swelled to fuel the burgeoning iron and steel industry, East Liberty grew too. The neighborhood's population increased from under 1,000 in 1850 to over 46,000 by 1910. East Liberty acted as a first-ring residential suburb for elite families looking to escape the industrial smoke and soot of the city. By the turn of the century, it was one of the richest suburbs in America, containing many of the wealthy industrialists’ mansions. However, East Liberty was not exclusively an elite, Anglo-American neighborhood. The East Liberty Station brought floods of European immigrants and African American migrants from the South, who were drawn by Pittsburgh's manufacturing and industrial jobs. The neighborhood became home to an impressive number of churches for various religions and ethnicities by the late nineteenth century. There were separate places of worship for German and Italian Protestants, Irish, Italian and German Catholics, as well as a Presbyterian church for Anglo-Americans and an AME church for African Americans. East Liberty's diverse mix of Italian, Anglo-American, German, African-American, Jewish, Polish, Greek, and Irish residents stayed intact until after World War II.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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