University of Pittsburgh - Owl Yearbook (Pittsburgh, PA)

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their faces burned from the red heat and glare, Stood from morning to night on a little platform and blew glass bubbles on the ends of sticks. The bubbles took shape and became bottles and panes and dishes that were loaded on boats and sent to the west. Each batch of glass got clearer and clearer until at laSt the sun shone through the windows and turned the apples, strung along the darkest rafters, a deeper red even in the rudest cabin. All this could not go on without more people coming across the mountains. Every day another covered wagon lumbered up into the city square where cows pastured near Grant and Diamond.The new cities of Lawrenceville and Allegheny began to make compe-tition for Pittsburgh. The narrow streets became crowded with burly men in working clothes, school children, and ladies in bustles and hoops out looking for a newcap or the latent bonnet from over the mountains. Then, too, traders from the west labored their way up the Ohio to get supplies for the season and to take home to the women folks some new trinket or vivid calico dress. The Pittsburghers of that time, not unconscious of their growth, wrote in the Gazette: “It is inevitable that Pittsburgh become a great city and an industrial center. At last the railroads came, and Pittsburgh went forward with a boom. Bigger mills, using all the new processes and turning out an end' less Stream of iron. Steel, brass, copper, and glass, spread out over all the adjoining lands until Lawrenceville and Allegheny were part of the city. More new industries came to this section, too, until now Pittsburgh is one of the industrial centers of the world. If there is anything to be made, just bring it to Pitts' burgh. She is eternally hurrying, but as the old saying goes, “If you want to get anything done, ask a busy person. And what is more, she is planning to be busier than ever in the future. Shall we move weSt? No! We are too busy. I

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S£j, % Pittsburgh labored to get her ships and Steel started, and once they were started she was busier Still. By 1813 the new mill, run entirely by one seventy-horsepower Steam engine, was flinging smoke against the blue sky, and boats came and went with coal, iron, and ore. Through the narrow streets, where muck from the last rain oozed along the gutters, men and boys hustled along, shouting to friends as they passed. Pittsburgh now had other interests than iron. In May of 1798 there had been built up along the river a frame mill run by water power. To that shack teams dragged log after log through the forest where creepers tangled over brush and made travel almost impossi-ble. And out of that mill came roll after roll of yellowish paper that went into Pittsburgh's one newspaper. The Pittsburgh Gazette. There was no whirring press in those days, and each copy was run off separately in a little room where the only light was a flickering flame burning on the end of a rag soaked in grease. With the paper mills came the beginning of one of Pittsburgh's greatest industries, brass. In the woody land around Like Michigan a man found some copper ore. As Pittsburgh already had most of the mills of the country, a load of the ore was floated down the lakes; and finally, one dreary morning, a baitful bumped against the wharf on the Point. Like true pioneers, Pittsburghers could use anything; little by little it was taken into the mills, and soon Fort Pitt copper was on the market. Out of this copper came brass. More and more copper came to our mills, until now there arc fifty brass foundries in Pittsburgh. JuSt while Pittsburgh was busiest with her iron, paper, and brass work, a new enterprise came in to make her busier than ever. A glass plant opened. Back in the old days there was no glass in the windows. The cabins had just mere peepholes for air and rifle slits. At night the rains bait against the oiled paper or skins tacked over the openings; the winds made them crackle and rustle; and sometimes the paper split and had to be mended in the coldest winter. What glass there was had to be carried over the mountains, and the roads were so hid that it rarely ever survived the journey. Then one day a new mill was added to the row along the river bank. A pile of white sand appeared, and more smoke rose and hung over the river. More and more people scurried through the narrow Streets to the water's edge, dodging an ambling cow peacefully chewing her cud in the middle of a Street, and tripping over small boys playing mumbley peg on the baird walk. Soon panes of clear glass took the place of oiled paper, and the window's began to let sunlight Streak across the wooden bowls on the tables. In the factory, a gaping mouth ate up the w'hite sand and digested it into a seething, bubbling liquid. Bronzed men, C il

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Pitt and Pittsburgh WHEN the Githedral of Learning raises its granite towards the sky, the smoke and fog of Pittsburgh will gray its Stone and blacken the Stretch of its walls. No one who has the ideals of the University in mind ever dreams that, with the building finished, Pittsburgh will somehow' alter itself so that blue skies and cottony clouds will always lie above. After the Cathedral is completed, life in our town will go on, to all appearances, much as it has in the past, unchanged in the externals of living. The Streets down town will be no wider; the fatforics will he no less things of fire and Steam and roaring iron; the traffic of grimy barges on the Ohio will Still sweep west and south; the rumble of trucks and trains and mills will Still surge from the Steel plants by the rivers; and the lights of the flaming Stacks at night will Still cover the blackened sky. Life, complex, nervous, powerful, will go on much as it has in the past. The transformation of the material city is not the province of the college, although, it is true, as beauty comes with the building, the same beauty may spread to our Streets and houses and places of business. But, for the most part, those who trust in the University must accept the town and believe that, although it is not beautiful — while it may have its grandeur,— it is yet a good place to live in, a good place in which to go to school and work and build one's home. To be a good Pittsburgher is to accept its mills, its nervous energy, its industry, and even some of its dirt. The province of the Githedral is not toeffetf a material change in our city although it may well do that. Pittsburgh will never grow better by comparing its crooked Streets with the lazy boulevards of Paris or w ith the languor and beauty of Spain. The Githedral of Learning is concerned not with the physical basis of Pittsburgh but with the spirit that made Pitts burgh and with the people w ho are now making and changing it by living here. This is to say nothing new, and yet it is to say everything. Cities are shaped more by the minds of their dwellers than by the contours of the rivers or the shape of the hills or the established industry.