Tube City Almanac

June 02, 2008

We Live Here ... We Like It!

Category: General Nonsense, History, Mon Valley Miscellany || By

For pure, unbridled Kennedy-era, "New Frontier" enthusiasm, it's hard to beat the 1963 book "This is Pittsburgh: We Live Here ... We Like It!" by the late Josie Carey and Marty Wolfson.

Long out of print, you can still get a copy at the Carnegie Free Library of McKeesport and on finer used-book websites everywhere.

I took a look at "This is Pittsburgh" for this week's installment of "Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix" at Pittsburgh Radio & TV Online.

Incidentally, "This is Pittsburgh" reports that all of Allegheny County's traffic problems will have disappeared by 1970 because of the fabulous new "expressways" being built, namely the Crosstown (I-279), the West Virginia-Erie Expressway (I-79), the Extension Expressway (Route 28) and the Penn-Lincoln Parkway (I-376).

(Or, the authors suggest, you can take "the Rapid Transit to Brentwood, the helicopter to the airport, or a train to anyplace you want to go!")

Since all of our traffic woes were solved by new highways in 1970, I guess I'm not sure why the Mon-Fayette Expressway is needed.

Ah, a cheap shot, I know, but I'm not sure that prognosticating --- particularly when we're talking about the improvements that highways will bring --- has improved that much in 45 years.






Your Comments are Welcome!

Don’t you just love nostalgia, I can remember my parents talking about the old Rainbow Gardens that they had to tear down to make way for a new interchange. In fact, I think about that everyday when I am stuck in traffic backed up to the White Oak Bowl on Rte. 48 trying to get through the light at Lincoln Way.
Chris - June 02, 2008



Priceless.
andrea (URL) - June 02, 2008



What those planners did back then (not having sufficient data otherwise) was assume an arithmetic increase in traffic to go along with the proposed highway system expansion. What they didn’t (any maybe couldn’t) anticipate was the logorithmic expansion in auto ownership and use that began occurring in earnest at about the same time they were formulating their predictions. I’m not sure yet whether the Mon-Fay route will be a significant improvement, but I certainly do agree that many of the existing local roads need some serious maintenance and maybe widening. And there really does need to be something done about getting out of Squirrel Hill and across the Mon in the afternoon rush period.
ebtnut - June 03, 2008



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