What is the "core" of the city?

[airwave09]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

By the way, this 1872 map (so right after annexation of the East End) is pretty interesting to contemplate:

maps:*76v01p10*1

As of that time, Oakland and Squirrel Hill were not yet very developed. But you can see that development had already been spreading out from the stations along the Pennsylvania RR main line (in fact those stations are prominently marked on that map).

I don't know what that means as far as terms like "core" are concerned, but it demonstrates that the railroad (which came through in the 1850s) immediately anchored development in the East End. And in that sense the East Busway corridor (which follows the same route, with some of the same stations) constitutes yet another long-standing focus of development, with East Liberty at its heart.

Great map, just goes to show that cities sprung up around waterways and railroads which were the two dominant modes of transportation back then.

That map also makes me want to bulldoze Allegheny Center and the Mellon Arena yesterday and restore the street grids immediately.

Post-war renewal plans were nothing short of a total disaster.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by airwave09

That map also makes me want to bulldoze Allegheny Center and the Mellon Arena yesterday and restore the street grids immediately. Post-war renewal plans were nothing short of a total disaster.

Yep--far more intact historic neighborhoods in those locations would be such a tremendous asset right now. Oh well. At least we can rebuild those areas on modern best-practices models (which look an awful lot like the more organic models of the pre-WWII eras).

Incidentally, it occurred to me you could look at the Wards on that map and get some sense of relative residential population density as of that time. There is no doubt if you look at that map in that way that the area around Downtown was WAY denser than anything else in the newly-enlarged city, development along the Main Line notwithstanding.

Fast forward to 1910, however, and things have radically changed. This great map from that year actually lays out the changes in Wards:

maps:*20090323-hopkins-0045*20090323-HOPKINS-0045.TIF

Squirrel Hill is still lagging, because its development as a dense residential neighborhood is still to come in 1910. But otherwise the East End is gaining Wards, and the Downtown area is consolidating and losing Wards, which reflects the big shift in residential patterns that occurred in the four decades between 1872 and 1910 (note the annexation of Allegheny required an overhaul of the Wards, but doesn't undermine the point about the relative changes around Downtown versus in the East End).

All of which is to point out this whole "center of gravity" of the City shifting eastward thing is really not new.