Swisshelm Park is a neighborhood located in the southeast corner of
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...
,
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
. It is represented o
Pittsburgh City Councilby Corey O'Connor. Swisshelm Park houses
PBF 19 Engine, and is covered by
PBP Zone 4 and the Bureau of EMS Medic 7.
A majority of Swisshelm Park is largely surrounded by
Frick Park
Frick Park is the largest municipal park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, covering . It is one of Pittsburgh's four historic large parks.
History
The park began when Henry Clay Frick, upon his death in 1919, bequeathed south of Clayto ...
.
Squirrel Hill
Squirrel Hill is a residential neighborhood in the East End of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The city officially divides it into two neighborhoods, Squirrel Hill North and Squirrel Hill South, but it is almost universally treated a ...
'
Nine Mile Runproject borders it on the west; to the north is a section of the park adjacent to the
Regent Square and the
Parkway East
Interstate 376 (I-376) is a major auxiliary route of the Interstate Highway System in the US state of Pennsylvania, located within the Allegheny Plateau. It runs from I-80 near Sharon south and east to a junction with the Pennsylvania Tu ...
. It also includes Duck Hollow,
whose roads only connect to Squirrel Hill, in its borders.
The Sarah Jackson Black Community Center caters to the recreational and civic interests of the neighborhood. The Center also lists the names of the hundreds who fought in the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
from the small community, including seven who died in action. Swisshelm Park Parklet is the place for young children to play. The neighborhood adjoins Frick Park, Regent Square, the Squirrel Hill shopping district, and
Edgewood Towne Centre
Edgewood is a borough in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, adjacent to the city of Pittsburgh. The population was 3,118 at the 2010 census.
History
Edgewood was incorporated on December 1, 1888. Its historic landmarks include the E ...
.
Swisshelm Park is full of suburban-style ranch and two story brick homes. It is also a tightly knit, family-oriented community. Its residents are active in its many recreational and youth programs. Because many city agencies require its employees to be city residents, the suburban character of the neighborhood has attracted many employees in the Department of Public Safety's Bureaus of
Fire
Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material (the fuel) in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction Product (chemistry), products.
At a certain point in the combustion reaction, called the ignition ...
,
Police
The police are a constituted body of persons empowered by a state, with the aim to enforce the law, to ensure the safety, health and possessions of citizens, and to prevent crime and civil disorder. Their lawful powers include arrest and t ...
and
EMS, and the
Pittsburgh Public School District.
History
Long before it had a name, Swisshelm Park was home to the Susquehannock and Iroquois Indians. Like the adjacent borough of
Swissvale, Pennsylvania
Swissvale is a borough in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, east of downtown Pittsburgh. Named for a farmstead owned by James Swisshelm, during the industrial age it was the site of the Union Switch & Signal, Union ...
, Swisshelm Park is named after the Swisshelm family, which moved to the area in 1800, although the land was also known to locals as Deniston Park or North Homestead.
[http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~paallegh/swisshelm.html ] John Swisshelm (1752–1838), a veteran of Valley Forge, purchased a grist mill from William Pollock in 1808 and built a small log cabin in Nine Mile Run Hollow.
The approximate location of the Swisshelm family homestead was just west of what is now S. Braddock Avenue and W. Swissvale Avenue, with the grist mill likely buried where the adjacent parkway now sits.
The largely Scotch-Irish settlers in the area took their grain to Swisshelm's grist mill for grinding, which then made its way to Pittsburgh via the old Braddock Road.
The grist mill and barn had crumbled and fallen by 1892, while the old Swisshelm house burned down in 1904.
The Swisshelm name gained fame and prestige from John Swisshelm's daughter-in-law,
Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm (December 6, 1815 – July 22, 1884) was an American Radical Republican journalist, publisher, abolitionist, and women's rights advocate. She was one of America's first female journalists hired by Horace Greeley at hi ...
, who was a teacher, business owner, prominent feminist, publisher of the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter - an anti-slavery newspaper
- and an organizer of the
Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early- to mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and Canada. T ...
. In 1850, Swisshelm made history as the first woman in the Senate press gallery.
It was Jane Swisshelm who gave the Borough of Swissvale its name and for whom Swisshelm Park was named.
Before the coal industry moved into Swisshelm Park, the area was mostly farmland. One prominent land-owner in the area was William S. Haven, who was a close friend of
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie (, ; November 25, 1835August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of the richest Americans i ...
's and one of wealthiest men in Pittsburgh at the time.
Haven's homestead was adjoined by the Swisshelm residence at Nine Mile Run Hollow and occupied what is today the
Edgewood Towne Centre
Edgewood is a borough in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, adjacent to the city of Pittsburgh. The population was 3,118 at the 2010 census.
History
Edgewood was incorporated on December 1, 1888. Its historic landmarks include the E ...
.
Haven's wife, Helen (Cooper),
gained notoriety during the Civil War for her generous support for the Union troops at nearby Camp Copeland (in the Braddock Borough). She is said to have made daily trips to the camp and, at her own expense, provided the troops with home cooked meals while attending to the sick and dying. Other homesteads in the area were owned by Robert Milligan, John McKelvy, Samuel Deniston, Thomas Dickson, Alexander Gordon, J. S. Newmyer, and Col. William G. Hawkins, all of whom now have schools and streets named after them in Swissvale,
Edgewood Edgewood may refer to:
Places Canada
*Edgewood, British Columbia
South Africa
*Edgewood, a University of KwaZulu-Natal campus in Pinetown, South Africa
United States Cities and towns
*Edgewood, California
*Edgewood, Florida
*Edgewood, Illinois, a ...
, and surrounding areas.
The building of the Pennsylvania Railroad through the area in 1852 encouraged industry. The Dickson-Stewart Coal Company began operations in 1866, attracting miners and their families. Swisshelm Park was incorporated into the City of Pittsburgh in 1868, relatively late in the city's history, when Jane Swisshelm was 53 years old. However, as late as the 1930s, residents noted that they were often not considered by others to be "City residents", given the rather isolated nature of the neighborhood.
Even today, Swisshelm Park remains unknown to many Pittsburgh residents and is frequently mistaken as a suburb.
Jackson Family and Windermere Drive
![House Support](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/House_Support.jpg)
A 35-acre portion of modern-day Swisshelm Park, including most of the area surrounding what is now Windermere Drive, was once owned by George Jackson, who died in 1854 and left the land to heirs. After the death of his last surviving children Mollie (or Mary) who died in 1889, and Sarah Black who died in 1912, a scandal erupted over the ownership of the land. Sarah left the land to a distant relative, Robert George Jackson, who was then sued in court by Alice Carey Jackson Cannon.
Alice sued for partial ownership of the land on the grounds that she was the illegitimate daughter of Mollie Jackson and was therefore entitled to a portion of the estate. Although her true birth origins were kept secret from her through most of her childhood, Alice eventually learned that she was the child of Mollie and City Fire Bureau Chief, Samuel Evans. Having laid bare the secret origins of her birth and producing several witnesses who affirmed her account in court, the judge sided with Alice and awarded her half of the estate, then valued at 1.5 million dollars, in 1915. The former Jackson farm house still stands and the barn was converted to a community center still in use today, the Sarah Jackson Black Community Center.
A city real estate map from 1939 shows that Robert George Jackson maintained possession of much of the land, which was divided into subplots and named, "Ye Old Swissvale Farm" development.
In 1940, Robert George Jackson, a former resident of England,
began putting the lots of land on Windermere Drive up for sale to raise money for British bomb refugees during the early stages of World War II. The lots ranged in value from $1,200 to $2,000 apiece, or approximately $20,000 to $32,000 today when adjusted for inflation.
Jackson's connection to England might also explain the origins for the name of the street, as
Windermere
Windermere (sometimes tautology (language), tautologically called Windermere Lake to distinguish it from the nearby town of Windermere, Cumbria (town), Windermere) is the largest natural lake in England. More than 11 miles (18 km) in leng ...
, the largest natural lake in England, has been a popular place in England for holidays and summer homes since 1846, when the first railroad to area was built. Most of the homes on Windermere Drive were built after the war in the early 1950s, with many of the homes supported by steel produced by the
Carnegie-Illinois Steel Company in nearby
Etna, Pennsylvania
Etna is a Borough
A borough is an administrative division in various English-speaking countries. In principle, the term ''borough'' designates a self-governing walled town, although in practice, official use of the term varies widely.
Hist ...
.
Nine Mile Run and Summerset at Frick Park
For decades, a continuing concern of Swisshelm Park residents was the condition and reuse of the Duquesne slag area on the northwestern portion of the neighborhood. Although city planners had at one time considered damming the Nine Mile Run and creating a golf course and recreation area,
[Duquesne Steel Works]
purchased the area around 1923 and began dumping slag
Slag is a by-product of smelting (pyrometallurgical) ores and used metals. Broadly, it can be classified as ferrous (by-products of processing iron and steel), ferroalloy (by-product of ferroalloy production) or non-ferrous/base metals (by-prod ...
- which is a glass-like material left over after extraction of metals from the smelting or refining of ore. The slag was brought in from the steel mill in Rankin via train and from the Jones and Laughlin Mill via barge, and it slowly buried the park-like terrain and stream, th
Nine Mile Run
By the time the dumping finally ceased, in 1972, a large area had been overtaken by two giant mountains of slag, said to be over 10 stories high, with the polluted stream bisecting the slag heaps. The stream eventually became the largest urban stream restoration in the United States carried out by the US Army Corps of Engineers. In 1996, th
began at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
, which led to the incorporation of the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association, in 2001. In 1997, construction began to re-purpose the land into an upscale housing development, the Summerset at Frick Park
Summerset at Frick Park is a residential development located in the Squirrel Hill and Swisshelm Park neighborhoods within the Pittsburgh, City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. This project is one of the nation's ...
residential development project. Th
master plan
for this brownfield
In urban planning, brownfield land is any previously developed land that is not currently in use. It may be potentially contaminated, but this is not required for the area to be considered brownfield. The term is also used to describe land prev ...
redevelopment project aims to make use of 40 acres along the western border of the Swisshelm Park neighborhood (between the western ends of Onodago Street and Goodman Street) to add an additional 217 new residential housing units and to make significant improvements to the adjacent Frick Park
Frick Park is the largest municipal park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, covering . It is one of Pittsburgh's four historic large parks.
History
The park began when Henry Clay Frick, upon his death in 1919, bequeathed south of Clayto ...
.
Duck Hollow
Duck Hollow is an isolated neighborhood located within Swisshelm Park's boundaries. It is accessible to automobiles only via a connection to the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, which previously required traversing an old, weight-restricted bridge.[http://www.pittsburghfederalprojects.com/index.php/second-avenue-bridge/ ] The new McFarren Street Bridge was constructed in 2020 to provide unrestricted access to emergency vehicles and others. It is bounded by the Monongahela River and railroad tracks, and by towering slag heaps across Nine Mile Run.[http://historicbridges.org/bridges/browser/?bridgebrowser=pennsylvania/mcfarren/ ]
Surrounding and adjacent neighborhoods
Swisshelm Park has three land borders, two with the Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Regent Square to the northwest and Squirrel Hill South from the north down to the southwest. The other land border is with Swissvale
Swissvale is a borough in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, east of downtown Pittsburgh. Named for a farmstead owned by James Swisshelm, during the industrial age it was the site of the Union Switch and Signal Company of George Westinghouse. T ...
to the east. Across the Monongahela River to the south, Swisshelm Park runs adjacent with Homestead
Homestead may refer to:
*Homestead (buildings), a farmhouse and its adjacent outbuildings; by extension, it can mean any small cluster of houses
*Homestead (unit), a unit of measurement equal to 160 acres
*Homestead principle, a legal concept th ...
and Munhall.
References
See also
* List of Pittsburgh neighborhoods
This is a list of 90 neighborhoods in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Generally neighborhood development followed ward boundaries, although the City Planning Commission has defined some neighborhood areas. The map of neighbor ...
{{Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Neighborhoods in Pittsburgh