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map of South Side Slopes.
The South Side was once composed of a number of smaller communities. These included Birmingham and East Birmingham, both named for the English Midlands industrial center; Ormsby, originally a part of East Birmingham, incorporated as a borough in 1866; South Pittsburgh, the area immediately adjacent to the Smithfield Street Bridge, and Monongahela, named for the adjacent river. These boroughs were collectively annexed to the city in 1872.
The South Side and much of the hillsides to its south had been granted to Major John Ormsby in 1763 in recognition his assistance in the building of Fort Pitt. By the 1770’s Ormsby had built an estate on these land and established a ferry for connecting his home with the community in Pittsburgh.
In 1811, Ormsby’s son-in-law, Dr. Nathaniel Bedford, laid out a town on the flats, naming it Birmingham in tribute to his native city. Bedford had come to Pittsburgh around 1770 and was the first practicing physician in the district known as Allegheny County. He named the streets after Ormsby’s children; names which the South Side streets still bear – Mary, Jane, Sarah, Sidney. Carson St. was named after a sea captain who lived in Philadelphia and was a friend of Dr. Bedford. In the early days it was part of the Washington Pike, the main road to Washington, PA. The nearby municipality of Mount Oliver would be named for John Ormsby’s son Oliver Ormsby.
Birmingham quickly became a sizable industrial center because of the easy access to river and rail transport. The region would first become a center of glass production, followed by a concentration of iron and steel manufacturing. In 1850 Benjamin Franklin Jones invested in a South Side iron works. During the depression of 1873 he formed a partnership with a banker, James Laughlin. The firm of Jones and Laughlin Steel Company would eventually become the South Side’s largest employer. By 1910 it would employ over 15,000 workers.
The majority of the workers who had settled in the area were immigrants of Eastern Europe. They found home throughout the Flats and Slopes of South Side and had brought allot of their culture and traditions to the area. Many of the Eastern European churches, clubs and bars are still present in the South Side .
The early 1980s would see the beginnings of redevelopment on the South Side. The South Side Local Development Company was formed in 1982. In 1985, the South Side’s East Carson Street was selected to participate in the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street Urban Demonstration Program. Community involvement would play a major role in the redevelopment of the former J&L site.
The Jones and Laughlin Company had merged with the Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV) Corporation in 1974. The company would merge its J&L Steel subsidiary with Republic Steel to form LTV Steel in 1984. The South Side J&L/LTV plant would shut down in 1986. The URA would eventually redevelop the site to be the Southside Works complex. The project has brought national retailers to the eastern end of the neighborhood.
South Side Slopes Neighborhood Organization
http://www.southsideslopes.org
South Side Local Development Corporation
http://www.southsidepgh.com/index_new.htm
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