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The section of downtown Pittsburgh along Fort Pitt Boulevard and First Avenue includes the foremost concentration of commercial buildings that survive from Pittsburgh's period as an important river port city during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pittsburgh's river traffic centered on the Monongahela Wharf, the sloping bank along the Monongahela River from the Point eastward to Smithfield Street. This traffic was due to the same geographic good fortune that made the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers the strategic key to the control of the West (west of the Appalachian Mountains) during the French and Indian Wars. Pittsburgh's connection to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers made it a logical jumping-off point for travelers to the West during the early years of the Republic. The rivers provided a convenient highway for the transport of people and goods, both west and east, at least in those months when they were navigable. They provided the only means to move goods in bulk before the construction of the canal systems in the 1830s and the railroads in the 1850s. The introduction of steamboats to the Western rivers (the first such steamboat, the "New Orleans", was launched from a Pittsburgh boatyard in 1811) provided the vehicles by which the supremacy of the river trade could be maintained for a century. Inland water traffic continued to grow through the nineteenth century from three million tons in 1854 to twelve million in 1915, and by the turn of the century Pittsburgh's leaders could boast that the city was the largest inland port in the United States. The cobblestoned Monongahela Wharf remained the center of maritime commerce in Pittsburgh; riverboats regularly lined the Wharf as crews took on or unloaded cargo and passengers. The riverbanks opposite the Downtown area on the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, and both banks of the Ohio, were built down to the water with industrial plants, and the Duquesne Wharf, on the south bank of the Allegheny, serviced industries and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Therefore, the Monongahela Wharf and Water Street (now Fort Pitt Boulevard) became lined with warehouses, where goods were stored that passed through Pittsburgh via the rivers. The earliest wharf buildings were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1845, and were soon replaced by three- and four-story brick structures - a few of which still exist. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s that riverboat traffic began to die away, under the competition of rail and truck transport, and the Wharf became occupied by other uses - especially the parking of automobiles. Finally, at the end of the 1930s, Pittsburgh's leaders approved a plan to construct an expressway along the Monongahela, elevated above the Wharf. This road came into being as the Parkway East during the Pittsburgh Renaissance in the late 1940s and early 1950s, permanently replacing the river traffic. Office buildings and parking lots replaced many of the warehouses along the river. The remains of the Monongahela Wharf became a parking lot in the shadow of the highway. In 1988, the historic and architectural value of the remaining riverfront warehouses in the 200 block of Fort Pitt Boulevard was recognized when the Firstside Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. |
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