AMERICA - Joel Cook

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and the weird white gleam of electric lights, that the elevated view down into Pittsburg seems a veritable pandemonium. So startling is it on a lowering day that it has been pointedly described by one who thus for the first time looked upon the "Smoky City," far down in its deep basin among the high hills, as appearing like "Hell with the lid off." There are plenty of railways in the scene, and scores of odd-looking, stumpy-prowed little steamboats built high above the water, having huge stern-wheels to drive them, with their noses thrust up on the sloping levee along the river bank, whereon is piled the cargoes, chiefly of iron products. The swift current turns all the sterns down stream, so that they lie diagonally towards the shore. Fleets of flat, shallow coal barges are moored along, waiting to be made up into tows for their journey down the Ohio, as Pittsburg has an extensive river trade, covering over twenty thousand miles of Western waters. Out of the weird and animated scene there come all sorts of busy noises, forges and trip-hammers pounding, steam hissing, railroad trains running, whistles screeching, locomotives puffing, bells ringing, so that with the flame jets rising, and the smokes of all colors blowing about, there is got a good idea of the active industries of this very busy place.

      PITTSBURG DEVELOPMENT.

      This wonderful industrial development all came within the nineteenth century. There is still preserved as a relic of its origin the little block-house citadel of the old Fort Pitt, down near the point of the peninsula where the rivers join. This has recently been restored by the Daughters of the American Revolution—a small square building with a pyramidal roof. The surrounding stockade long ago disappeared. There is in the Pittsburg City Hall an inscribed tablet from Fort Pitt bearing the date 1764. The old building, which was the scene of Pittsburg's earliest history, for it stands almost on the spot occupied by Fort Duquesne, is among modern mills and storehouses, about three hundred feet from the head of the Ohio. Pittsburg, after an almost exclusive devotion to manufacturing and business, began some years ago to cultivate artistic tastes in architecture, and has some very fine buildings. There is an elaborate Post-office and an interesting City Hall on Smithfield Street; but the finest building of all, and one of the best in the country, is the magnificent Romanesque Court-house, built at a cost of $2,500,000, and occupying a prominent position on a hill adjoining Fifth Avenue. There is a massive jail of similar architecture, and a "Bridge of Sighs" connects them, a beautifully designed arched and stone-covered bridge, thrown for a passageway across an intervening street. The main tower, giving a grand view, rises three hundred and twenty feet over the architectural pile, and, as in Venice, the convicted prisoner crosses the bridge from his trial to his doom. There are attractive churches, banks and business buildings, and eastward from the city, near Schenley Park, is the attractive Carnegie Library and Museum in Italian Renaissance, with a capacity for two hundred thousand volumes, a benefaction of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, originally costing $1,100,000, to which he has recently added $1,750,000 for its enlargement. The residential section is mainly on the hills east of Pittsburg and across the Allegheny River in Allegheny City, there being many attractive villas in beautiful situations on the surrounding highlands.

      But the great Pittsburg attraction is the multitude of factories that are its pride and create its prosperity. Some of these are among the greatest in the world—the Edgar Thomson Works and Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company, the Duquesne Steel Works, the Keystone Bridge Company, and others. The Edgar Thomas mills make over a million tons of rails a year, and at Homestead fifteen hundred thousand tons of steel will be annually produced, this being the place where nickel-steel armor-plates for the navy are manufactured. They largely use natural gas, and employ at times ten thousand men at the two great establishments. The Duquesne Works, just above Homestead on the Monongahela, have the four largest blast furnaces in the world, producing twenty-two hundred tons of pig-iron daily. The Keystone Bridge Works cover seven acres, and have made some of the greatest steel bridges in existence. The Westinghouse Electrical Works manufacture the greatest dynamos, including those of the Niagara Power Company, and the Westinghouse Air-Brake Works is also another extensive establishment. In the Pittsburg district, covering about two hundred square miles, the daily product of mines and factories is estimated at $6,000,000.

      The two men whose names are most closely connected with Pittsburg's vast industrial development are Andrew Carnegie and George Westinghouse. Carnegie was born at Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1837, and his father, a potter, brought him to Pittsburg when eleven years old. He began life as a telegraph messenger boy, attracted the attention of Colonel Thomas A. Scott, and was by him brought into the service of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Then he entered business, and became the greatest developer of the iron and steel industries of Pittsburg and its wealthiest resident. He some time ago sold out his interests to the Carnegie Steel Company, in which he is largely interested. Westinghouse, born in New York State in 1846, combined with business tact the genius of the inventor. He invented and developed the railway air-brake now in universal use, has established a complete electrical lighting and power system, and was the chief adapter of natural gas to manufacturing and domestic uses, being the inventor of many ingenious contrivances for its introduction and economical employment. He had a gas well almost at his door, for Pittsburg overlaid a great deposit. The enormous coal measures underlying and surrounding the city have been its most stable basis for industry and profit, as the Pittsburg coal-field is one of enormous output. The deposits of Lake Superior furnish the ores for its furnaces, and the railroad development is such that each enormous establishment now has its special railroad to fetch in the ores from Lake Erie, where they are brought by vessels. Across in Allegheny City, where most of these ore-bringing roads go out, about one hundred acres in the centre of the city are reserved for the attractive Allegheny Park, one portion rising in a very steep hill, almost at the edge of the Allegheny River. Upon its top, seen from afar, stands a Soldiers' Monument, a graceful column, erected in memory of four thousand men of Allegheny County who fell in the Civil War. Soldier statues guard the base, and look out upon the smokes and steam jets of the busy city below, and thousands climb up there to enjoy the grand view.

      COAL, COKE AND GAS.

      The four counties adjoining Pittsburg turn out over thirty millions of tons of bituminous coal in a year. To carry this coal away, besides railways, the city has about a million and a half of tonnage of river craft of various kinds, a greater tonnage than all the Mississippi River ports put together. Its coal boats go everywhere throughout the Western water ways, and two thousand miles down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans. Its stumpy but powerful little tugs, with their stern-wheels, will safely convey fleets of shallow flatboats, sometimes over twenty thousand tons of coal being carried in a single tow. These flatboats are collected in the rivers about Pittsburg, waiting for the proper stage of water on the Ohio; and to regulate the depth at the city the curious movable dam was constructed at Davis's Island, four miles below Pittsburg, at a cost of $1,000,000, the dam opening when necessary to let freshets through, and having a lock five hundred feet long and one hundred and ten feet wide to pass the boats. The Monongahela River above Pittsburg has for miles a series of coal mines in the high bordering banks, the river being lined with coal "tipples," which load the flatboats; and it is also provided with a series of dams, which aid navigation and divide the channel into a succession of "pools." The very crooked Youghiogheny flows in at McKeesport, fifteen miles above Pittsburg, another river of coal mines, whose name was given as a signification of its crookedness by the matter-of-fact Indians, the word signifying "the stream flowing a contrary, roundabout course." This river comes northward out of the chief coke district of America, in the flanks of the long Chestnut Ridge, the Connellsville coke region sometimes turning out ten millions of tons annually from its ovens. Railways run in there on both river banks to Connellsville, a town of six thousand people, in the midst of the coke ovens, and about fifty-six miles south of Pittsburg.

      Pittsburg is decreasing its use of natural gas for manufacturing, as the diminishing supply and greater distance it has to be brought are making it too costly for the iron and glass works, which are returning again to coal and coke, but the city is still said to use forty-five thousand millions of cubic feet in a year, mostly for domestic purposes. Pittsburg stands in a great but partly exhausted natural-gas district. The gas is stored under pressure beneath strata of rock, being set free when these are pierced. This is a gaseous member of the paraffin series, of which petroleum is a liquid member, and is mainly marsh-gas, the "fire-damp" of the miner. It originates in the decomposition of animal

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