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Pitt's Historic Impact

Historic Pittsburgh Preserves Pitt Treasures

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On a sunny day in Pittsburgh, automobiles convey baseball fans across the St. Pierre Bridge to Forbes Field. It’s a remarkable scene (and no cracks about the rarity of sunny days in Pittsburgh).

Actually, what makes the scene—captured in a photograph taken around 1910—striking is that virtually nothing in it exists anymore. Forbes Field, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1909 to 1970, made way for Pitt’s Posvar Hall. The St. Pierre Ravine was filled in 1915. And it’s extremely unlikely that even the youngest of the fans are around any longer, either.

The photo is one of about 28,000 visual images on the Historic Pittsburgh Image Collections Web site, which itself is part of the Pitt-hosted Historic Pittsburgh digital library collection. Historic Pittsburgh also contains videos, full-text books, maps, census records, a chronology of 300 years of local history, and archival finding aids, all related to Western Pennsylvania history.

The site provides free online access to these materials to researchers, educators, and the general public. Given the University’s importance to the region, it’s only natural that Historic Pittsburgh includes a wealth of Pitt-related treasures, such as the full text of Through One Hundred and Fifty Years, the University of Pittsburgh—a book written by Agnes Lynch Starrett on Pitt’s 150th anniversary—and a video of an aerial view of Oakland circa 1968.

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