Reviews for Allegheny City, Pennsylvania: 1840-1907 (Images of America Series)

The average rating for Allegheny City, Pennsylvania: 1840-1907 (Images of America Series) based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-05 00:00:00 Crystal Hall Allegheny City: 1840-1907 is my first experience with the ubiquitous Images of America series, and it pretty well fulfilled my expectations: a little short on an overarching narrative of the city's history, but plenty of goodies along the way. It is, after all, meant to be a collection of photographs, not an exhaustive history of the region. Still, the disjointedness is a little distracting if, like me, you're reading this through in one sitting--perhaps it would work better as a toilet read, I don't know. But I did end up learning a few things: that Allegheny City had its own Gettysburg cyclorama, though perhaps not as famous as its Brooklyn and Boston counterparts; that H.J. Heinz was never actually a resident of Allegheny City, despite his clear commercial presence there; that the founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses was a local; and that the first World Series was played here, at Exposition Park (probably people who know anything about baseball knew that already, though). To the book's credit, there's a bibliography included at the end of the book, in the event that you wish to explore the history a bit more thoroughly. The titles and dates of the texts, little-known works mostly published in the nineteenth century, probably would prohibit most folks from doing this, however, since you'd need access to a university library, particularly one in western Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, many of the images collected here don't have dates clearly associated with them--so you can see that it's a picture of the chancellor's office for the University of Pittsburgh, but have no sense of when that picture was taken. Still, there's a lot to love here, and any book dedicated to so short-lived a city is worth it for those of us who are interested in the area.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-03 00:00:00 Jason Shaw Interesting gif bits of the factory museum I visited a d history of Edison. Many wonderful photos too.