Meet local artist Dennis Bergevin
Boy Scouts become Eagle Scouts upon project completion
The Northside Chronicle
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July 2017 Est. 1985
Your Community Newspapper
Volume 33 Issue 7 - FREE -
Photo by Bridget Fertal
The “Welcome to Deutschtown” mural on the side of Allegheny City Brewing, 507 Foreland St., was completed last July by artist Amy Novelli.
The history of Charles Street Valley By Victoria Stevans Charles Street Valley, a neighborhood in the Northside’s “heartland,” has a rich history, and a promising, unfolding future. According to John Canning, the president of the historical Allegheny City Society (ACS), the Northside first materialized in 1787. That year, David Reddick, a Washington County surveyor and member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, was asked by the state’s Supreme Council to stake out a plot of land for the freshly-formed Allegheny County. Reddick, in his resulting report, called Allegheny City’s hills, which lie beyond the Allegheny
and Ohio Rivers’ flat floodplains, an uninhabitable “moonscape.” Nevertheless, throughout the late 1700s and the early 1800s, this “moonscape,” which would later become Charles Street Valley (CSV), California-Kirkbride, Marshall-Shadeland, Perry Hilltop, and Fineview, was separated into private family-owned farms, settled, and gradually developed. The Civil War brought economic expansion through its demand for industrial production, and afterwards Allegheny City enlarged in both population and territory. From 1875 to 1900, the area’s real estate changed shape, as farms turned into apartment buildings and
houses for working-middle class families employed in Pittsburgh’s businesses, factories, and mills. Around this same time, the hills were further transformed by the installation of electric trolley lines and incline planes, which made commuting easier for the working class population. “[Allegheny City’s] hinterland [or ‘moonscape] was rapidly becoming the Heartland,” Canning said. Charles Street Valley ,specifically, was home to an incline plane that connected it to “the Clifton Park housing development[on] Chautauqua Street,” according to Canning. See Heartland, Page 11
Deutschtown Music Festival enters 5th year By Alyse Horn The Deutschtown Music Festival has been eating magic beans. Close to 250 bands will perform during this year’s free two-day music festival, an event that was also named the “Best Music Festival” in Pittsburgh by the City Paper in 2016. Last year the event garnered 189 bands, and during its first year there were only 46 bands, said Cody Walters, co-founder of the event. See DMF, Page 14