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THE MONTROSE EXCHANGE PROJECT is named for the old local telephone exchange in this area of East Liberty. The name celebrates East Liberty’s historic importance at the heart of the East End as well as the neighborhood’s twenty-first century rebirth.
East Liberty was once a center for commerce, communication and transportation, rivaling Downtown Pittsburgh in its vitality. The first streetcar lines in the region connected East Liberty to Downtown and elsewhere, the neighborhood’s railroad station was a major stop on the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the second telephone exchange in the nation was installed here. The neighborhood was a classic small town within the city of Pittsburgh with a tight street grid, human-scale buildings and hundreds of street trees. Our project area was once the site of a residential neighborhood, several churches, a large firehouse and small commercial buildings. The American Legion building is on the site of the old Rittenhouse Hotel, a grand Renaissance Revival building constructed during the first decade of the twentieth century during East Liberty’s heyday. The Rittenhouse was torn down by 1960 as part of the now-infamous Urban Renewal efforts undertaken in East Liberty.
1960s urban renewal, an effort to reverse the trend of urban decline in the face of rapid suburbanization, wiped out over 1 million square feet of commercial and residential space, replacing it with a ring road, high-rise public housing and parking lots. Within twenty years it was generally agreed that those efforts had failed. Since 1996, however, there has been a strong grass-roots effort to revive the neighborhood. The rapid private development of the last three years has shown that the market is ready to follow.
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