Western Pennsylvania's Burgeoning Industrial Revolution

The Otto Krebs lithograph above shows a bird's-eye view of the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as seen from Mt. Washington, located in the city's South Side. Shown are the Monongahela River (sweeping the South Side) and the Allegheny River (delineating the city's North Side), both converging (at the extreme left) to create the Ohio River. The North Side community was originally known as Allegheny City, and in the right foreground is Birmingham. Over time, the triangle of land constituting Pittsburg, later spelled Pittsburgh, situated between the Al and the Mon, became known as The Golden Triangle.

Even in the early 1870s, there were numerous bridges linking all shores, busy railroad trains uploading and transporting coal, coke and other goods, like rye whiskey. The city had a wide docking area for incoming steamboats, sometimes stranded there, whenever the rivers were too low to support that mode of travel. And there were all kinds of factories burning tons of coal, turning the blue sky of Pennsylvania to steel gray. The growing population lived in small, coal-dusted homes, some of them lucky enough to live in neighborhoods surrounded by rapidly disappearing trees and bushes. This was the horrifying, and exciting, Western Pennsylvania Industrial Revolution.

References

Pittsburgh in the American Civil War, Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_in_the_American_Civil_War)

Otto Krebs Lithograph, Pittsburgh, a bird's-eye view of the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from Mt. Washington
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pittsburgh_1874_Otto_Krebs.jpg)