Not only is this elegant palace of switching one of the few buildings left in Allegheny Center from before the great urban renewal of the 1960s, but it also preserves a memory of the extinct street layout of old Allegheny.
The architect was probably James Windrim of Philadelphia, who did most of the work for Bell of Pennsylvania in the first quarter of the twentieth century. His mission was to make these necessary industrial buildings ornaments to their neighborhoods, so that the telephone company would not face too much opposition. In the nineteenth century, it had been usual to put street signs on the corners of buildings; it was already a bit old-fashioned by the time this exchange was built, but several of the old Bell Telephone exchanges have them, and we suppose it was another way of making them seem like good neighborhood citizens. These streets no longer exist; the quarter-loop drive that turns around this corner is known as Montgomery Place.
Leave a Reply