Area Rug Cleaning Garfield Pittsburgh, PA 15224

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A little History of Garfield, Pittsburgh PA (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Like nearby Bloomfield and Friendship, the land comprising modern-day Garfield was stolen by Casper Taub from the local Delaware tribe. Taub sold it to his son-in-law, Joseph Conrad Winebiddle, in the late 18th century. About a hundred years later, Winebiddle’s descendants broke the family estate into lots and sold them to new residents of an expanding City of Pittsburgh. The first owner of a lot in present-day Garfield bought his plot in 1881, on the day that U.S. President James Garfield was buried, so the neighborhood was named for the late President.

Garfield’s earliest settlers were predominantly blue-collar Irish laborers and their families, who worked in the mills and foundries down along the Allegheny River, shopped in local stores on Penn Avenue, and built and lived in modest brick foursquare homes on the streets running up from Penn Avenue. The community, then almost exclusively Catholic, built St. Lawrence O’Toole Parish on Penn Avenue in 1897. From 1880 until about 1960, the neighborhood remained as it began: a solid, working-class area. Neighborhood activist Aggie Brose described Garfield in 1960 as a place where “You sponsored each other’s kids, you went to all the weddings and funerals, you never wanted for a baby-sitter, you never had to call a repairman, you didn’t need for a social. When you put the kids to bed, the women went out on the stoops.”

FUN FACT: The neighborhood is named after president James Garfield, who was buried on the same day that the first plot was purchased in Garfield in 1881.