Local government and civic history

The borough, 1854

Altoona's local government grew up in the shadow of the railroad that created the town. Most of this page draws on the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) report on the city, prepared for the National Park Service and held by the Library of Congress, which traces how public services caught up with a population that grew faster than anyone had planned for.

Altoona was incorporated as a borough on February 6, 1854, when it had about 2,000 residents. HABS records that the borough was administered by a chief burgess and a five-member council.

The railroad company was the town's largest property owner and employer, but it did not run the borough. HABS describes a distant kind of paternalism: the company helped with public works when it had a direct interest, bought borough bonds, and backed a market house and town hall, but it left most of the town's development to private builders and the borough.

The city and its charters

In 1868 Altoona was chartered as a city, with a mayor and a twelve-member council made up of two members from each ward. The city's form of government changed twice more in the period HABS covers:

Each of these administrations, the report says, faced the same problem: providing streets, water, sewers, police, fire protection, schools and transport fast enough to keep up with the population.

Government today

This site does not describe the city's present charter, list its current officials or give meeting times. Those details change, and the official City of Altoona website is the place for them; this site is not that website and has no connection to it. Two stable facts are worth knowing. Altoona is a city within Blair County, and the county's seat of government is Hollidaysburg, not Altoona: the Pennsylvania State Archives' table of county courthouses records Hollidaysburg as the county seat of Blair County, which was formed in 1846. County business and city business are therefore handled in different places.

Streets, sewers and water

The early town was not pleasant. HABS quotes a railroad guidebook admitting that swamps, marshes and ponds covered much of the site and that the streets were deep in mud, and one resident's name for the period: the "mud age".

• Streets. Altoona had no permanent street or sidewalk paving before 1889. In 1873 the city was authorised to issue $150,000 in bonds for improvements, and the two main commercial streets were surfaced with macadam, which broke up within a few years. From 1889 they were repaved with more durable asphalt blocks, and paving spread from there. In 1905 the city borrowed for more paving, with the wider community paying a third of the cost.
• Sewers. The first sewer line was laid through the main commercial district in 1870. By the 1880s the city engineer divided the city into four districts following natural drainage. The southern district's outfall was held up by lawsuits from property owners downstream, and in 1891 a farmer was awarded $5,000 for pollution damage before the line was redesigned.
• Water. Residents relied on wells and cisterns until 1859, when the Altoona Gas and Water Company, closely tied to the railroad, began supplying the borough. In 1872 the water franchise and lines were sold to the city, which built reservoirs at Kittanning Point, inside the bend of Horseshoe Curve, and a 3-million-gallon storage reservoir on Prospect Hill. The railroad lent money toward the expansion.
• Other services. HABS dates the first telephone exchange to 1880 (connected to the railroad shops), electric service to 1886, the first street railway to 1880, a police patrol wagon to 1894, and a professional fire department, replacing volunteer companies, to 1895.

Library, hospitals and schools

Several of the city's institutions began with railroad help. The Mechanics' Library and Reading Room opened in 1858, started by the company's local superintendent, Herman Haupt, with a contribution from the directors. It was open to anyone who paid a small yearly fee. The railroad gave the library to the Altoona School District in 1926, and HABS says its collection formed the basis of the Altoona Public Library.

The Altoona Hospital opened in 1886, paid for with a state appropriation and matching local money, including contributions from railroad employees and land and money from the company. Mercy Hospital was chartered in 1909.

The first school built by the elected school board, a two-room building, went up in 1854 on the East Side, with a West Side school a year later. When Altoona became a city in 1868 the district had seven frame buildings, nine teachers and 550 students. The first separate high school opened in 1895, and its later building was enlarged in 1929 to hold 2,500 students. In 1905 the railroad paid to equip the manual training shops of a new high school, and good students from those classes could enter railroad apprenticeships at higher wages.

Parks and the 1929 annexation

The 1849 plan had no public square or park. For years, HABS says, Fairview Cemetery, laid out in 1857, served as the place people went for green space. In 1892 the railroad's directors agreed to spend $5,000 turning a piece of company land into a park, after the local superintendent pointed out that a city of about 35,000 had no park at all. The city itself created Prospect Hill Park by ordinance in 1906, on a site that had earlier been a quarantine house, a quarry and a dump, and by 1912 it had a commissioner of parks and recreation. Lakemont Park, a 100-acre amusement park, was built in 1893 by the streetcar company on its line to Hollidaysburg.

The city grew in area as well as population. In January 1929 it annexed 4.57 square miles, more than doubling its size and adding about 17,000 residents, including the borough of Juniata and a string of neighbourhoods in Logan Township. HABS notes that annexation usually followed proof that a neighbourhood had grown enough to pay for the city services it would receive.

Population, then and now

The census shows the railroad's rise and decline more clearly than any other record. The historical figures below come from the census table in the HABS report; the recent figures come from the US Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program.

On these figures, the city's 2020 population was a little under 54 percent of its 1930 peak. The city's land area in the Census Bureau's 2020 gazetteer is 9.791 square miles. The railroad shops page explains the fall in employment behind the fall in population.

The story continues: Public landmarks in and around Altoona