Public landmarks in and around Altoona

Which records this page uses

A list of "things to see" in any city tends to turn into a list of businesses. This page takes a narrower path. It covers only places that appear in public historical records: the National Park Service's list of National Historic Landmarks, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission's (PHMC) state historical markers, and the reports of the Historic American Buildings Survey and Historic American Engineering Record (HABS and HAER), which the Library of Congress holds. For each place it says what the record says, and no more.

It gives no opening hours, prices, addresses or event dates. Those change, and the bodies that run each place publish their own.

National Historic Landmarks

The National Park Service keeps the official list of National Historic Landmarks, arranged by state. Its Pennsylvania section includes several in and around Altoona:

Horseshoe Curve is the best known. It is the great loop of track west of the city that let the Pennsylvania Railroad climb the Allegheny Front, opened in 1854 and still in daily use. It has its own page on this site.

The Allegheny Portage Railroad and the Staple Bend Tunnel belong to the state-built route over the mountain that the curve replaced. Both lie west of Altoona, and the National Park Service manages them as the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site. Its home page describes the Staple Bend Tunnel as sitting at the top of the first inclined plane, a few miles from Johnstown. See the Portage Railroad page.

Leap-the-Dips is the one landmark on the list inside the city itself. The list records its name, its place and the date of designation; it does not describe it, and this site has not yet checked a primary record that does, so it adds nothing further here rather than guess.

The Baker house and Allegheny Furnace

Altoona's oldest industrial site is older than the town. The HAER report on Allegheny Furnace records that the furnace was built in 1811 by two Huntingdon investors and went out of blast after about seven years, probably because of the depressed economy after the War of 1812. It stood idle until 1835, when Elias Baker and Roland Diller of Lancaster County bought it. Baker moved to the furnace to run it, and the business grew in the 1840s, helped by the newly completed state canal.

The clearest sign of that success is Baker's house. The same report calls it the largest and most ornate ironmaster's house in the region: a two-storey stone residence in the Greek Revival style, designed by the architect Robert Cary Long, Jr., begun in 1846 and completed in 1848. It stands on a hill above the furnace, with a two-storey portico on its south front.

After Elias Baker died in 1854, his son Sylvester ran the furnace, converting it from charcoal to coke in 1867. It made its last iron in the 1870s. The family lived in the house until 1914, and eight years later it was acquired by the Blair County Historical Society, which keeps its museum there. The furnace stack itself was restored in 1939. The HABS report on the city adds that much of South Altoona was later laid out on former Baker land.

State historical markers

The PHMC's state historical markers are a public record in their own right. Two of them carry the main story of the city, and each has a long background essay on ExplorePAHistory.com, which this site uses as a source:

• "Altoona", dedicated in April 1947. Its essay is mainly about the building of Horseshoe Curve and the mountain line.
• "Pennsylvania Railroad Shops", dedicated on October 5, 1996. Its essay covers the shops from the first repair building of 1850 to the Norfolk Southern era, and is summarised on the shops page.

Public works still in use

Some of the most lasting landmarks are pieces of infrastructure. The HABS report on the city describes the reservoirs at Kittanning Point, built by the city in the late nineteenth century in a fold of the mountain inside the bend of Horseshoe Curve, as still serving the city and still an impressive sight when it was written. It quotes a writer of 1896 who thought them almost a work of art.

The railroad divided the city, and the bridges and underpasses that joined its halves were moved and rebuilt as the shops grew. HABS identifies the 7th Street bridge, opened in 1913 for trolleys and pedestrians and later converted for cars, as the oldest surviving crossing of the tracks.

Documented neighbourhoods

The HABS survey of Altoona did not stop at grand buildings. It recorded ordinary neighbourhoods as historic evidence of how a railroad city housed its workers, including:

• The First Ward, north of downtown, home to professionals and skilled workers who built larger individual houses.
• The Fourth Ward on the East Side, on the slopes of Prospect Hill, settled by so many German families that it was known locally as "Dutch Hill".
• Llyswen, planned in 1894 as a streetcar suburb, with house designs by the local architects Michael and Louis Beezer.
• The Knickerbocker, a block of Philadelphia-style row houses built near the South Altoona shops after 1903 by an outside investor and rented mostly to shop workers.

These are not museums. They are lived-in streets, described here only for what the federal record says about them.

Landmarks that are gone

Some of the places that once defined Altoona no longer stand. The Logan House, the railroad's four-storey hotel beside the station and the site of the Loyal War Governors' Conference of 1862, was demolished in 1931. The railroad's own office buildings and officials' houses in the downtown blocks were pulled down in the early 1920s, when the company moved its administrative offices to Philadelphia and Harrisburg, though HABS notes that one 1863 office building survived in altered form.

One entry on the National Park Service list shows that landmark status can change. The Charles B. Dudley House in Altoona was designated a National Historic Landmark on May 11, 1976, and the designation was withdrawn on January 3, 2001. The list does not give a reason. HABS identifies Dudley as the railroad's chemist and the chairman of the city's library association in 1890.

The story ends here. Return to the topic index