Junction Hollow

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Junction Hollow is a small wooded valley bordering the west flanks of Schenley Park and the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.

The 150-foot deep valley runs south to north approximately 2.5 miles. It begins where Four Mile Run empties into the Monongahela River and runs through the neighborhood of Four Mile Run north into Oakland along Schenley Park, Carnegie Mellon, and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and ends at Neville Street behind Central Catholic High School.

Junction Hollow is often confused for Panther Hollow, which at Schenley Lake veers off from it to the northeast into the park.

[edit] History

Junction Hollow is named for the Pittsburgh Junction Railroad, which first laid tracks there in the 1880s. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (now CSX Transportation) mainline ran along the Monongahela, and the idea of a Junction Hollow spur line was to divert rail traffic north through Schenley Tunnel (beneath Neville Street) to a rail yard along the Allegheny River, thus avoiding rail congestion in Downtown.

Prior to the railroad the area was known as the Four Mile Run Valley, for its stream that was named on account of its distance from the The Point. Today the stream is piped underneath the ground to the river.

In the 1950s and 1960s planners created a grand proposal to fill the hollow with a research complex extending from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University to the river, but it was never realized.

Since the 1990s the Eliza Furnace Trail extends into the hollow where it is called Junction Hollow Trail.

[edit] References

• Alberts, Robert C. (1987). Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh 1787–1987. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 0-8229-1150-7. 
• Toker, Franklin (1986, 1994). Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 0-8229-5434-6.