The Growth of Westinghouse Electric - in pictures

The Westinghouse Electric Company was incorporated on January 8, 1886. Three years later, WEC moved into a building in downtown Pittsburgh along Garrison Alley and the Allegheny River.

As shown on the maps that follow below, the building’s previous tenant had been another Westinghouse company, Union Switch and Signal, which had moved into the building a decade earlier, as indicated on this plat map from 1882.

1882

Switch & Signal had outgrown the Garrison Alley space and moved to a site in Allegheny (now Pittsburgh’s Northshore) in a factory originally occupied by Westinghouse Air Brake.

Here’s how the building looked in 1893, three years after Westinghouse Electric had moved in.

Rapid growth was a characteristic of Westinghouse companies, as was re-using existing facilities for a new company.

This 1890 map shows the Garrison Alley facility in transition.

1890

A decade later, it was all Westinghouse Electric.

1903

But by then Westinghouse Electric also outgrew the Garrison Alley facilty and transitioned into the same Northside space once occupied by Westinghouse Air Brake and then Union Switch and Signal.

Meanwhile the East Pittsburgh works of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company took root in 1897 on acreage also sited along the Turtle Creek Valley, a mile downstream from the Westinghouse Air Brake plant in Wilmerding.

Here’s a photo of the Westinghouse Electric plant in 1900.

Here’s a color postcard showing the Westinghouse Electric works in East Pittsburgh surrounded by other Westinghouse Electric facilities.

Westinghouse Electric workers waiting for the train outside the East Pittsburgh plant in 1907.

One final note. Even after Westinghouse Electric moved on from Garrision Place, the facility was taken over by other Westinghouse enterprises, the RD Nuttall Machine Company and Nernst Lamp company, as shown in this map from 1910.

Shown in the lower right corner of the map is the site of the Westinghouse Building. Here’s a picture of the stately Westinghouse World Headquarters which stood at the corner of 9th Street and Penn Avenue until it was demolished in the mid-1950’s.