52nd Street

52nd Street
Neighborhood	Upper Lawrenceville
Origin of name	Sequential numbering up the Allegheny River
➤ 53rd Street (1871 – ca. 1873)
Origin of name	Sequential numbering up the Allegheny River, leaving a gap for a street never built

The numbering of Pittsburgh's streets up the Allegheny River was done in 1868; these numbers extended as far as 50th Street. Today's 51st Street also existed at the time, as Cochran Street, but was apparently not given a number in 1868.

As additional streets were laid out in Upper Lawrenceville, there seems to have been some uncertainty about how they should be fit into the numbering scheme. A city ordinance in 1871 opened 53rd Street "from Butler street to the Allegheny River." But a plan of the street, which had been presented at the meeting of the Common Council on January 30 of that year, placed it "between the property of C. Sewert and Mrs. Mowrey." This is the location of modern 52nd Street, which the 1872 Hopkins atlas shows (unlabeled) between properties of C. Seibert and Mrs. Mowrey. Perhaps the planners saw the relatively short distance between 50th and 51st Streets and assumed that another street would be put through in the gap between 51st and their new street, making theirs 53rd.

The expected street was never built in that gap, and the street that had been opened as 53rd Street soon came to be called 52nd Street. A list of liquor licenses granted in November 1873 included "Boyle, Manus, eating house, Fifty-second street, Eighteenth ward, Pittsburgh." An 1876 bill in City Councils to locate Harrison Street had to be amended to change "Fifty-third street" to "Fifty-second street."

The name 52nd Street was certainly established by 1876, when it appeared in both the Hopkins atlas and the street guide of George H. Thurston and J. F. Diffenbacher's city directory.