Notes:Wood Street

Source:Frey, pp. 30–31: "Col. George Woods of Bedford, a surveyor using a surveyor's rod one-eighth of an inch too long in every ten feet, laid out the first Triangle plan for the Penns. He was an obliging fellow, and, after all, in 1784, traffic could do with twenty feet less width. He cheerfully narrowed Market St. from sixty feet to a forty-foot width, so that the owners of log cabins jutting into the thoroughfare did not lose their property. In February, 1955, when City Council temporarily dropped plans to widen Third Avenue from [p. 31] Wood Street to the Point Park, 171 years after Col. Woods' decision, the same reason was advanced: There are too many 'substantial buildings' to permit a widening operation. Col. Wood made no effort to change John Campbell's plan of 1764 as far as Grant St., but laid out Penn and Liberty Avenues parallel to the Allegheny. The Diamond, Pittsburgh's public square, was on Market Street, not far from Liberty, and was destined to be the center of Pittsburgh's growth for over fifty years. Col. Woods gave names to the streets close to the Monongahela as familiar to-day as when he christened them; Grant Street was named after Major James Grant, Smithfield for Devereux Smith and Wood for the surveyor himself. At right angles to the Allegheny, and long since changed, were Marbury, Hay, Pitt, St. Clair, Irwin, Hand, Wayne and Washington."