Source:Remedy-an-error
"Councils are asked to remedy an error: Discover that Calton street, instead of Valley, should have been vacated." Pittsburgh Gazette Times, Oct. 1, 1910, p. 7. Newspapers.com 85715657.
The vacation of Valley street by councils some months ago, in order that the McConway & Torley Company and the H. K. Porter Company might expand their plants, has been found to be not the vacation the firms desired. A new ordinance has been presented correcting the error. The ordinance calls for the vacation of Calton street, from Forty-eighth to Forty-ninth streets.
After the Valley street ordinance was passed and signed by the mayor, a queer situation developed. It was found that while Valley street passes diagonally in front of the property of the companies and of a house owned and used by a saloonkeeper, yet at Forty-eighth street the street is 50 feet away from the properties mentioned, and at Forty-ninth street only seven feet away. This irregular, four-sided piece of land between Valley street and the properties is called Calton street. Why a second street was laid out alongside another street, with no private property between, nobody can find out. In effect, Calton street is merely a widening of Valley street, yet this one street has two names, each name applying to a different part.
Calton street does not appear on any of the city maps, although it does on the maps of old Lawrenceville borough, under the name of Clay street.
It has been learned that, even though Clay or Calton street does not appear on the city's maps, yet a few years after the annexation of Lawrenceville councils changed the name of Clay street to Calton street, keeping no record of the street, under either name, on the maps.