Try Street

Try Street
Try Street, seen from its intersection with First Avenue.
Neighborhood	Central Business District

Try Street is one of the most hidden streets in Pittsburgh. It is a small, dark, covered passageway running from Second Avenue to First Avenue under the Panhandle Bridge. It is so hard to find that a 1983 article in the Pittsburgh Press declared that it no longer existed, despite an accurate description of its location ("one block east of Ross Street"). But it is also one of the oldest streets in Pittsburgh east of Grant Street. It appears in William Darby's 1815 map of Pittsburgh, and it was officially accepted into the City of Pittsburgh in 1816 as part of the eastern addition of James O'Hara and James Ross, the first extension of the city limits.

I have spent many hours trying to uncover the origin of the name Try Street, but so far I have been completely unsuccessful. It seems to be an odd name. Most streets recall a person or place (e.g., Penn Avenue or Gettysburg Street), or their names are nouns (Market Street) or sometimes adjectives (Shady Avenue). But, of course, the word try is most commonly a verb. Even ignoring its part of speech, it seems strange to name a street after a word that means "attempt," especially in the early days of Pittsburgh when the number of existing streets was not so large as to make the invention of distinct new street names difficult. So it seems likely to me that the name is not, in fact, the common verb try. Could it be a surname? Possibly, but I cannot find a record of any early Pittsburgher by that name. Could it be some sense of the word try used as a noun? Perhaps, though there are no obvious candidates. In addition to the meaning "attempt," the noun try can mean "a trial, test," "a sieve for grain," or "a play in rugby or football," but obviously the last is too recent to be the source of the street name. The verb try can also mean "to render oil from blubber," from which sense come compounds such as try-pot, tryworks, and tryhouse, but the whaling industry never came anywhere near Pittsburgh. A trysail is a strong sail used in heavy weather, a try square is a carpenter's tool used to make right angles, and a try plane or trying plane is a carpenter's plane used to smooth the edges of pieces to be joined, any of which could conceivably be related to the early Pittsburgh shipbuilding industry (see below), but this would be wild conjecture, and in any case such a hypothesis would not explain why the street is called just Try. Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, there are Try Streets in Monongahela (Washington County) and Manorville (Armstrong County), and there is a Try Road in Beaver Springs (Snyder County), which suggests that the word may have a regional meaning that I do not know.

Try Street originally ran through a ravine, the lower reaches of a stream called Suke's Run, which drained what is now the Hill District and emptied into the Monongahela River. This run was said to be named for a woman named Susan, nicknamed Suke, who either hanged herself in a thicket of plum trees there or drowned herself in the run. Leland D. Baldwin says that there was a whiskey distillery at Suke's Run in 1775. The area around the mouth of the run was an important early shipbuilding center. William Masson's 1805 map of Pittsburgh shows William Greenough's shipyard there; this was probably where Meriwether Lewis's keelboat was built, in which he and William Clark set off on their famous expedition into the West in 1803. This was also where the first steamboat on western rivers, the New Orleans, was built in 1811. Somewhat later in the nineteenth century, many butchers established slaughterhouses along the run, because large rains would turn the run into a torrent and thoroughly flush it out.

The mouth of Suke's Run served as the Monongahela River terminus of the Pennsylvania Canal, constructed in the second half of the 1820s. The canal, which came down the northern side of the Allegheny River, was originally designed to end in the town of Allegheny (today's North Side), but the citizens of Pittsburgh demanded that the terminus be in their city. So an aqueduct was built to carry the canal across the Allegheny River, entering Pittsburgh near 11th Street and Penn Avenue, where a basin was constructed to receive canal boats. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was planned to reach Pittsburgh via the Monongahela River, so at great expense a tunnel was built to take the canal through Grant's Hill, and a series of four locks along Try Street connected the southern end of this tunnel to the Monongahela. As it turned out, the C & O Canal never even crossed the Allegheny Mountains, so the tunnel and locks fell into disuse and were eventually closed.

In the gully of Suke's Run arose a shanty town known as Hardscrabble, with people living on both sides of Try Street. In 1921, George T. Fleming wrote, "Original Hardscrabble extended to the jail wall and along Old avenue [today's Diamond Street] to Boyd street. Shingiss street was the eastern line on Forbes. The extension of Forbes street to Diamond, the building of the jail in 1882 and the demands of the railroads for yard room changed the character of all this lower part of the old Eighth Ward." In December 1817, an Irishman named John Tiernan, who lived near Turtle Creek, killed his housemate Patrick Campbell, robbed and concealed the body, and came to Pittsburgh. He was arrested, and in January he was tried and convicted of murder and publicly hanged on Try Street. This was the second execution for murder in Allegheny County.

In 1856, a fire started in the flint-glass works of Phillips, Best & Co. on Try Street; it destroyed fifty houses and left one hundred families homeless, but the loss was estimated at only $20,000. Sometime after 1863, the lower part of Suke's run was converted into a large underground sewer, and the ravine was filled in.

The first Panhandle Bridge was constructed in the 1860s, and connecting tracks were laid along Try Street. The current bridge, the third, was built in 1903.

The portion of Try Street south of Water Street (today's Fort Pitt Boulevard, which formerly continued parallel to First Avenue to Try Street) was vacated in 1956 to make way for the Parkway East.