Auto-oriented use in a company town founded before the Model T. 

In a scramble to meet my quota of articles before the end of November, I offer a simple ponder and an almost 360° view at a single intersection.  A series of photos offers all that is necessary to conceive a small manufacturing city’s metamorphosis through the increasing prevalence of the automobile over the twentieth century.  The city is one I featured this past summer and offered adequate historic background back then.  Ambridge, Pennsylvania, effectively a suburb of Pittsburgh, owes its rise and (modest) fall to the corporation that gave it its name. Though the initial Harmonist settlement dates from 1824, the American Bridge Company founded the borough as a company town in 1905, and while it quickly peaked at just over 20,000 people in 1930, today it has fewer than 7,000.  The demand for US-made steel collapsed in the 1970s and 80s, and though American Bridge Company still exists, over forty years ago it ceased having any presence in the community that it begat.  Amidst that precipitous decline, one might expect to see scores of abandoned homes.  Nope.  While I’m sure at least a few have faced the wrecking ball, the decline was slow and the housing stock good enough that most homes simply have fewer residents.  Ambridge never suffered a spike in crime that would encourage people to flee without finding a buyer; it remains a quiet bedroom community to Pittsburgh.  What has changed, albeit subtly, is a loss of viable functions to the buildings of its old main street and the gradual encroachment of auto-oriented uses.  And Ambridge reveals this devolution effectively in the borough’s most prominent intersection.

I’m standing at PJ Caul Memorial Park, the most central park in Ambridge—also the southeast corner of where Merchant Street (the primary north-south corridor) intersects 11th Street, a lateral collector road.  Although the design of Merchant Street is a minor collector, not conducive for heavy traffic, it still hosts the majority of the borough’s commercial buildings and is, for at least six blocks, the de facto main street of Ambridge.  Here’s what it looks like at its core.

Some stretches of Merchant Street are active; others show clear gaps in the building continuity, where vacant lots or parking have replaced what most likely were structures similar to the ones that remain.

Meanwhile, the intersecting 11th Street does not host many commercial buildings but achieves its prominence primarily because it transitions to a bridge that crosses the Ohio River, thereby linking Ambridge with communities on both sides of the valley: among them, Aliquippa and Coraopolis (current headquarters for American Bridge Company).  

Neither of these roads is the busiest street in Ambridge; that honor goes to State Route 65, Ohio River Boulevard, stringing right along the bank of the river, passing under the bridge in the photo below.

PA-65 essentially allows vehicles to bypass the heart of Ambridge and neighboring towns at high speeds, through a limited number conventional intersections with stop lights.  But if visitors want to get to the heart of Ambridge, it’s right there at PJ Caul Memorial Park and the intersection of Merchant and 11th.

The park itself offers no great surprises, and in the long summer days preceding Independence Day (when I took these pics), it’s a reassuring slice of Americana.  One might argue, however, that the remaining corners of this intersection are just as American but under much more dubious circumstances.

Looking across 11th Street, the northeast corner features a corner gas station.  Though unlikely that it has always been a Sunoco, this corner has hosted a gas station for decades.  It was inevitable.  After all, this intersection encapsulates two of the most prominent streets in Ambridge, so a disproportionate number of tire treads will touch this spot.  Demand for auto-oriented uses is considerable.  Not surprisingly, the Sunoco also features a mechanic shop and emissions inspection station.  Pivoting to the left offers all the visual evidence one needs of the push-and-pull forces at work.

At this point, my camera’s lens is staring straight westward down 11th Street; the aforementioned, iconic Ambridge-Aliquippa Bridge is visible in the distance.  To the right is a structure that most likely dates from the time when Ambridge was a thriving manufacturing center: its buildout right to the sidewalk, its mansard roof, its paired windows all evoke a time period when such pedestrian scaled structures were the norm because car ownership was not yet widespread among the urban working class.  Almost all of Ambridge’s street grid precedes 1950.  I suspect that two-story structure dates from between the two wars; given Ambridge’s founding age, it may be the only structure that has ever stood at this site.

But it is in the minority; on the other side is one more auto-oriented use: another gas station.

Two gas stations at a single intersection couldn’t compete more blatantly.  The Marathon and Sunoco demonstrate the high demand for fuel and basic automotive services at this intersection, and they comprise two of the three gas stations operating within Ambridge municipal limits at the time of this analysis.  (The third, another Sunoco, operates just three blocks away, on Merchant at 8th Street.  Though I’m sure at least one or both Sunocos are franchises, their proximity reveals how confident both are that the Sunoco brand won’t nullify itself.)

Then, pivoting a bit further to the left at this same southwest corner, another auto-oriented use becomes fully visible.

Advance Auto Parts may be in a rough patch at the moment, but it has quietly achieved dominance over the last ninety years as a leading retailer for auto parts and accessories.  Most are comparable to the size of the operation featured in this photo, and, ironically, they rarely feature a great deal of parking.  Since the stores are fairly small and focused on one “category killer” strain of merchandise, people don’t need to linger; 24 spaces are probably enough.  But this building, although plunked right at the end of Ambridge’s oldest commercial corridor, is the prototype operating in numerous auto-dependent suburbs.  Advance Auto Parts does not anticipate a customer base consisting of pedestrians strolling down Merchant Street: the store entrance fronts the parking lot, not the sidewalk, and the frontage on Merchant is just a big blank wall.  Customers drive to this store and stash their purchases within their cars.  Any retailer using this commercial building typology, regardless of whether it sells car accessories, is an unequivocal auto-oriented use.

And, after a full 360° rotation, the photographs prove that Ambridge has allowed auto-oriented uses to subsume at least two of the four corners at this intersection.   PJ Caul Memorial Park receives comparatively little engagement: people lingering on the benches get to stare the surrounding corners at the intersection, which consists of two gas stations.  And the gas stations themselves attract people needing to fill up their gas tanks, not pedestrians shopping recreationally among the fledgling storefronts on Merchant Street.  In short, when vying for limited square footage (Ambridge’s land area is 1.5 square miles), auto-oriented uses always trump the pedestrians.  Cars just have a way of muscling out the bikes and scooters and feet; public infrastructure accommodates them first (road design has morphed to enable cars ease of movement), and the uses that fill the huge quadrilaterals between public ROW latticework follow suit.

It’s not impossible to imagine that the original petrochemical corporations bought and destroyed whatever old buildings preceded these two gas stations.  And I suspect that Merchant Street matured as Ambridge’s commercial corridor long before 11th Street extended out to a bridge across the nearby Ohio River.  But once that bridge went up, motorists recognized Ambridge as a great place for a pit stop.  Demand for driver amenities surpassed the collective pursuit to save old buildings, so, over the course of decades, most of the historic buildings at this intersection faced obsolescence (due to tiny loading docks, no off-street parking), then demolition.  As a result, visitors today get a microcosm of urban transformation through the intersection of 11th and Merchant.  Erratic preservation of the walkable landscape that sprouted seemingly overnight.  It’s not a bad intersection…just unassuming and very typical of American car dependence in 2024.  Yet at one point, before cars became the alpha and omega, a brick commercial structure with a mansard roof was just as banal as the modern-day Sunoco.  If alternative energy sources (and electric vehicles) ever supplant petroleum, the 21st century gas station may soon be a relic of the past.  I have a sneaking suspicion the preservationists won’t pick a battle to save buildings like these.