Operations began for a funicular — a railway designed to travel both up and down steep slopes — on Mount Washington in Pittsburgh’s South Side area. This section of the Steel City is located along the Monongahela River and across from the city’s downtown area.
The origins of this funicular, which is known as the Monongahela Incline, can be traced to Pittsburgh’s ever-growing industrial base during the 1860s and the consequent need for a lot more people to work in factories, foundries, mills, and several other manufacturing centers within and near the city.
This large-scale demand for labor resulted in numerous German immigrants making their way to Pittsburgh to work in those jobs, but it also created a major shortage of available housing. Quite a few of these immigrants ended up settling in homes on the hilltop and hillsides of Mount Washington…