Railroad suburbs like Edgewood, where you are, grew up east of Pittsburgh along the Pennsylvania Railroad main line in the late nineteenth century. The pattern here — a train station at the center of a walkable residential neighborhood, with houses radiating outward within walking distance — was the dominant model of suburban growth before the automobile made everything else possible. The Pennsylvania Railroad opened the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh to development beginning in the 1870s.
Edgewood was incorporated as a borough in 1888 and attracted middle-class families who could live away from the city's smoke while commuting by train to downtown offices. Swissvale, to the southwest, developed somewhat later and served a more working-class population tied to the Westinghouse Electric plants at East Pittsburgh. George Westinghouse, inventor of the railway air brake and the alternating current electrical system that won the War of Currents against Thomas Edison, built his industrial empire in the eastern Pittsburgh suburbs.
The Westinghouse plants at East Pittsburgh and Turtle Creek once employed tens of thousands of workers. The inventor who gave the world alternating current lived and worked in a neighborhood that now searches for the economic successor to those plants.