Picture the oldest public gathering space in Pittsburgh. Market Square was established in 1764, the same year Fort Pitt built the civilian blockhouse, as the commercial heart of the settlement growing outside the fort's walls. It served the same function that market squares served in English towns: a place where farmers and merchants gathered to trade goods, where public announcements were made, and where community life organized itself around commerce.
Pittsburgh's early economy revolved around supplying westward-bound settlers who floated down the Ohio from this point. Boats, barrels, flour, salt pork — everything a family needed to settle the Ohio Valley passed through Pittsburgh. Andrew Mellon's banking empire, which financed much of the industrial expansion of the late nineteenth century, had its roots in the commercial networks centered around this square.
T. Mellon and Sons Bank was founded nearby in 1869. The Allegheny County Courthouse, one of the finest Romanesque Revival buildings in America, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson in 1888, stands a few blocks east. Market Square today hosts a farmers market that connects this ground to its original purpose.
Pittsburgh has always known how to use its public spaces.