A six-story ice storage warehouse built in 1898 now houses the largest history museum in Pennsylvania, and you are outside it. The Senator John Heinz History Center holds the collections of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, which has been documenting Pittsburgh's history since 1834. The building itself tells a story: it was built for cold storage before mechanical refrigeration, when the Allegheny River was harvested for ice in winter and stored in insulated warehouses for summer use.
Ice was a major Pittsburgh industry. The museum covers twelve thousand years of Western Pennsylvania history, from the first Native American settlements through the French and Indian War, the industrial revolution, the steel era, and the post-industrial present. The Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum on the upper floors documents the city's athletic legacy: the Pirates' 1960 World Series, the four Steeler Super Bowl wins of the 1970s dynasty, Mario Lemieux and the Penguins.
The museum's collection of Pittsburgh industrial artifacts — blast furnace equipment, labor union records, immigrant community documents — is the primary archive for understanding how the steel city was built and who built it.