Historic McKeesport, PA Water Roundhouse set for Demolition
Cindy Shegan Keeley, Daily News | Equinox27
Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County plans to begin demolition of this 106-year-old facility near McKeesport’s Fifteenth Avenue Bridge on Tuesday.
McKeeesport is a post-industrial city near Pittsburgh, at the confluence of the Youghiogheny and Monongahela Rivers. It has been economically depressed since the decline of the steel industry.
Demolition is to begin on Tuesday on the remaining portion of a 106-year-old former water pumping facility near McKeesport’s Fifteenth Avenue Bridge.
The Water Roundhouse opened on Oct. 11, 1908, as part of the Municipal Water Softening and Filtration Plant, regarded as the first regional facility to provide reliable and safe drinking water to area residents.
According to a 2011 history of the city written by Michelle Tryon Wardle-Eggers and John W. Barna of the McKeesport Regional History & Heritage Center, the plant enabled the city to go from having what the U.S. Geological Survey described as the worst water in the country to what city residents regarded as the finest water in the nation.
The 1908 plant was replaced in 1990 by the present plant drawing water out of the Youghiogheny River, located about a block away from the roundhouse on the McKeesport side of the bridge.
Read entire article here: triblive.com/neighborhoods/yourmckeesport/yourmckeesportmore/6240610-74/roundhouse-mckeesport-plant