Fisk Street

Fisk Street
Neighborhoods	Bloomfield, Central Lawrenceville
Origin of name	Alba Fisk
➤ Market Street (1850s)
Portion	From Penn Avenue to Cabinet Way
➤ Market Alley (until 1881)
Portion	From Penn Avenue to Cabinet Way
➤ 41st Street (1868)
Portion	North of Penn Avenue
Origin of name	Sequential numbering up the Allegheny River
➤ Shaw Street (1872–1873)
Portion	North of Penn Avenue
➤ Meteor Alley (1881–1898)
Portion	From Penn Avenue to Cabinet Way

Fisk Street is named for Alba Fisk. Fisk came to Pittsburgh from Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1818, and became the first master armorer at the Allegheny Arsenal.

Fisk Street has twice been renamed by city ordinance, only to be quickly changed back to Fisk.

In 1868, Pittsburgh's modern sequence of numbered streets was created by renaming all the streets perpendicular to the Allegheny River. The original renaming ordinance included Fisk Street among the streets to be renamed; it was to have become 41st Street. But this appears to have been a mistake. Less than a month later, City Councils passed a supplementary ordinance that repealed all of the name changes east of 40th Street and redid the numbering with Fisk Street omitted. This produced the street numbers that we have today.

Four years later, in 1872, Fisk Street was renamed Shaw Street, but five and a half months later, this change was also reverted.

South of Penn Avenue

The portion of Fisk Street from Penn Avenue to Cabinet Way was first laid out as Market Street in the 1850s by William Woolslayer. It was 20 feet wide, with the expectation that the owner of the adjacent land would later dedicate enough to make the width 40 feet. However, this did not happen, and the 1872 Hopkins atlas shows it was still a narrow alley. Because it did not reach the width expected of a street, it became known as Market Alley.

In 1881, a city ordinance renamed many streets to fix duplicates. Pittsburgh had three Market Alleys, all of which were confusable with Market Street downtown, so this Market Alley was renamed Meteor Alley.

Fisk Street was extended from Penn Avenue to Liberty Avenue by a city ordinance in 1898 that established its location, which replaced Meteor Alley. A 1910 ordinance that listed all streets and alleys in Pittsburgh included both "Fisk, from Butler to Liberty av., 9th wd.," and "Meteor ay., from Penn av. to Cabinet ay., 8th wd.," but by this time Meteor Alley had ceased to exist.

See also

• Market Alley, for other thoroughfares that have had that name
• Shaw Avenue in Squirrel Hill