One of those 475 homes that was threatened was the historic Burtner House, built in 1821. The redesign took two years, and several massive hillsides were sliced away to accommodate the new design. When residents of the Creighton section of East Deer, West Tarentum and Harrison discovered about 475 homes would be razed to build the respective phases of the expressway, the protests began. In the Slate Lick area of South Buffalo, 33 homes were either razed or moved.īut in between is where the problems occurred. While work began in 1967 on the stretch from Fox Chapel Road through the then-fledgling RIDC Industrial Park in O’Hara, and on the northern end between Freeport and West Kittanning, both of those sections were completed without much delay and opened by 1972. Scranton, speaking at a Brackenridge Heights Country Club dinner in October 1966, declared that the project was in its final design, state funding was secured “and it will be completed soon.” Transportation was quickly improved with the completion of the Millvale Bypass in 1950, the Etna Bypass in 1958, the Sharpsburg Bypass in 1963 and the leg to Fox Chapel Road in 1968. The overall expressway idea was hatched in 1948. Now, that total drive time is cut in half with no traffic lights. There were 32 traffic lights from Fox Chapel Road to the Armstrong County line at Freeport. The drive from Pittsburgh’s North Side to Freeport was often more than an hour. The original Route 28 layout started on East Ohio Street in Pittsburgh and snaked along the Allegheny River through the small riverfront towns that were developed largely before the automobile was popularized. While Route 28 stretches from Pittsburgh’s North Side to Brockway in Jefferson County, the Allegheny Valley Expressway is more narrowly defined as the area of 28 from the Fox Chapel Road interchange to the area just north of Kittanning, where Route 28 meets Route 85. More than 40 years of designs, redesigns, funding, defunding and demographic changes that threatened to derail the entire project were overcome that day with the ribbon-cutting cermony that took place on the final leg of the expressway between Exits 14 and 15. 9, 1985, the day the Allegheny Valley Expressway was completed. It was a day many in the Alle-Kiski Valley thought might never come: Aug.
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