Larimer is a
neighborhood in the East End of the City of
Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania in the
United States. The neighborhood takes its name from
William Larimer, who grew up in nearby
Westmoreland County and, after making a fortune in the railroad industry, built a manor house overlooking
East Liberty along a path that came to be called "Larimer Lane" and later Larimer Avenue.
Larimer's daughter, Rachel, married James Mellon, son of
Thomas Mellon, which brought what is now Larimer into the Mellon clan's control. As with East Liberty, the Mellons sold or rented this land and used the proceeds to finance Pittsburgh's coal, steel, and gas industries. A number of James Mellon's heirs used Larimer as a middle name, including Gulf Oil founder
William Larimer Mellon, and they ensured that the present-day neighborhood took the name as well.
Larimer was originally settled by Germans in the later half of the 19th century. By the early 1900s
Italians from
Abruzzi, Calabria, Campania, Sicily and Northern Italians became the dominant ethnic group. These settlers were slightly better-off than their kinsmen who moved to
Bloomfield around the same time: the residents of Bloomfield built modest frame row-houses, while those in Larimer built somewhat nicer detached brick homes with small yards. Before long, Larimer residents had built and were running
concrete foundries and commercial bakeries along Lincoln Avenue towards Two-Mile Run (some of which still exist today), and a successful...
Read More