Last Fall I was driving around taking pictures of mobster graves and sites associated with organized crime history in Pittsburgh when I spotted an old microwave tower on a hilltop. It was breaking the horizon in an otherwise ordinary suburban landscape. Nearby, as is common with many first- and second-generation microwave towers building in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were radio and television broadcast towers and cellphone towers.

Former AT&T microwave tower site, December 2020. It is flanked by a television broadcast tower (Sinclair Broadcasting) and a monopole (cellphone).

I have long had an interest in the history of telecommunications history infrastructure: towers and antenna sites. The old microwave tower in Pittsburgh’s North Hills was easily recognizable from a distance as a type built by AT&T during the company’s first microwave network buildout. Towers like these were built on hilltops and mountainsides throughout the United States to create a line-of-sight antenna network carrying voice, television, and data at the speed of light.

AT&T microwave tower. National Archives photo.

The former AT&T tower that caught my eye last year was built in 1950, more than two years after the first microwave network reached western Pennsylvania. In 1945, the Western Union Telegraph Company announced that Pittsburgh would be one of four terminal cities in the nation’s first commercial microwave telecommunications network. The new network also included the company’s headquarters, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.

Western Union Microwave Network System Map. Originally published in 2004 by the Recent Past Preservation Network for the annual Transportation Research Board meeting, Washington, D.C.

Two sites were built inside Pittsburgh: the terminal station atop the Chamber of Commerce Building downtown and a relay station in the North Hills called the Fort Site. The Western Union network initially carried telegrams when it went online by early 1948. The towers soon carried faxes and then television signals. Read more about the Western Union network in this 2006 article, “Towers for Telegrams: The Western Union Telegraph Company and the Emergence of Microwave Telecommunications Infrastructure.”

The Pittsburgh Press, October 22, 1945.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 23, 1945.

Bell telephone microwave facilities followed Western Union. In 1949, Pennsylvania newspapers reported that new television relay sites were planned throughout the Commonwealth. “The towers are to be 60 to 80 feet tall and will be built of concrete a foot thick,” wrote the Sunbury Daily Item. “They resemble small grain elevators and will support repeating and amplifying equipment placed by the Bell Telephone Company.”

In early 1950, AT&T bought land on the north side of Mt. Troy Road in Pittsburgh’s 26th Ward (the Steel City’s northernmost reaches). It took eight days for the Rust Engineering Company to build the 103-foot reinforced concrete tower. The new tower relayed microwaves from nearby towers near Rochester and Apollo. A headline in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph touted the new tower’s function: “To improve TV here.”

Rust Companies advertisement noting construction of the “Television relay tower, Troy Hill.” The Pittsburgh Press, December 13, 1953.

Shortly after AT&T completed the tower, the Pittsburgh Press published a picture of it captioned, “A New Landmark.”

The Pittsburgh Press, August 21, 1950.

You really can’t argue with that 1950 photo caption. The tower was a landmark from the moment it was completed. The tower is visible throughout Pittsburgh, from the nearby historic St, Mary’s Cemetery to boroughs up the Allegheny River.

Former AT&T microwave tower as seen from Mt. Troy Road at St. Mary’s Cemetery.

Former AT&T microwave tower viewed through one of the arches in the Highland Park Bridge. Photo taken in Aspinwall Riverfront Park.

Another view from Aspinwall.

Former AT&T microwave tower as seen from Highland Park Reservoir.

Former AT&T microwave tower, December 2020.

Former AT&T microwave tower, December 2020.

If you’re a historic preservationist or just a fan of Cold War era telecommunications history, you won’t find this site or any other microwave relay site listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The Federal Communications Commission excluded them from consideration in National Historic Preservation Act regulatory compliance proceedings. And, since most of the old towers are owned by telecommunications companies (American Tower Corporation owns the Mt. Troy tower and many others), preservationists cannot nominate the sites for listing in the National Register of Historic Places because the telecoms oppose the designations as well as any new regulatory compliance obligations.

Western Union’s Pittsburgh terminal was located downtown in the Chamber of Commerce Building (right).

Western Union’s antennas and other equipment was removed from the Chamber of Commerce building many years ago. The Fort Site, also located in the North Hills, was demolished several years ago. Western Union had sold the site to the Federal Aviation Administration which continued to use the tower and radio equipment until it was decommissioned.

Western Union’s Fort Site, Pittsburgh North Side, in 2004.

Fort Site tower base and equipment building, 2004.

Fort Site after demolition.

For an inside look at one of the Western Union Towers, drop by National Park Service documentation of the Jennerstown relay site immediately east of Pittsburgh. This was one of the last original intact Western Union sites with an unaltered tower and equipment building. Documenting the site was like stepping into a time machine.

National Park Service architect Christopher Marston takes notes while standing outside the equipment cab at the top of the Jennerstown relay station, June 2005.

Western Union Jennerstown relay station, Historic American Engineering Record photo by Jet Lowe, 2005.

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

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