Pittsburgh Plate Glass: Ford City Works

The Pittsburgh Plate Glass plant that opened here in Ford City in eighteen eighty-seven became one of the largest and most productive plate glass factories anywhere in the world. At its peak it employed more than three thousand five hundred workers, a workforce so ethnically diverse that the company built a special tunnel beneath the busy railroad tracks so workers could pass safely between buildings. Belgians, Poles, Slovaks, and others who had mastered glassmaking in their home countries crossed an ocean and then that tunnel every shift.

The plant supplied plate glass to buildings and automobiles across the country for more than a century before operations finally ended in nineteen ninety-one. The factory's long run shaped Ford City from a company town into a real community, and the tunnel those workers walked is one of the few tangible reminders of that industrial scale.