Author’s Note: The full narrative below, of how Quinn Drive was named and the family that lived there, was an outcome of the SHHS’s Squirrel Hill Street Names Project and a rich enough story in itself to deserve adding it to our “House History Page.” It was a very personally rewarding effort for me—a close friend of the Quinn family through decades of living in the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill South along the winding bends of Beechwood Boulevard before entering Greenfield. Though my wife Jean and I were a generation younger than Dan and Jane Quinn, we first became friends through ties we and our children had to the former St. Philomena Church and School, now the Community Day School.
Tony Indovina, Dec. 8, 2025
The story of Quinn Drive is the story of Dan and Jane O’Neill Quinn, who lived in the old house Jane grew up in. Jane was born on Howe St. in Shadyside in 1926, and the following year her parents bought a house and property off Guy and Kemper Streets. An old frame house appears on a 1939 Hopkins plat map with the name “C. J. O’Neill,” Jane’s father, and it is believed to be one of the oldest structures in this area off Beechwood Blvd. below Guy St. This house appears on maps as early as 1910 under unnamed ownership and its exact age is not known. Dan and Jane married in 1951 and a few years later bought her family’s house and property. They would eventually raise three daughters here and run their family business out of their home.
It is not certain whether the Quinns approached the city or someone from the city approached them about dedicating the unnamed street next to their house in 1959. But after use of the family name was agreed to, it is likely there was further discussion about changing the name from Quinn Way to Quinn Drive to fully satisfy Dan and Jane. Jane was known to be very vocal in her community. She was a neighborhood spokesperson in 1955 when broken sewer lines plagued area residents around her home off Beechwood, and she persisted in having the city resolve the issue.* During 1972-73, the Quinns began major renovation to the old house that originally belonged to Jane’s parents, expanding it and modernizing it, so that today one cannot recognize the now brick-clad structure as being one of the oldest structures in this old neighborhood below Beechwood Boulevard. Several years prior, Dan fell off the roof of the house while working on it and spent several months in traction. When renovation actually began, he and Jane enlisted help from two of her brothers who grew up in the old house to work with them, while hiring contractors to do brick and asphalt work. The basement served as an office for Dan and Jane’s family business in supplying industrial conveyer belts. The address of the house and business retained the old address of Kemper Street from before Quinn Drive was dedicated. The lot was zoned commercial because Jane’s father ran a nursery business there in the 1940s.
Prior to the house’s renovation, the only access was off Quinn Drive above Kemper Street. Another access was created with a private drive that drops steeply off Beechwood Boulevard about thirty feet in elevation to the house below it. This extension of the property appears as a small lot on Beechwood Boulevard with C.J. O’Neill’s name on the 1939 map. The lot remained vacant until then because it was too small to develop. As part of the renovation in 1973, Dan and Jane had the lot graded and paved so there could be a separate entrance to the house. Even though the house and property have always been connected to Beechwood Blvd. by this small parcel, the house now has the same numbered address on Quinn Drive as the old commercial Kemper St. address. At its scenic and wooded location at the head of a large ravine facing Nine Mile Run Valley, the rejuvenated family house is now owed by a new family but has always been part of the old community below Guy Street.
*For more information about the sewer-line break, see the December 2021 SHHS Newsletter, “The Sewer System Above Nine Mile Run—Living, Breeding History,” by Tony Indovina. SHHS Newsletters can be found on the password-protected “Members Page” link on the SHHS website.
From “Street Names Project” to ”House History”
As stated in the technical description of our Squirrel Hill Street Names project (See note below), the approximately 366 ft. long Quinn Drive, running parallel to Beechwood Blvd. below Guy St. in Squirrel Hill South, was named for the Quinn family, who lived in the house abutting its western terminus even before the street was dedicated. The information included in our project description further states that it was originally an unnamed roadway in an area that was planned for development in the early20th century. However, that development was never completed as envisioned because of slag dumping by the Duquesne Slag Company that began several decades later in Nine Mile Run valley just below this neighborhood. The earliest maps show Quinn Drive extending from an angular portion in the western part of this development, across Guy Street, to its terminus in the east, just above Kemper Street. There was also an unnamed extension off it ending on a westerly extension of Kemper Street above Nine Mile Run Valley. Neither of these extensions exists today, but it is believed the old unnamed street that became Quinn Drive was to have been an integral part of this total development below Beechwood Boulevard.
NOTE: The Squirrel Hill Street Names Project is a very rewarding but time-consuming task for the dedicated team of volunteers working with our vice president, Helen Wilson. The Project database has not been put on the SHHS website yet, but we continue to collect information about the neighborhood’s 200-plus roads and bridges. If anyone has information they’d like to contribute, please contact us at sqhillhist@shhsoc.org. More help is always welcome to realize the end product of our research—a book to be published within the foreseeable future.
Squirrel Hill Historical Society 