Lisa Miles knew a good thing when she saw it, and what she saw was that Allegheny City was a book waiting to happen.

Three years ago, with the discovery of the Allegheny City archives and with the 100th anniversary of the town's forced annexation by Pittsburgh on the horizon, Ms. Miles pounced. A couple of grants later -- from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, which rescued and cataloged the archives, and the Buhl Foundation -- she was hard at work on "Resurrecting Allegheny City: The Land, Structures & People of Pittsburgh's North Side."

The book's publication last month is one of several ways North Siders are marking the centennial of Allegheny City's passing on Dec. 9, 1907, a day that for some will forever live in infamy.

"Alleghenians were fiercely proud of their home," said Ms. Miles. "Through the 1950s, they didn't even want to call it anything but Allegheny."

"A few of us use Allegheny City 15212 as our address," said David McMunn, secretary of the Allegheny City Society, founded in 1958. "All of my mail comes to me that way."

The society, which keeps alive the memory of Allegheny City through programs and publications, is expecting 130 people at its centennial banquet Thursday at the Grand Hall at The Priory. Society members also have produced a book this year, part of Arcadia's Images of America series. "Allegheny City 1840-1907" features photographs, maps and illustrations of Allegheny buildings, parks, monuments and residents.

While not every North Sider today knows that part of Pittsburgh once was its own separate city, there are plenty who appreciate its storied past and are curious to know more.

"It sort of lingers," said Ms. Miles, who has lived in the Perry Hilltop neighborhood since the early 1990s. "For those who have an interest in the antique, Allegheny's identity seemed especially mysterious. There was a lot of hidden and still there material that could be unearthed," such as the brutal past of sunken Smokey Island.

"Resurrecting Allegheny City" begins with the land as it was in prehistoric times, and with the Native Americans who roamed it and the first white settlers who conquered it. The evolution of the land over two and a half centuries, its division into patents, townships, boroughs and lots, is of particular fascination to Ms. Miles, as is its early identity as a village with English antecedents.

Land north of the Allegheny and Ohio rivers was still Indian territory when the state purchased it in 1784; three years later the legislature commissioned surveyor David Redick to draw up a town plan. He centered it on the intersection of two Indian paths: the Venango trail, now Federal Street, and the Great Path, now Ohio Street. Four block-size squares at the crossing would be dedicated to public use, and surrounded by 32 blocks divided into residential lots. These "in lots" would be enclosed by 102 acres of common pasture land, which "set a pastoral tone for the geniality, civility and pride that marked Allegheny citizens," Ms. Miles writes. "This land area represented a stake in community -- of mutual responsibility, purpose and respect for the last vestige of the wilderness."

Beyond the Commons were the "out lots," individually designated farmland ascribed to owners of the in lots -- the only such English-influenced town plan in America outside New England, Ms. Miles reports. The state intended that Allegheny would be the county seat of the new Allegheny County, but protests from Pittsburgh squelched that plan.

When Redick drew Allegheny's plan, Delaware Chief Killbuck was living peacefully on Smokey Island, just off the north shore opposite the Point. But between 1755 and 1782, it had been the scene of gruesome violence, as Colonial soldiers and Delawares had been tortured or killed there, sometimes in deliberate view of the soldiers at Fort Pitt. Ms. Miles sees the episodes as an early use of the northern shore as a stage, which continued with the arrival of traveling circuses and the development of Exposition Park, Three Rivers Stadium, PNC Park and Heinz Field.

"That land was always a sort of place of exhibitionist show and sportsmanship," she said.

Allegheny City was born as a third-class city in 1840. Among its first laws were ones curtailing roaming dogs and establishing a Night Watch and constables. Ms. Miles' painstaking research in the Allegheny City archives in Harrisburg shows in her detailed accounting of land development and industrial, residential and infrastructure growth. She rounds out the story by consulting newspapers and other texts; still, one wishes for a better sense of social life in a city with the region's first Millionaire's Row.

Pittsburgh officials had been agitating for annexation as early as the 1830s and finally found their hook when the Western University of Pennsylvania, in Allegheny City since 1882, needed room to grow. Ms. Miles discovered that supporters of consolidation linked the need for a greater university with the desire for a Greater Pittsburgh.

"If you were against the university moving, you were against the consolidation," Ms. Miles said. "It was a really slick and ugly campaign."

Alleghenians voted 2 to 1 against annexation; Pittsburghers almost unanimously favored it. When the votes were tallied together, annexation prevailed.

"What happened with the consolidation would never have happened in this day and age," she said.

She found no mention of speechifying and hand-wringing in the records of Allegheny City's last days, just a tidying up and taking care of business. Allegheny's last official act was to thank its council president for "courtesy, efficiency and faithfulness" in performing his duties.

Generously illustrated and attractively designed by Greg Pytlik, the 275-page book is published by the author and available for $12 at Borders bookstores, the University of Pittsburgh Bookstore and several North Side locations, including the Children's Museum and Mattress Factory. Ms. Miles, who also is a musician and the author of a biography of Pittsburgh artist Esther Phillips, will speak on Allegheny City at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 13 at Borders South, Bethel Park, and at 1:30 p.m. Dec. 14 at Bistro to Go, 415 E. Ohio St., North Side. Her books and information about other appearances are available on her Web site, lisamilesviolin.com.

To reserve a ticket for the Allegheny City Society's centennial banquet (6 to 10 p.m. Thursday, $30), call David McMunn at 412-657-8486 by 4 p.m. today.