One hundred years ago today, 145,000 people who had gone to sleep the night before in Allegheny woke up in Pittsburgh. Two to one, they were not happy about it.

Stripped of political identity overnight, Allegheny went forward as the North Side. Many Alleghenians, however, mourned the loss. And for many North Siders today, the consolidation remains bittersweet because of what has been lost since. What has been saved, though, keeps the old city relevant, as a foundation to build on and as a lesson.

It was the state's third-largest city by 1899, a densely packed market town that was growing with both industry and culture. Wrapped around its original town square, 100 acres of original grazing commons had been transformed into a park of tree-lined promenades, majestic fountains and a lake with a boathouse. Allegheny Commons Park remains as a legacy for the North Side as Pittsburgh's oldest park.

Calling Allegheny "stunning in its simplicity and clarity," Doug Suismon, a Los Angeles-based urban designer, electrified a packed house at the New Hazlett Theater last winter with ideas for resurrecting the old city, even suggesting the North Side return to its old name.

		More information For more about the Allegheny City Society, visit www.alleghenycity.org. The Allegheny Commons Park restoration project is detailed on the city's web site by clicking on "departments" then "city planning" at www.pittsburgh.pa.us.

Mr. Suismon and other urban designers are consulting with North Side institutions in a collaboration as a "charm bracelet" of attractions for families. The designers have recommended putting things back: returning Allegheny Center's traffic circle to the original Federal-Ohio Street grid and replacing the 1840's markethouse. It was demolished in 1966 for make way for high-rise apartments, office buildings and the suburban-style Allegheny Center mall, which failed and is now serving as an office building.

On the 100th anniversary of losing itself as a city, the North Side is in a rebirth. Its blighted Federal Street-North Avenue corridors are slated for massive investment in as many savable Victorian buildings as possible, plus a new Carnegie Library branch. The 84-acre Allegheny Commons Park is in the first stages of a more than $16 million plan to return its fountains, reline its promenades with trees and, ultimately, build a new boathouse on Lake Elizabeth.

On the incoming tide of pro-urbanism, Allegheny demands a look ahead to the past.

David McMunn, a board member of several North Side groups dedicated to preservation, said even if one doesn't know Allegheny's history "you can't help but get the feeling something profound happened here."

Allegheny was established as a town in 1787. In 1828, it became a borough, its businesses in need of a transport channel to compete with the Erie Canal. The state expanded its canal system to link Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Erie, but it brought the "Pittsburgh channel" into Allegheny City via the Kiski and Connemaugh Rivers and down the Allegheny from Freeport. The basin was located about where PNC Park is today.

In her just-published book "Resurrecting Allegheny," Lisa A. Miles writes of Pittsburg's (spelled without an "h" from 1891 to 1911) resentment "that Allegheny was granted something that they instead, should have." After agitating long and hard enough, Pittsburgh got its aqueduct, "an enormous wooden trough with a roof," writes Ms. Miles.

The canal was a boon, giving Allegheny a teeming riverfront that led to its growth as a marketplace. In 1840, it incorporated as a city with 10,000 people

Almost as wide east-to-west as the North Side is now, its northern fringes did not run far beyond Perrysville Avenue.

By annexing its own neighbors, it grew to 125,000 by 1890, adding 20,000 more by 1907.

For a time in the late 1800s, Allegheny was home to more millionaires per capita than any city in the world, and many of the homes on its "millionaire's row" remain on Ridge Avenue. News articles of the day refer to Allegheny's cultural wealth, too, in institutions such as the Western Pennsylvania University, (a forerunner of the University of Pittsburgh), the original Phipps Conservatory, a Carnegie Music Hall and Library and many theaters.

Pittsburg had made two overtures to consolidate before 1907, but momentum was behind its third effort. It had already annexed a number of boroughs around it, including Birmingham and East Birmingham (parts of what are now the South Side). To get Allegheny, Pittsburg used the needs of Western Pennsylvania University as ammunition.

On its hillside home in Allegheny, the university had no room for growth.

"The city of Pittsburg started a campaign to move the university to bigger ground and entangled it with the consolidation argument," Ms. Miles said in an interview.

The cries for consolidation reached fever pitch in time for the 1905 mayoral campaign in Allegheny. The "better government" reform candidate, George Lucas, had the backing of Pittsburg newspapers and pushed the message that Allegheny was becoming tainted by corruption, vice and crime. The press exhorted the public to believe that the "better" class of citizens favored consolidation. In old clippings the color of tobacco juice, headlines railed against the threat of "schemers" stealing the election. They paired "corruption" with Allegheny's resistance.

Allegheny chose as its mayor Charles Kirschler, who had vowed to fight annexation. Shortly after he took office in 1906, the state Legislature, under its "Greater Pittsburg Act," called a special election. The two cities would decide, once again, whether to consolidat, on June 12.

Pittsburg had no match with the state behind it. For this vote, instead of granting the smaller city the right of refusal, the state changed the law to allow the count of combined votes to determine the majority. Pittsburgh, three times larger, voted almost unanimously in favor, Allegheny 2-1 against.

Allegheny took its fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against it, and the deal was sealed on Dec. 9, 1907.

Many conscientious people on both sides of the river favored consolidation. With Allegheny, Pittsburg became the country's fifth largest city, with more room to grow industrially and with a large new source of tax revenue.

Today's talk of a city-county merger carries some of the same arguments in favor -- streamlining multi-municipal costs and boosting Pittsburg's population status to about 12th nationwide.

Archives at the Senator John Heinz History Center include an 1893 series of 12 subscription picture books of the Pittsburg area. As a postscript in one installment, an unsigned essay reads, in part, "It is almost impossible to make a separate chapter out of Allegheny when writing a history of Pittsburg. Many of the men who have made Pittsburg famous as an industrial center have their homes in Allegheny and no one who lives on the north side is independent of the thriving, bustling city across the river. "

To the fiercely independent smaller city, those might have been fighting words. Today, many North Siders who embrace Pittsburgh still don't feel the North Side fits comfortably in its weave of neighborhoods.

"We're just different over here," said Mike Coleman, president of the Allegheny City Society and a long-time resident of Allegheny West. "When we moved here, we were amazed at how much like a village it is, apart from the rest of the city."

"I think a lot of folks felt like we were a step-child," said former city councilwoman Barbara Burns, a native of East Allegheny. "The sentiment is that we've always been an afterthought and a dumping ground.

"A lot of our history was lost, but over the last 30, 40 years, there's been an effort to hold onto what we have and reinvest in it," she said.

Much was not lost, though. The architecture of its core neighborhoods -- Manchester, Allegheny West, the Central Norths Side and East Allegheny -- is steeped in Allegheny.

Sometimes, the old city emerges in unexpected, almost ghostly ways.

Between two walls in a house he renovated on Alpine Street three years ago, Daryl Troha, a neighborhood bartender, uncovered a wall with a sliding-glass window and a sign below that read, "Allegheny City Tax Office," with its hours posted.

When actress and comedian Barbara Russell moved into a Monterrey Street house in 1971, she found a business sign and other records of an ointment and tinctures shop on the same site back when Allegheny ran a street car past her house.

Allegheny City is still listed as the owner of three properties on the North Side, all of them municipal buildings.

East Diamond Street disappeared when Pittsburgh renamed the streets that framed Allegheny's old town square, but lettered on the side of a building in Allegheny Center, "East Diamond Street" remains.

John Canning, a retired high school history teacher, still has in his head his grandmother's voice on the phone to her sister saying, "Let's meet in Allegheny" decades after it became the North Side.

Allegheny also remains by the insistence of its advocates.

Mary Wohleber, Troy Hill's history maven, has offered to carry Allegheny City's flag "back across the bridge" if the North Side ever secedes from Pittsburgh. She says she is, "of course," an Alleghenian. Her father was born there as were her grandparents and great-grandparents.

Both David McMunn, a Central Northsider with generational roots in Allegheny City, and John DeSantis, a transplant to Allegheny West 30 years ago, maintain Allegheny, Pa. addresses. "It's the zip code that matters to the post office," said Mr. DeSantis. "To me, what matters is that Allegheny is not gone and not forgotten."

In researching for her book, Ms. Miles talked to people whose loyalties made a resurrection seem possible, she said: "It's as if Allegheny's soul lives on."

Ms. Miles, who lives in Perry South, said one of her goals was "to get the word out about a place in need of being revered."

That was the hope of a group Allegheny's native sons when they established the Allegheny City Society in 1957 to make sure Pittsburgh would remember her "sister" during the bicentennial celebration in 1958.

Pittsburgh, though, had a true need to induce economic revival on the North Side and was actually making plans to demolish much of it.

Route 279 through East Allegheny and Route 65 through Manchester would claim thousands of homes and businesses in the 1960s and '70s, and Allegheny Center destroyed the heart of the city. Preservationists successfully fought the city's plans to raze residential areas, four of which are now designated historic by the city and the federal government.

Associate state archivist Jerry Ellis had never heard of Allegheny before the hundreds of hours he spent cleaning, sorting, organizing and cataloging 3,000 volumes of orphaned documents from Allegheny, 1828 to 1907.

The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission's State Archives adopted them almost seven years ago from a loading dock at the University of Pittsburgh.

"I got emotionally wrapped up in it," said Mr. Ellis, who read everything from municipal records to reports of land transactions, elocution performances, pets' names and the cost of their licenses, shop receipts, sanitation reports, and police logs.

The records informed much of Ms. Miles' research for her book and are open to the public free of charge in Harrisburg.

"When people learned we had the materials, I started getting phone calls," said Mr. Ellis. "I could see there was a great deal of emotional attachment out there."

When he visited the North Side for the first time, to "tour the remnants," he said, he brought a mental picture. "I could tell what was missing, but there was still a lot there. There's a lot to hold onto."