The Bridge of Sighs connected the Allegheny County Courthouse with the jail across Ross Street. Now it connects the bureaucracy in the courthouse with more bureaucracy in the repurposed jail building, so that the name is just as appropriate. In the picture above, for a bit of a change of pace, old Pa Pitt gives you a bus driving away from you, which gives us a good sense of scale.
The architectural parts of the Sixteenth Street or David McCullough Bridge, built in 1923, were designed by Warren and Wetmore, architects of Grand Central Station in New York. The fact that the bridge does not fall down is attributable to the engineer, H. G. Balcom.
With November colors in Point State Park.
The Fallowfield station on the Red Line in Beechview is a kind of parasite on the Fallowfield viaduct. The Fallowfield Avenue end is at street level; the other end of the station is about five storeys above street level. Stations on the Red Line are currently getting a little bit of renovation.
The Fallowfield viaduct is one of three major viaducts, along with a bridge and a tunnel, that are necessary to bring the streetcars from downtown into central Beechview.
The viaduct is as important to pedestrians as it is to streetcars—so important, in fact, that, when the walkway was closed for repairs for a while a few years ago, the Port Authority gave free rides between Fallowfield and Westfield at the other end of the viaduct.
Outbound streetcars approach the viaduct from a curve.
The Panhandle Bridge, in the foreground, carries trolleys across the Monongahela River. Behind that, the Liberty Bridge; then the Tenth Street Bridge; and in the distance, the Birmingham Bridge. Below, a slightly different framing of the same view.
Seen from the South Side Slopes.
This bridge carries eight lanes of expressway traffic over the entrance to Point Park. It was also designed to make entering and leaving Point Park a dramatic experience. Under the bridge is a footbridge over an artificial pond, and as we cross the footbridge on the way in, the Point Fountain becomes visible; on the way out, the skyline opens up to us.
In 1967, the Point had been cleared and the Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt Bridges had been built. But the old Manchester and Point Bridges were still standing. The Manchester Bridge was still in use; the Fort Duquesne Bridge was famously the Bridge to Nowhere, with no approaches on the North Side end. It was built in 1963, but did not open (with actual ramps on the north end) until 1969. The Fort Pitt Bridge, on the other hand, had opened in 1959, so the Point Bridge was an abandoned hulk. Both the Point and Manchester Bridges were finally taken down in 1970.
This old slide, taken by the late Donald Bailey in 1967, was badly overexposed to begin with, and it had been stored in bad conditions, but we were able to get a recognizable image out of it with some work in the GIMP. We thank Mr. Bailey’s heirs for donating some of his pictures to the public.
Looking southward on the Smithfield Street Bridge from Fort Pitt Boulevard, with the Monongahela Incline beginning its descent in the background.
When Amtrak stopped using this bridge and the downtown tunnel into which it led, the Port Authority seized the opportunity. The bridge now carries the streetcars over the Mon and into the subway, the first part of which uses that old railroad tunnel—so that, like many other things in Pittsburgh, our subway is cobbled together from spare parts.
