Father Pitt

Category: Bridges

  • Smithfield Street Bridge

  • Subway Crossing First Avenue

    Subway crossing First Avenue

    The “subway” is an elevated line by the time it crosses First Avenue on its way into the First Avenue station. In the background, three skyscrapers—front to back and shortest to tallest, the Jones & Laughlin Building (now the John P. Robin Civic Building), the Grant Building, and One Oxford Centre.

  • Under the Boulevard of the Allies

    A view eastward on Second Avenue under the Boulevard of the Allies viaduct. Below, the relief and inscription at the Grant Street entrance to the viaduct.

  • Seventh Street Bridge with a Plastic Camera

    Three pictures from 1999. No one would say that this Imperial fixed-focus twin-lens-reflex camera was a fine piece of optical equipment. But it could take satisfactory pictures, and (as “toy camera” fans all over the Internet insist) its defects are themselves charming in their way.

  • A Lot of Bridges

    West End Bridge

    Above: the West End Bridge over the Ohio, with the Ohio Connecting Railroad Bridge behind it, and the McKees Rocks Bridge behind that. Below, the Allegheny, with the Fort Duquesne Bridge, the Three Sisters, the Fort Wayne railroad bridge, the Veterans Bridge, and the Sixteenth Street Bridge. For extra credit, see if you can point out the Twenty-Eighth Street Bridge. (Click on the picture to make it very big.)

    Allegheny River

  • The Mon

    Looking east up the Monongahela River from Mount Washington.

  • Sun and Shade

    Patterns of sun and shade on the rocks in the middle of Saw Mill Run, Seldom Seen, with a railroad bridge in the background.

  • Construction on the Rachel Carson Bridge

    The Ninth Street or Rachel Carson Bridge is closed for construction for a while. Here we see it in early-morning light.

  • Panhandle Bridge

    An outbound Blue Line car heads toward Station Square on the Panhandle Bridge, an old railroad bridge repurposed, along with the railroad tunnel under downtown, for the subway in the 1980s.

  • Hot Metal Bridge

    This rehabilitated pair of bridges gets its name from the fact that the downstream span was used to transport hot metal across the river between the two sections of the giant J&L steel plant. The upstream span (which technically used to be the Monongahela Connecting Railroad Bridge) is now open to automobile traffic; the downstream span is reserved for bicycles.

    Although official records spell this “Hot Metal Bridge,” it is always pronounced “Hotmetal Bridge,” with the accent on the first syllable.