Anyone who knows of my fascination with bridges will not be surprised to discover that I enjoyed Pittsburgh and exploring the city's Roberto Clemente Bridge, as well as other nearby spans.
We walked across the bridge, fittingly enough, on our way to a baseball game at the PNC ballpark.
This span across the Allegheny River in downtown Pittsburgh, also known as the Sixth Street Bridge, takes its name from the baseball right fielder that played 18 seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates before his untimely death at the age of 38.
Clemente often worked with charities to benefit Puerto Rico and Latin American countries, delivering food or baseball equipment to those in need. He died in a 1972 plane crash off of the coast of Puerto Rico while on the way to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.
While there was strong sentiment to name the ballpark for Clemente, his name ended up on the bridge as part of a compromise after the Pirates sold naming rights to the park to the locally-based PNC in 1998.
The Roberto Clemente Bridge wasn't the first bridge built at this crossing, though.
The first bridge was a wooden covered truss bridge with multiple spans supported by masonry abutments and piers that opened in 1819 as a toll bridge. The 1037-foot-long span became popular as a promenade for pedestrians who paid two cents toll for each crossing.
That span gave way to a John Roebling-designed suspension bridge in 1857. Roebling designed one of my favorites, a bridge connecting Cincinnati (Ohio) and Covington (Kentucky), but he is particularly famous for his design of New York's Brooklyn Bridge.
Operators reduced the toll to one cent for male pedestrians and allowed women to cross for free. Reduced tolls and the public's fascination with the new-fangled suspension bridge increased traffic and bolstered the bridge company's profits.
The bridge also began carrying rail traffic across the river, but the advent of electric street cars made it obsolete because it wasn't wide enough or strong enough to carry the additional weight.
In 1892, workers floated parts of the bridge 12 miles to use in Coraopolis as a Theodore Cooper-designed span featuring a pair of 440-foot-long bowstring trusses replaced it at Sixth Street.
Calls to replace that bridge began in the late 1890s when requirements for higher bridge clearances over the water found numerous Pittsburgh bridges in violation.
World War I delayed enforcement of the clearance requirements, but it became necessary to replace the bridge by the mid-1920s.
The Allegheny County architects and engineers developed a unique design for the span using steel eye-bars in place of the more traditional wire cables to answer the county's political and commercial concerns, as well as a mandate for a suspension bridge from the Municipal Art Commission. The design features rigid towers holding the ends apart instead of heavy anchorages to at each end of the bridge for cables.
The Sixth Street bridge design and construction became the design model for a trio of nearly identical suspension bridges near each other. The bridges, known collectively as The Three Sisters, are among the only surviving examples of spans using large eye-bar construction.
The Sixth Street Bridge measures 995 feet long and features 78-foot-tall towers.
The bridge opened to traffic on October 19, 1928 and won an award for beauty from the American Institute of Steel Construction in 1929.
In 1986, it earned a spot on the National Register of Historical Places.
The four-lane bridge has a pedestrian walkway, although it closes to car traffic on Pirates' baseball and Steelers' football game days and becomes a pedestrian-only route to PNC Park and Heinz Field.
Being able to take the "T" (the city's trolley or train) into the city and walk the bridges made it much easier for us to navigate downtown for a stress-free trip to and from the ballpark.
Read Catching a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game to learn more about the ballpark and our trip to see a ball game there, and Roebling Bridge links Ohio, Kentucky and Brooklyn to learn more about my favorite Roebling-designed bridge.
Want to learn more about Pittsburgh bridges? Check out Pittsburgh Bridges: Architecture and Engineering by Walter C. Kidney or Bridges of Pittsburgh by Bob Regan.
Interested in learning more about Roberto Clemente? Check out Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss or The Team that Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates by Bruce Markusen.
© Dominique King 2012 All rights reserved
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