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Jun 18, 2006 5:56 pm US/Eastern
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Pittsburgh Has Plenty Of Bridges
PITTSBURGH (KDKA/AP) ―
Cross that bridge when you come to it? That could be very tiring in Pittsburgh.
The dozen or so bridges that cross the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, joining downtown and its southern and northern neighborhoods, represent only a small fraction of the spans that crisscross this city.
Just how many are there? Depending on who has been doing the counting, that number has varied over the years.
Now, a local author who is a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh believes he has come up with a definitive
number: 446. That would put the Steel City ahead of even Venice, Italy, the city of canals also known, naturally, for its many bridges. (The Venice tourism board puts the number at 443.)
Bob Regan, author of "The Bridges of Pittsburgh," said he believes Pittsburgh has the greatest variety of bridges anywhere, "and they're all beautiful."
Regan did not set out to claim any record for Pittsburgh. He just wanted to bring attention to another of this city's
attributes.
"Pittsburgh is beautiful and we're trying to make sure people realize this," he said.
Regan spent a week just going through bridge databases kept by the city, Allegheny County, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and railroad companies. He reconciled some data, excluding, for instance, tunnels, and adding some bridges whose ownership is being transferred from one entity to another.
The Local History Company, a Pittsburgh publisher, had pitched the idea to him. It also published his "The Steps of Pittsburgh: Portrait of a City," which became the company's best seller, said Cheryl Towers, co-owner and editor. In it, Regan detailed the city's hundreds of stairways and thousands of steps, a feature many natives take for granted but which captured the fancy of Regan, a Boston transplant.
Towers said she wanted the "folk treatment" Regan brought to his steps book. He paired up with photographer Tim Fabian, whose 100-plus photos illustrate the bridge book, published this month.
The bridge book is not engineering-dense, though it does discuss bridge types, evolution of bridge technology and bridge pioneers, some of whom, not surprisingly, are connected to Pittsburgh.
John Augustus Roebling, who went on to design the Brooklyn Bridge, developed wire rope in nearby Saxonburg, Butler County, and worked on bridges in the city. George W.G. Ferris, who invented the Ferris Wheel, had an engineering firm in Pittsburgh.
Beam bridges. Arch bridges. Suspension bridges - Pittsburgh's got them all. About the only type of bridge it doesn't have is a drawbridge. It's no wonder the International Bridge Conference has been held here for the past 23 years, as it was this past week.
Some bridges are pedestrian - in both senses of the word: plain and for foot traffic.
Some are elegant, like the city's oldest bridge, the Smithfield Street Bridge, which was built in the 1880s using the unusual lenticular truss style. The support beams resemble a figure eight on its side with its ends pulled taught, creating a gentle curve.
Some are unique or rare. The Three Sisters bridges were the first self-anchored suspension bridges built in the United States and are the only three identical side-by-side bridges in the world.
They're better known as the Roberto Clemente, the Andy Warhol and Rachel Carson, after the Pittsburgh Pirates great, the city's best-known artist and the area native who wrote "Silent Spring," the 1962 book which revealed the harmful effects of DDT and other pesticides and helped launched the environmental movement.
Pittsburgh also boasts the first "self-cleaning" bridge - a steel deck bridge built of open-grate.
Regan, a professor of information sciences, had a little help on his project. Visiting a library, he ran across a fourth-grader writing a report on bridges, footnotes and all, for a class project. He included the report in his book.
(© 2006 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)