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Early Pittsburgh Bridges

No attempts were made early in the nineteenth century to bridge the rivers at the Point. The first bridges built were the Smithfield Street Bridge across the Monongahela (called in its early days simply the Monongahela Bridge) erected in 1818, and the St. Clair Street (later Sixth Street) across the Allegheny opened a year later. (3) The former was a Burr-truss covered wooden bridge designed by Lewis Wernwag (4) and built by John Thompson. The Allegheny span was also of timber and covered. These bridges, which were conveniently situated for commerce, could not carry all traffic as the century advanced, and among other sites the Point began to be considered for new bridge construction. Another wooden truss bridge was constructed in 1840 at Hand Street (later Ninth Street) and at Mechanic's Street (later Sixteenth Street) in 1837 -- both across the Allegheny. (5) Near the present Eleventh Street the canal aqueduct was erected in 1834, which was superceded in 1844-45 by John Roebling's famous wire suspension aqueduct.(6) The Monongahela at Pittsburgh was not to be bridged by another highway span until the covered wooden bridge was built at South Tenth Street in 1861. At Pittsburgh the Ohio was unbridged until the twentieth century.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the three rivers at Pittsburgh presented rather a different appearance. Before the introduction of dams toward the end of the nineteenth century, the rivers at slack water were relatively shallow, and numerous islands and sandbars were in evidence. There was, for instance, a long sandbar in the Monongahela at the site of the Smithfield Street Bridge and two islands Smokey and Kilbeck (Kilbuck), near the north bank at the confluence of the rivers. (7) It must be remembered also that there was an extensive traffic on all three rivers and the spans of the bridges had to be sufficiently high to allow boats to pass underneath them.

The coal interests in Western Pennsylvania were also particularly concerned with navigation on the rivers, especially the Monongahela, because it was the chief means of transporting coal from the mines in the southwestern part of the state. (8) Certainly when bridges at the Point were projected, the claims of navigation had to be respected and the height of the span and an unobstructed channel at the mouth of the Monongahela were of interest not only to local commerce but also to the United States government and the United States Army Corps of Engineers who were charged with keeping the navigable streams unobstructed. (9)

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