The Fort Pitt Bridge

We must start this artistic internet mountain-carving process with the image of the Fort Pitt Bridge because it provides a cinematic entrance into the Mount Rushmore of Pittsburgh Bridges. After all “Pittsburgh is the only city that makes an entrance,” according to two-time Pulitzer Prize Winner and Presidential Medal of Freedom bearer David McCullough, perhaps the greatest American historian of the 20th century who also knew a thing or two about bridges having written the definitive book–-The Great Bridge–-on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Fort Pitt Bridge tag teams with the Fort Pitt Tunnel, like the great studio wrestlers of old, to create this dynamic entrance; and if we stay in that same ring and transition our sweet similes to the sweet science of boxing, like the great fisticuffs of old, it is the Fort Pitt Bridge that provides the theatrical knockout blow in combining with the Fort Pitt Tunnel for a 1-2 punch in TKOing any other potential metropolitan thespian competitors.

But we wish not to make this all about the Fort Pitt Bridge, our dear readers. We wish to make this about you. This is your experience, your rare vacation time you have earned and chosen so diligently to use visiting this tourist site over less inspiring ones on the Other Internet or more sunburn-risky ones like Cancun. So we will step aside and allow you to make the entrance as the Fort Pitt Bridge is so humbly here to humbly serve you, as it is typical of Great Bridges.

First you ready yourself with a fantastic drink* and appetizer, typical form of the great restaurants of old. This is what restauranteurs in the know call the Fort Pitt Tunnel of your dining experience. It creates a combined sense of relaxation and anticipation. You are both calm and excited. Content but ambitious (in both a gastronomic sense and transportation sense considering the vivid restaurant/city entrance imagery afoot).

With such joy in your heart, you want to this moment to last forever, temporarily forgetting you have ordered a meal—the main course. But then the waiter brings you that hot plate and suddenly you realize that life can get even better, that your dining experience is building like the great rock songs of old.

And here’s what the first bite of a great main course tastes like.

And so now you enter with a grand entrance provided by the Fort Pitt Bridge, like the great sponsors of old allowing you to watch PBS programming commercial free. Oh and how elegantly, effectively, and effortlessly the Fort Pitt Bridge furnishes the dynamic entrance to “the only city in America with an entrance,” so correctly and accurately (citation: their editorial standards) asserted by The New York Times in 1988 with a truth that is still so relevant today**.

So great is this entrance, so awe-inspiring its awesomeness, that not only has it inspired rare positivity unofficially banned through the proxy of scarcity on the Other Internet but we have found for you in uplifting YouTube videos, it also has inspired many opposing NFL teams to get crushed when visiting the Steelers, such as Bill Belichik’s Browns in 1995, causing them to immediately move to Baltimore the following year in hopes of finding a less distracting way of entering Pittsburgh and Belichik to eventually flee north and east to New England, historically a hub of anti-witch (and probably anti-tunnel and anti-bridge, via ignorance’s anti-bridge to all-things anti-science) ignorant mindsets.

The amazing view cannot only be incredibly distracting to high-level athletic competitors, but also high-level medical practitioners, like Caroline Gill, a really good nurse (who also probably had a good driving record, perhaps flawless—though her insurance premium history was unable to be obtained during the construction of this Mount Rushmore) that she almost lost control of her car when she entered Pittsburgh for the first time. This experience was chronicled in Kim Edwards’ most successful novel (the only one we are aware of that focuses on Great Pittsburgh Bridges in a nod to the intermingling of causation and correlation), The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which was later made into a movie, as novels indeed novels are often bridges to movies.

But that was of course not the only movie made about the Fort Pitt Bridge.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower features a two-minute scene focusing on Pittsburgh’s grand entrance which acts as an oasis in a story filled with less-intriguing, non-Mount Rushmore-worthy stuff, sometimes called “filler” in the industry*** that allows for one of Pittsburgh’s great Bridges to not only star in a feature-length film but also carry the film to relevance (here on this Mount Rushmore), paving (or dynamiting, you could say considering the context of mountain carving) the way for its co-star Emma Watson to ride the Fort Pitt Bridge’s fame to her own relevance while rekindling interest in her dusty, older projects like Harry Potter, increasing residuals for J.K. Rowling, bridging a path over the river**** of millionaires for her to become a billionaire.

Because people get so jealous of great bridge content, especially those that are obviously destined to be featured on important hypothetical Mount Rushmores, the book The Perks of Being a Wallflower was banned in many places (mostly places that have never even been in the discussion of possibly being great bridge cities), not altogether different than jealous publishers and construction companies’ refusal to publish or construct such great-bridge-centric Mount Rushmores like this one, likely for fear it would overshadow their other “accomplishments.” Ego can be so self-destructive. And very harmful to societal progress.

That’s why Great Bridges have such longevity. They let others do the talking for them. #Humility

And oh boy was The New York Times ever-so-inspired to provide that voice that they dedicated a lot more space than the entrance quote above to admiring the Fort Pitt Bridge, which inspired the newspaper industry to relevancy in the 1980s. Let’s dive deeper into what newspaper relevancy looks like:

“You slide and slither into most downtowns, passing through gradual layers of ever-more-intensely built-up sprawl, and you do not so much enter the center as realize after you are there that it is all around you. Not Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is entered with glory and drama. If you come to Pittsburgh from the airport, you do not see the city as you approach it. You see hills and valleys and the minutiae of suburbia, but no city. Suddenly the expressway dives into a tunnel through Mount Washington - and on the other side, revealed all at once, is a skyline of striking power.”

You might think that would be enough. That newspaper relevancy would stop there: however, with the Fort Pitt Bridge keeping The New York Times and other newsprint journalism relevant in the 1980s, they would go on to cover Noriega’s surrender as well as other important events as the 1990s became a decade. The “Bridge Journalism Bump” (citation: Wikipedia article pending) that the newspaper industry has been said (here) to have received from such great work focusing on one of Pittsburgh’s (and by default the world’s) Great Bridges would be enough to carry the newspaper industry to the end of the previous century.

But the newspaper moguls were not listening to Bill Clinton’s repeated explicit hints about “building a bridge to the 21st century” regarding the importance of bridges to maintaining the newspaper industry. As a result, the newspaper industry folded, ironically causing the youth to no longer know how to fold a newspaper and less ironically also causing many people to lose their jobs while still-employed others lost an easy way to start fires in their fireplaces or fire pits.

But for now, through the magic of bridges and Mount Rushmores, we are able to take a peek into the past and see when being a newspaper meant something, when being a journalist meant something: it meant being the bridge that ferried people (like the great ferries of old) and their wonderful minds over the pre-Rachel Carson rivers polluted with ignorance (and cancer-causing chemicals).

Let’s take a look at what the world looks like without ignorance:

“here, the model was the Gothic tower of the Houses of Parliament in London, but since the client, PPG Corporation (once known as Pittsburgh Plate Glass), is the largest glassmaker in the world, this is Gothic architecture not of stone but of glass. The 40-story PPG tower rises to 635 feet and the complex includes a '’winter garden,'’ or glass-enclosed atrium, on one side of the tower, and an open plaza surrounded by stores on the other side.”

Wow, the world looks great without ignorance!

This, dear friends, is what the Fort Pitt Bridge leads to: democracy. Houses of Parliament where people vote on decisions governing people’s lives rather than modeled on the dictatorial castle system, where kings made the decisions and people died of the Plague.

Dictatorship doesn’t work, folks.

Oh, yes, sorry, we may be jumping ahead a little bit to where the Great Bridge leads rather than the transformative experience of the Bridge itself. This is only natural though because this revelatory moment is so suddenly cathartic that you may forget exactly where you are and all the regrets you ever had in life, as explained in different words by The New York Times:

“From tunnel to bridge to city is only a matter of seconds. The moment of Pittsburgh's revelation is so brief that one's first instinct is to push the rewind button and see it all again:”

So we ourselves will hit the rewind button and return to this wonderful experience of entering the city.

Former Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy once correctly noted that Paris is the only other city with an entrance that compares. And the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University published a book accurately labeling Pittsburgh The Paris of Appalachia. Only calling Paris the Pittsburgh of Europe would be more accurate, and we imagine such a title from a prestigious European university press to be forthcoming if that continent is to maintain global legitimacy through appreciation of its great Bridge cities and those abroad.

The comparisons between Paris and Pittsburgh could seemingly be endless: not only is their identical-twin appearance already an entire book (as noted above) by itself, but their shared traits and DNA could also be refined into a future Mount Rushmore of Pittsburgh/Paris commonalities. Surely one jointly-held love is their incredible astuteness for the visual arts, which The New York Times continues to articulate about Pittsburgh (though taken out of context could thought to be about Paris):

“we are hardly accustomed to any visual drama in cities, let alone such power in so tightly compressed a time frame.”

And in such a tightly compressed time frame unusual to the normally-longer nature of bridge construction, we are delivering perhaps the most magnificent bridge in the world. We evoke The Great Qualifier “perhaps” in the previous sentence because there are four total bridges in a Mount Rushmore of Pittsburgh Bridges, so the others are magnificent too and we wish not to turn magnificent bridge against magnificent and relive, even in metaphorical bridge fashion, the haunting horrors of the Civil War in any way, shape, or form–-especially not the wonderful form of a bridge, sullying its brilliant form, shape, and manner (also known as “way”).

Rather than casting Great Bridges like this one in an unfair, negative light, we wish to give them their proper praise, which means giving them the highest praise, for no Great Bridge is a bridge to hyperbole when praise for it is involved.

Rather than hyperbole, most praise results in understatement, like water beneath a bridge, regardless of how hard we try to bestow the proper plaudits. In the end, where Great Bridges are concerned, attempts to provide sufficient acclaim are only like a Great Bridge tribute band doing the best it can, playing their hearts out while giving it their all, and the audience applauding with all its might but it is never the same as experiencing the actual Bridge itself. In short, a Great Bridge is always a bridge to humility.

One might hope that if they were to compare entering Pittsburgh as to seeing the Mount Rushmore in South Dakota for the first time or entering into holy matrimony with their soulmate, such accolades and celebration would be sufficient enough.

“But it is better than that,” continues the the objective newspaper reporting, “because Pittsburgh sits at the intersection of three rivers, and the tunnel does not actually deposit you within the downtown proper but just across the Monongahela River from it, so when you emerge from the tunnel and first see the skyline you are not on a street but on a bridge. Approaching and entering Pittsburgh is a drama of many acts, coming in a rapid-fire sequence that is virtually cinematic - expressway, mountain and tunnel form the restrained beginning; skyline, river and bridge are the climax. The denouement is the movement off the bridge and onto the downtown streets themselves.”

So here we must examine the Fort Pitt Bridge and its inherent relationship to the Fort Pitt Tunnel under a higher-powered microscope than previously because some bridges may argue that the Fort Pitt Bridge would not be so great without the Fort Pitt Tunnel and that if they had a great tunnel—or the greatest tunnel, the Fort Pitt Tunnel—supporting them, they could have had a much better bridge career and catapulted themselves, through better performances earning higher accolades, to such a prestigious Mount Rushmore as you are currently smartly visiting right now on your holiday.

Such frivolous jealousy is sad though and we will leave such non-productive regrets to overpriced cable television channels and bandwidth-sucking corners of the Other Internet.

The truth is the Fort Pitt Tunnel and the Fort Pitt Bridge cannot really be separated when speaking about their greatness of city-entrance game planning and execution and the good they have brought into this world, just like Brady & Belichick cannot be separated when talking about their two regrettable decades of NFL dominance and the evil they spread or peanut butter cannot be separated from jelly when talking about the classic childhood sandwich that provides all the nutrients kids need to have a car or bus drive them safely over a Great Bridge back home from school.

Characters in history’s important stories, whether good or bad, cannot be separated from their compadres. You cannot comprehensively discuss the history of television, without including the history of radio. If you were to discuss the history of The Beatles, you really should include Chuck Berry and his influence on John Lennon. We are all connected (citation: Donne, John; Bridges). You cannot discuss Jekyll without Hyde. If you were to kill one, you would literally kill the other (citation: Stevenson, Robert Louis).

So would you like someone to die because we failed to discuss the Fort Pitt Tunnel along with the Fort Pitt Bridge itself?

Of course not, because you are a sweet person visiting this, the sweeter of internets.

We cannot disconnect key characters from each other and we cannot remove important parts from stories in some cheap abridged novel or Reader’s Digest version of a Great Bridge literary masterpiece, like removing a key component from a bridge that would cause drivers and pedestrians alike to plummet to their sad deaths when the bridge ultimately collapsed due to no fault of its own but rather because of outside, jealous interference like a Tonya Harding bodyguard taking a telescopic baton to the lower thigh of a better Bridge.

For such dangerously blasphemic practices exist not only in spiritual realms but unfortunately also in literary ones as well. Because we are not blasphemers here, we will not stoop into partaking in such stunted projects of ill-repute, much like people of stunted morals spend their time frequenting brothels, unaccredited opium dens, and handicap parking spots they have no permit for.

Such material is not morally-sound enough for great stories to be represented in Mount Rushmores, which requires durable, sensible substance to be chiseled into, for when you are starting a Mount Rushmore without an actual mountain, the content you are carving into it must be as solid as rock itself–-and as strong as dynamite. It must be the Alpha and the Omega; the Yin and the Yang. Few things can be both. Few things tell a whole story. Few things are built to take you from the beginning to the end. But some are.

Such as Great Bridges.

If you doubt that every Great Bridge tells a great story, then you must at least accept that every Great Bridge-Tunnel combination is great literature.

All the literary elements are there:

“the mountain and the tunnel form the restrained beginning” (citation: The New York Times) and “the skyline, river, and bridge are the climax” (citation: The New York Times).

And so the question becomes: would you experience the greatest climax ever without the Fort Pitt Bridge?

It’s a great question.

Whether or not you explore this question with your romantic partner–-whether or not you ask the love of your life “Why are you not like the Fort Pitt Tunnel?”--is between you, your soulmate, and your relationship counselor.

Be prepared to be asked why you are not more like the Fort Pitt Bridge. Things can get confusing fast.

That’s why people often refer to Cliff’s Notes or the Other Internet for cheating assistance.

But you need not stoop so low here, for we have provided explanation enough here at this Mount Rushmore of Pittsburgh Bridges.

The “restrained beginning” of this great story–-a 2 Act Play, really–-creates the sense of a catapult whose power is gained from the strong sense of anticipation. Carly Simon goes into depth about that in her song “Anticipation.” Stand-Up comedians have also used this idea to structure their jokes, create careers, make people laugh, and support their families (citation: Joke Structure).

“Well that explains the story well enough,” you may be thinking. “But my English professor at an elite University [or my AP English teacher, if one is an ambitious youngster that is speaking this hypothetical quote] wants me to analyze the the flaws of my favorite character (that I dare deem incredibly attractive in a romantic and sexual way, but I may keep that only in my private fantasies [and I am only thinking these thoughts if I am the aforementioned college student and not the ambitious youngster because we don’t want any gross underage fantasies here]) as I know every great protagonist has a tragic flaw. But I am failing to see any flaws with this Great Bridge, which *Spoiler Alert* is my favorite character, who I only find romantically attractive if I am mature enough to do so.”

We are glad to help you. While people may be able to attain pure evil (citation: Brady; Belichick; psychopathic serial killers; Hitler; et al.), no one attains pure goodness. In the great novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, while Hyde was “pure evil,” Jekyll “was radically both” good and evil, with simply more of the former than the latter (though the former declined and latter increased as the story progressed). So one can rise to psychopathic levels of no remorse or feeling for their evil deeds, but not be purely good (citation: fiction).

In other words, no one is perfect, as they say, not even Great Bridges.

While we cannot see the flaws of the Fort Pitt Bridge visibly, we must then conclude it is something in its mindset. And looking to what did in the great historical characters of the past, we must consider the flaws of Narcissus and Jekyll himself, when he thinks vain thoughts on a Regent’s Park bench and so forever cannot rid himself of Hyde.

And so in considering these great stories of old, which hold so much truth today they have entered our dictionaries (citation: our dictionaries; dictionary.com; Merriam-Webster), we must consider this to be the one and only flaw of the great Fort Pitt Bridge:

Vanity.

But who can blame the bridge that is farthest downstream on the Monongahela, a feat this Great Bridge has accomplished every year since its opening in 1959 in a string of dominance that makes Brady and Belichick look merely human, for indulging in a little vanity now and then?

Yes, it is so beautiful, that is vain according to some, such as Carly Simon discussed in her classic “You're So Vain” (citation: Uncertainty).

“But,” the curious scholar is certainly wondering. “What about the humility talked about earlier? How does this mesh with vanity? Additionally, isn’t vanity or excessive self-love the first of the 7 deadly sins (the Bible, having not yet been privy to Mount Rushmores, choosing the number 7 over the number 4 for the amount of deadly sins)? Yet, the Fort Pitt Bridge still stands–-how is that possible?”

These are good questions. And we can answer them unevasively here.

In a way, you have answered your own questions with your own questions. As the Fort Pitt Bridge does still stand—and is not dead-–it is therefore clear that its vanity does not rise to the level of sinful vanity that would result in death, as has been the result of all humans (citation: life’s certainties; death; taxes). Its vanity may have resulted in such sinful pride if it were not quelled to levels below the deadly sinful threshold through its positive attribute of humility. This is not completely unlike when a great surgeon removes Stage 4 cancer from a patient who is now miraculously cancer free and lives. Did the patient have a death sentence? Yes, they did, but they overcame it through positive qualities of medical science, the bridge to recovery. In this case, the Fort Pitt Bridge is both the patient and great surgeon, healing itself and curing its own ills through the wand-like scalpel of humility.

Such wizardly wonders only make us marvel more at its wonderfulness through the widest eyes and alliterations our muscles and Mensa (untested) minds can muster.

It is so beautiful, it is literally artwork. It is more than art, really. It is art+. It is 4D that you are literally inside of—a part of, an active participant of. It is the highest of high art.

It is the Fort Pitt Bridge.

“It is an entrance that combines the controlled quality of a classical, Beaux-Arts axial approach with the rapid movement of automobile travel, and this is perhaps why it seems so unreal, so cinematic, to us today.”

So what we have done for you here, perhaps, is provide you a script, though not necessarily in typical screenplay format you could submit to a studio in hopes it makes a major motion picture out of it, for the ultimate cinema. We only evoke the qualifier “perhaps” once again because there are other cinematic elements beyond entrances and other bridges to consider. For a Mount Rushmore has more than one part.

And we will get to them soon. We just first had to allow your own great entrance through the great entrance of the Fort Pitt Bridge.

All of this greatness does not even yet account for the fact the Fort Pitt Bridge is “the world's first computer designed bowstring arch bridge,” whatever that means.

Does it mean that this bridge was literally the metaphorical bridge to the internet?

Maybe.

If so, in a way, this is the Bridge that allows this very Mount Rushmore to exist–-and allows you to exist, if your parents met on an online dating site.

It could be said the Fort Pitt Bridge is the bridge to your very self, your entrance into this world.

If Pittsburgh is the only city with an entrance, which it is (citation: The New York Times), then perhaps it could be said that this is the world’s only Mount Rushmore with an Entrance*****.

There is a lot to think about here. As The New York Times puts it, “There are a lot of lessons in all of this [...]”

Have you recognized the lessons here and begun applying and heeding them in your own life?

Or will you shrivel to irrelevance like the newspaper industry?

It is up to you which bridge you choose.

Will you be the hero of your own story or will that station be held by someone else?

The amount of Great Bridges you cross will show that.

We will help you be the hero of your own story, as under the great guidance of the Mount Rushmore of Pittsburgh Bridges, we steer you towards the crossing of another Great Bridge.

Read these very words to reflect upon how the above buttons are much like helpful signs at a National Park.

Teach Them A Lesson

Now, laugh mockingly at the bridges below for not being The Fort Pitt Bridge nor being on any Mount Rushmore.

*In this case it is a non-alcoholic drink, to prevent drinking and driving.

**regardless in what millennium you read this scroll of thy internet in, for a bomb of war could, God forbid, destroy a great Bridge in body, but it can never destroy that Bridge in soul, can never remove the fact it did actually safely carry automobiles filled with many souls safely across water below to visit their beloved families or a hospital where they would receive medical care that would save their lives, can never delete it from its existence in history, as recorded in here in this great internet, which no bomb can ever destroy, for bombs cannot even ever likely destroy the lesser Other Internet.

***Film industry; in the Mount Rushmore industry it is called “uncarved rock” behind the “carved rock.”

****Not an actual river, just great metaphorical imagery appropriate to the topic, which is an indication of great writing skills.

*****The correctness of this statement is one highly debated between the educated and the ignorant. The ignorant would like to point out that the Mount Rushmore in South Dakota has an entrance which you must pay to enter, less you have a park pass, in which you have still paid, just at a prior time. This does not even include indirect payments, such as paying federal taxes, such of which, in some form or fashion, go to the National Park Service, which then invariably drip their way to places like the Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, as the federal government fails to support Mount Rushmores like ours that are actually completely free to the general public, without qualifications other than having internet access.

Yes, that may make for an entrance. But it is not a proper entrance, which is what was alluded to in the above statement with the use of a capital E. Everyone that is not ignorant knows that capital letters in a nouns make them proper nouns; thus Entrance means proper entrance. And waiting in line for other drivers scrounging through their pockets to find the exact change only to realize they need to show the guy or gal at the park entrance (emphasis on the lower case “e”) a QR code from some sort of app they still have to download while you almost burst your bladder in the car behind them because you don’t want to get out and pee in an improper place (emphasis on lower case letters) less you end up getting accused of a sex crime and end up a less-than-savory registry with the most dangerous of people and lose your job, your marriage, and your sanity is definitely not a proper entrance.