Pittsburgh Has More Bridges Than Any City In America, If You Want It To
My wife and I have driven past Pittsburgh more times than we can remember, heading south to places like South Carolina and Florida to get away from the cold. I'm ashamed to say we've stopped only once to poke around the downtown area. Even then, we paid little attention to the city's bridges, which I now regret.
Because if we had, I might have thought twice before filing an article claiming this river city has the most bridges in America.
My editor fired back with three words: it does not. He pointed out that Houston has nearly eight times as many bridges, and that Pittsburgh isn't even in the top ten. So, tail firmly between my legs, I dove back in to untangle the web of misinformation and marketing to find out just how a city with 446 bridges talked half the internet, a former sitting President, and me into believing it has more bridges than any other river town. And it's quite a tale.
The Number Everyone Repeats
Type the question "which river city has the most bridges in America" into a search engine and the first page of results will tell you it's Pittsburgh with 446, usually with a note that it's three more than Venice. That was the result I was handed, so off I went, researching how Pittsburgh became known as the "City of Bridges."
Google led me first to the Bridges of Pittsburgh, which it described as the "definitive" book on the subject. It was published in 2006 by Bob Regan, a retired computer mapping professor, whose previous book cataloged the city's public staircases, a subject I can't help thinking would really flummox search engines. Regan started with local government records of road bridges, added the footbridges and railroad spans that those records left out, and arrived at 446.
The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, a local preservation group, calls that the best estimate available, and the comparison with Venice is the city's favorite party trick. The tourism office in Venice puts the number of bridges on its canal islands at 438, so Pittsburgh wins by eight.
Nobody mentions that the 438 only covers the islands, not the modern mainland districts where most Venetians live. Well, nobody in Pittsburgh, anyway.
The Claim That Stuck
Pittsburgh's claim is far older than Regan's book. In 1899, the Pittsburg Press Almanac (the city spelled its name without the 'h' back then) announced that the bridge count in Allegheny County exceeded "any other community in the country," without troubling readers with anyone else's total.
In the 1920s, the North Side department store Boggs & Buhl ran advertisements crediting the region with more than 500 bridges, the most in the world. The same campaign claimed Pittsburghers led the world in department store spending, which tells you something about the standard of proof.
And it still works. Standing beside the collapsed Fern Hollow Bridge in January 2022, President Joe Biden told reporters, "I didn't realize there are literally more bridges in Pittsburgh than any other city in the world. Did you know that? More than in Venice." The mayor's communications manager had tweeted the same thing the day before.
So hey, if it's good enough for the White House, it was good enough for a travel writer on his way to the beach. Well, that is until somebody checked.
Then Somebody Looked It Up
That somebody was Pittsburgh Magazine, which in 2022 did the thing nobody did (including this writer) and took a look at the National Bridge Inventory, a safety database kept by the U.S. Department of Transportation that lists every public road bridge of 20 feet or longer.
Pittsburgh had 297 entries. Houston, Texas, had 2,325. Los Angeles, New York, and four other Texas cities each had more than 1,000, and Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and Cleveland were all ahead, too. Worse, Philadelphia had 591, so Pittsburgh isn't even the city with the most bridges in Pennsylvania.
To be fair to Pittsburgh, the federal list has its quirks. It logs each deck of a double-decker bridge separately, along with every ramp leading to it, which is why Pittsburgh's own Fort Pitt Bridge and Fort Duquesne Bridge account for 14 of the city's 297 records apiece. The same rule applies in Houston, which, as we'll see, matters.
The list also ignores anything that isn't a public road, so the railroad bridges and footbridges that got Regan to 446 don't count. But that cuts both ways. Todd Wilson, a Pittsburgh civil engineer and the author of the book Pittsburgh's Bridges, estimates the city has 700 elevated crossings of all kinds once small and private ones are included. But, of course, that means Houston would have more of those, too.
Houston's claim isn't as clear-cut as you might think, either. Tom Leech, a retired Pittsburgh bridge engineer who designed the Bloomfield Bridge, has a theory about Houston, which he visits to see his son. The land there is so flat, he notes, that highway builders can't find soil for embankments, so every big interchange is built as a bridge. A lot of Houston's 2,325 bridges, in other words, are interchange ramps that a hillier city would have built on fill.
There's one measure that goes Pittsburgh's way against Houston, and I had to do the arithmetic myself. Houston spreads across 665 square miles to Pittsburgh's 55, which works out to 3.5 road bridges per square mile in Houston, and 5.4 in Pittsburgh. So hey, in my book that makes Pittsburgh the winner, at least over Houston. Just don't mention Boston.
Why So Many Bridges?
None of which explains why a city of 55 square miles has 446 of anything. The answer is water and hills. The Allegheny River and the Monongahela River meet at the Point, the tip of downtown Pittsburgh, to form the Ohio River, and the land on every side is cut by ravines steep enough that getting to the next neighborhood has always meant crossing something.
The first bridge opened in 1818. Designed by Lewis Wernwag, the Monongahela Bridge was a covered span of wood and iron that stretched 1,500 feet across the river at Smithfield Street, cost $102,000, and charged foot passengers two cents.
At the dedication, the opening toast was to Pennsylvania as "the first in the Union for the Number and Beauty of its Bridges." The city had one bridge at the time. The boasting, in other words, started at the ribbon cutting.
That bridge burned in less than 15 minutes during the Great Fire of April 10, 1845, and John A. Roebling, who went on to design the Brooklyn Bridge, replaced it a year later with a suspension bridge on the surviving stone piers. He'd just finished his first suspension structure a mile up the Allegheny, an aqueduct that floated the boats of the Pennsylvania Canal across the river on seven 162-foot spans.
The city then exported its bridge-building talent. Andrew Carnegie's Keystone Bridge Company built the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis in 1874, and George Ferris, a Pittsburgh bridge inspector, built the first Ferris wheel for the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
The ravines needed bridges, too, and keeping them up is the hard part. On January 28, 2022, the Fern Hollow Bridge, a 447-foot span that took Forbes Avenue over Frick Park, collapsed and fell 100 feet into the park with a transit bus on it. Nobody died.
The National Transportation Safety Board blamed corrosion the city had been warned about in inspection after inspection. A replacement opened in December 2022, the very week President Biden came to town and bought into the hype about Pittsburgh's bridges.
The Three Sisters
If Pittsburgh can't win on quantity, it has a strong case on looks. The Roberto Clemente Bridge, the Andy Warhol Bridge, and the Rachel Carson Bridge cross the Allegheny River at Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Streets, and are known as the Three Sisters. Built between 1924 and 1928, they're the only trio of nearly identical bridges in the United States, according to the federal Historic American Engineering Record (finally, a Pittsburgh bridge claim with a government source behind it!).
They were a compromise. The War Department wanted greater clearance for river traffic, and the city's art commission had thrown out earlier plans because overhead trusses would spoil the skyline. The county's engineers settled on suspension bridges with chains fastened to the ends of the deck instead of the riverbank, a type known as self-anchored, the first of that kind built in America. The American Institute of Steel Construction even named the Sixth Street span its "Most Beautiful Steel Bridge" in 1928.
All three are painted yellow, and Warhol's was the first bridge in the country named for a visual artist. The county finished rehabilitating the trio when the Clemente Bridge reopened in December 2023. The bridge closes to cars during many Pirates home games so fans can walk to PNC Park, and the Picklesburgh food festival took over both it and the Warhol Bridge over a July weekend in 2026.
So, sure. Houston may have 2,325 bridges, but none of them ever close for a pickle festival.
Where To See The Bridges
On the Monongahela River, the Smithfield Street Bridge is the city's oldest surviving river crossing. Opened in 1883 where the city's first bridge and Roebling's replacement once stood, its twin 360-foot trusses are lens-shaped, a form engineers call lenticular.
It still takes cars and pedestrians from downtown to Station Square, a former railroad terminal that's now a shopping and entertainment complex.
The city's classic bridge view is from Mount Washington, the ridge on the south bank of the Monongahela River. The Duquesne Incline, a cable railway that opened in 1877, climbs 400 feet up the hillside, and both rivers can be seen from the upper station. Farther downstream, the West End Overlook in the city's Elliott neighborhood looks straight back at the Point from above the Ohio, with all three rivers in view.
Down at river level, Point State Park covers 36 acres at the confluence, with a fountain that shoots water more than 150 feet into the air. Here you'll see the Fort Pitt Bridge, a double-decker that opened in 1959, on one side of the park, and the Fort Duquesne Bridge on the other.
Still The City Of Bridges
So, does Pittsburgh have the most bridges in America? No. Houston has 2,325 road bridges to its 297, and several other cities are ahead on any count you care to make. What Pittsburgh has is 446 bridges in 55 square miles (more per square mile than Houston), a nickname it has been repeating since 1899, and a city full of people who'll tell you about Venice without you ever asking.
Wilson, the civil engineer from Pittsburgh, has run the numbers more ways than anyone. He puts it best to Pittsburgh Magazine: "Pittsburgh has more bridges than any other city, if you want it to." I wanted it to. So did the President.
The difference is that the bridges of Houston are interchanges, and the bridges of Pittsburgh are a reason to stop. On our next drive south, I will. And I might just stay awhile and count those bridges myself.
