Todd Wilson spent his childhood drawing and snapping pictures of Pittsburgh’s many bridges.
“I have photos dating back to when I was six years old,” Wilson told PA Local.
The fascination, encouraged by his photographer father and art teacher mother, was formative. Wilson now works in civil engineering, and co-wrote a book on Pittsburgh’s bridges in 2015.
“With Western Pennsylvania [having] all of these deep valleys and so much infrastructure competing for space: roads perched on the sides of hills, bridges built where they probably shouldn’t be, the visual spectacle of being on the hilltop looking down at the city,” Wilson said, “it definitely made me very excited about Pittsburgh.”
Bridge photography remains a big part of Wilson’s life. He travels the world taking photos of the structures, and has visited all 50 states and around 30 countries to do so, he said.
The images and videos he snaps locally land on @pghbridges, an Instagram account that’s amassed around 34,000 followers since he started it in 2020. (It “complements” but is “completely separate” from his friend Bruce Cridlebaugh’s website pghbridges.com, Wilson said.)
Wilson’s photography captures what he calls the “intentionally unique and structurally beautiful design” of Pittsburgh’s bridges. Their stylishness is a result of an early-20th-century city art commission that “refused to approve” a specific utilitarian type of metal bridge, Wilson explained, which forced engineers to get creative with their blueprints.
“They pulled a lot of designs from Europe. Some designs were the first of their kind in America, but they were based on European designs,” he said. “And all of the bridges were designed so if you’re crossing the bridge, you could see out. You could see the city. You could see the river.”
PA Local recently spoke with Wilson about his photography, Pennsylvania’s coolest bridges, and whether Pittsburgh actually has more bridges than anywhere else. (You’ll have to read to the end to find out.)
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
PA Local: How did Pittsburgh become so well-known for its bridges?
Todd Wilson: Part of it is just the topography of being the city of three rivers — with those rivers being in valleys, and then all of the streams intersecting the rivers in valleys, so you needed a lot of high-profile bridges kind of framing the skyline, but then so many other bridges everywhere else that the density of bridges became really a defining feature of the city.
What’s the appeal for you in photographing bridges?
The visual interest has always been something. In general, I’m just somebody who’s very stimulated by art and architecture, engineering. So just seeing these really intricate and really well-designed structures [is] really exciting.
Another thing that I didn’t realize until later is that my great-grandfather was a bridge builder. So, it was just funny later on in life realizing, “Oh, maybe you like these bridges because your great-grandfather built them.”
When you look at a bridge, what are some of the first things that you notice about it? What are you focusing on capturing in your pictures?
Really, it’s the structural design. The more that you know about something, the more that you want to learn even more. The more that I’d look at a bridge, it just goes from being a typical structure to starting to appreciate all of the various details about the structure: the design, the materials.
For example, if a bridge is a metal truss bridge built in the late 1800s, you can tell which company built it based on little design details. Or if that bridge was then built in say, the 1930s, a lot of those bridges were built by the Pennsylvania State Highway Department, and they were standardized, so you could see this exact design here in this part of the state, and then that exact same design somewhere else, and somewhere else. But then there might be minor details by year. You can generally date a bridge just by looking at it.
What about your bridge photos do you think resonates with a local audience?
I think what really gets overlooked when it comes to bridges, is that bridges are used by everybody. It’s the one thing that does not discriminate.
Say for example, you have a skyscraper or a beautiful building. Well, people might like the skyscraper, but it's not like everybody can just go into the skyscraper, right? Or a fancy house. Or even something where it's maybe open to the public, but you have to buy a ticket. But with a bridge, the point is to be a civic structure for everybody to use.
You might not intentionally go and say, “I’m going to go look at this bridge for fun,” but it’s always kind of in your mind when you’re crossing a certain bridge. You can think about life, and you can think about memories on a bridge. Whether you like the bridge, or you’re scared of the bridge, or your family took you fishing on the bridge, or who knows, right? It just becomes something that’s just like part of everybody.
Do you have a favorite Pittsburgh bridge, past or present?
My top three are the Smithfield Street Bridge, the 16th Street Bridge, and the McKees Rocks Bridge.
With the Smithfield Street Bridge, it’s the oldest river bridge in Pittsburgh. It’s an incredible lenticular truss from the 1880s. It was designed by a really prominent engineer, but it has these grand castle-like portals. It has a really, really interesting history.
The 16th Street Bridge, also known as the David McCullough Bridge, was the first [major] arch bridge in Pittsburgh. That bridge is this fantastic architectural piece. It’s modeled after a bridge in Cologne. It has sculptures that are modeled after a fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.
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[It] ignited kind of a war between engineers and architects when it was built, because the city’s art commission … wanted to hire an architecture firm to lead the project instead of an engineering firm, which became a national controversy because the engineers said, fundamentally the purpose of a bridge is use, and that is our domain. To solve that, Allegheny County decided we’re just going to bring everyone in house, just make one huge public agency.
A few years later, they built the McKees Rocks Bridge, which was the biggest bridge in Pittsburgh. It was designed to pay homage to the Hell Gate Bridge in New York, but it was also designed to just have a beautiful structural vista driving across. It’s hard to explain unless you’re actually driving on it, but it’s one of the few bridges that the actual look as you’re driving off the bridge became part of its design.
I’m wondering if you have any bridges elsewhere in Pennsylvania that come to mind when you think of bridges you’ve been really impressed, or sort of taken, by?
Oh, absolutely. It’s such a varied state. I definitely have a soft spot for the old metal bridges — maybe that was because of my great-grandfather. In Western Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad Bridge over the Beaver River is this massive cantilever bridge … that kind of proved that the type was viable after a bridge in Quebec collapsed.
For concrete bridges, the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge over the Susquehanna is over a mile long with concrete arches. In the rural part of the state, around the Pine Creek area, there’s the Lower English Center Bridge, which is this weird suspension/truss hybrid. Philadelphia also has so many great and beautiful bridges — obviously the Ben Franklin Bridge is quite a fantastic bridge. The Delaware River itself has a really incredible collection of historic metal bridges.
In your travels, have you visited any other cities that kind of remind you of Pittsburgh in their prominence of bridges, or maybe even the style of bridges?
Lyon, France … It has inclines, it has a main island in the river, it has a lot of bridges. It’s one of those cities, you can get on the incline, go up to the top of the hill overlooking the city, and see a city with bridges.
Portland, Oregon, is also a city that really celebrates their bridges, and also has some similarities.
Is there anything else you would like to add that I didn’t ask you about?
Every time I give a talk, the first question that anybody asks is: “How many bridges are there in Pittsburgh?” And if you Google it, you’ll find an answer. That answer’s not right, but you’ll find an answer.
You’ll also probably find that Pittsburgh has more bridges than any other city. That’s not even close. Philadelphia has more bridges than Pittsburgh. Houston, Texas, has more bridges, technically, because Pittsburgh — especially in geographical footprint — is really, really small. Pittsburgh can’t have a high number of bridges geographically. But that being said, Pittsburgh does have more bridges that span 300 feet than any other city in America.
As far as how many bridges the city has, it really depends on how you count, because engineers have certain definitions, people have different definitions. If you think about it, you can just go crazy with what counts as a bridge, what doesn’t. For example, engineers only count bridges if they’re 20 feet or longer. So, if you have a 19-foot stone arch bridge, engineers would not count that as a bridge.
But in PA, all bridges are assigned a unique number. And that unique number includes the road that it’s on, and if it’s a ramp, it has a separate number. So therefore … basically every ramp would count as a different bridge than what it connects to.
Wow.
So you can go on and on about all these technicalities, but I would say Pittsburgh has at least 370 bridges. Six hundred is probably a realistic number. But if you really want to go crazy and count absolutely everything, you can get about 700 bridges.