The Hot Metal Bridge is a truss bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that crosses the Monongahela River. The bridge consists of two parallel spans on a single set of piers: the former Monongahela Connecting Railroad Bridge, built in 1887, on the upstream side and the former Hot Metal Bridge, built in 1900, on the downstream side. The Monongahela Connecting Railroad Bridge carried conventional railroad traffic, while the Hot Metal Bridge connected parts of the J&L Steel mill, carrying crucibles of molten steel from the blast furnaces to the rolling mills on the opposite bank. The upstream span was converted to road use in 2000, connecting 2nd Avenue near South Oakland with Hot Metal Street (South 29th Street) in the South Side. The downstream span reopened for pedestrian and bicycle use in late 2007 after two years of work.
The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation was responsible for managing the decorative lighting project for the bridge, which was lit with energy-efficient light-emitting diode (LED) and optical fiber technology on June 12, 2008.
The Hot Metal Bridge is the namesake of the defunct Hot Metal Grille at the nearby South Side Works shopping center; the online magazine of the University of Pittsburgh, HotMetalBridge.org; and other local entities.
Read more about Hot Metal Bridge: Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words hot, metal and/or bridge:
“They come like sacrifices in their trim,
And to the fire-eyed maid of smoky war
All hot and bleeding will we offer them.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilisation.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)