It’s about 7:30 a.m. on one of the coldest days of the winter. My buddy Dan and I are parked at the edge of the Youghiogheny River, looking across the river at McKeesport. He has the heater cranked up in his late-model Chevrolet Caprice, and on the radio, WLSW is pouring out a steady stream of doo-wop oldies.

We’re out here on a Saturday morning, waiting to see the Fifteenth Street Bridge meet its doom.

The big bang today was supposed to be a secret. PennDOT wanted to avoid a crowd. But a volunteer fireman I know tipped me off the night before. I phoned Dan, and since neither one of us had ever seen a bridge get blown up, well, here we were.

Unfortunately for PennDOT, word also leaked out to KDKA, WTAE, and WPXI, and on their 11 o’clock news, they leaked it to the world.

There’s a line of cars parked on both sides of the narrow road that goes up the river. Little clouds of vapor rise from their tailpipes.

At the boat landing a few yards away, a small group of hardy souls is standing in the snow, stamping their feet and clapping their hands together.

Port Vue’s ambulance arrives and parks in front of Dan’s Caprice. Port Vue’s police cruiser pulls in behind us a few cars away. The town cop, looking more like an Eskimo than a law officer, walks towards us.

Dan rolls down his window.

“Someone sick?” he asks.

“Nah,” says the cop. His words form little puffs of steam. “We were afraid someone would get hypothermia or frostbite standing around out here.”

“When’s the bridge coming down?” I ask.

“Don’t know. The Army Corps of Engineers wants them to move that barge further back,” he says, gesturing out at the river. His radio squawks, and he excuses himself. Dan nods, and rolls the window back up.

....

The Fifteenth Street Bridge was built in 1908 by the McKeesport and Port Vue Bridge Company. It was designed for wagons, horses, and the streetcars of the Port Vue Traction Company. It provided a quick way for farm families up in Port Vue to come into the city.

The bridge didn’t go very far — it crossed the Baltimore and Ohio’s tracks on the McKeesport side, the McKeesport Tin Plate Company and the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie’s tracks on the Port Vue side, and the barely-navigable Yough River in the middle.

It was no engineering marvel, either, though it did have a certain Victorian grace and charm. A spindly, delicate truss formed the main span, with a smaller truss on each end. Steel lattices and scrollwork adorned the railings.

By World War One, the farms were gone, replaced by houses for workers in the city’s mills. The little trolley cars were gone, too, victims of frequent bus service and Henry Ford’s Model T.

But the bridge survived. The streetcar tracks were torn up, and the brick deck was replaced by a steel grid, until it proved slippery in the winter. Then the steel was covered with macadam.

As cars got larger, longer, and wider after World War Two, the bridge started to show its age. The approach ramp at the Port Vue side had a hairpin bend, for one thing. And the bridge was narrow — a tight squeeze for the big “Wide-Track” Pontiacs that were popular then — and led to a lot of scraped fenders and angry words.

....

In the ’60s, as politicians debated replacing the bridge, regular maintenance stopped. The powder-blue paint began to fade and peel. The beams were streaked with rust. By the late ’70s, some potholes were so deep, you could see the river through them.

As a little kid, I always marveled at the way my mother maneuvered our big Chevy Impala around the holes and through the bridge’s confines. I held my breath whenever a big truck passed us. I stared at the weeds and flowers growing in the guardrails. I looked down into the bowels of the tin plate mill on one side and the water-treatment plant on the other.

I got a little thrill every time we crossed the river to go shopping. It was like a ride at Kennywood. What if the bridge lets go right now? I’d wonder. How would I get out of the car? Would we drown? Would we get killed by the fall? Disaster movie titles flashed through my head. Bridge ’81.

Port Vue’s main water line, which was carried by the bridge, froze up and burst. Port Vue moved it onto the sidewalk. People snuck out there at night and stole the insulation off of the pipe.

In 1989, with no advance warning, PennDOT closed the bridge. “It can’t support its own weight,” engineers grimly told Channel 4’s Beth Dolinar.

It had a three-ton weight limit at the end. Beth talked to the local Lincoln-Mercury dealer, who told her that the average car weighs almost two tons. Beth couldn’t believe it — that meant that if two cars crossed the bridge at the same time, they were over the limit, and the bridge might collapse, she told us breathlessly.

No one told Beth that “three tons” meant no single vehicle over three tons. It didn’t matter. We had apparently been risking life and limb every time we went to Shop ’n Save.

So we waited patiently for a new bridge. And waited. And waited. Three years passed, then four, and we quickly tired of the long detour. I went to a town meeting in the elementary school auditorium, where PennDOT’s engineer showed us the dazzling new span that we would get, Soon, Any Day Now, When Funding Becomes Available.

We ganged up on him, telling him every travel horror story we could think of. He came prepared for Lake Wobegon; we gave him Peyton Place.

Finally the plans were approved. The right-of-way was acquired. Elaborate detour signs were posted to replace the temporary ones, office trailers were trucked in, ironworkers started cutting through the beams.

Another sign went up: “Operation Jump Start — Jobs For Pennsylvania!”

A bridge for McKeesport would be a nice jump start, I thought.

And then the big day arrived.

.... 

So we sit here in January, a modern-day Dobie Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs, waiting for them to knock down the Endicott Building.

The main span is no longer connected to the smaller trusses. Demolition crews have severed the roadway, and each side of the big arched truss ends in mid-air now. It sits, isolated, alone, unreachable, useless.

We decide to brave the cold and stand outside with the crowd. Some people are setting up camcorders on tripods. The newspapers and TV stations have the best shots locked up, as they jockey for position along the river and on the hillsides. I have my little Kodak 35 mm, with its one lens and two shutter speeds.

I walk over to the cop. “What’s the holdup now, officer?” I ask.

“They’re trying to get permission from the railroad,” he says. He means CSX, which owns the old P&LE tracks on our side of the river. The B&O tracks on the other side are long gone.

Time passes, and the mood becomes festive even as we lose feeling in our extremities. It’s almost like a tailgate party, except that we’re not sure when the big event is going to start.

I take a few quick, last snaps of the bridge.

.... 

Over the summer, I had to walk to a meeting in McKeesport, and I decided to use the bridge to cross the river, both to save time and to pay my respects. The demolition crews hadn’t shown up yet, and I didn’t see any “Keep Out” signs, so I made my visit a leisurely one.

It seemed even more narrow than I remembered it. I couldn’t imagine two cars, side-by-side, crossing the bridge, but of course, I knew they had.

The tin plate mill was mostly gone, the victim of a fire and the bankruptcy of a later owner. One of the half-mile-long factory buildings had been torn down, replaced by a scrap yard. The other buildings were getting a new metal skin.

The bridge seemed somehow more solid now that little, old, 184-pound me was out there by myself. Still, as I looked down at the muddy water below, I was possessed by strange desires. What if I jumped? What if I fell? What if my glasses went in? I eased back from the rusty railing.

At the other end, the old water treatment plant was being knocked to the ground, replaced by a more modern and sterile plant next door. A bulldozer was parked inside the gutted pump-house.

I exited on the McKeesport side, and turned back to look at the bridge one last time. As I did, I tripped on a loose chunk of pavement, fell, and banged my knee off of a metal-edged curb, tearing my pants and bloodying my leg.

I limped up Walnut Street to my destination.

.... 

It’s almost 9 a.m. I’m starting to think it’s all an elaborate hoax. The bridge has been there since before I was born — since before my grandparents were born. It’ll always be there.

The cop’s radio comes to life. “Base to 131. CSX says that we do not have permission to blow up the bridge today. Repeat, we do not ...”

With a roar and a bang, the bridge comes to life. Everyone jumps.

Little puffs of smoke erupt along the top and bottom of the bridge. It leaps off of its piers, buckles, and falls into the water with a splash. The air smells of cordite, and our ears are ringing.

Someone up front starts to hoot and clap.

My state senator comes chugging up the hill towards me. He’s wearing a open topcoat over a gray suit. His white hair is perfect, and his bare head and hands are roughly the same color red as his tie.

“You cold, Senator Belan?” I ask.

“I-I-I w-w-w-asn’t a-a-a-at f-f-f-irst,” he stammers, “b-b-b-b-but n-n-n-ow I’m f-f-f-f-f-freezing.” He doesn’t pause to chat.

Dan and I beat a hasty retreat for the warm confines of the Caprice, and wind up the morning over pancakes and coffee at Eat ’n Park.

.... 

As I write this, crews are pouring concrete on a modern 3-lane bridge with wide approach ramps and wheelchair-accessible sidewalks. It flows in an unbroken line, with nothing overhead to obstruct tall trucks. It’s business-like, professional, unadorned. It should be easy to maintain.

Busses will be able to use the bridge again, and fire trucks and ambulances. It’s been a major construction project. The city intends to dedicate it in November with a “rubber duckie-wuckie race” (their words) from it to the mouth of the Yough, where the river flows into the Monongahela.

The new bridge has no panache. It has no soul. It has no character. I hope I’m around to see it get blown up, too, in eighty years.