Three rivers, 446 bridges, and a missing h
Pittsburgh sits where the Allegheny and Monongahela meet to form the Ohio, a junction valuable enough that the French and British were fighting over it years before war was formally declared — Fort Duquesne became Fort Pitt in 1758, named for the British statesman William Pitt. The rivers and the steep ravines between them mean the city needs more bridges than anywhere else on earth, 446 at last count, along with two surviving funiculars that still haul passengers up the face of Mount Washington. The mills that made Andrew Carnegie the richest man in the world are gone, but the money he left behind is not, and it still funds libraries, a university, and a museum system across the city. Andy Warhol grew up here in a Byzantine Catholic family from what is now Slovakia; the museum bearing his name is the largest in North America devoted to a single artist. The city lost the h at the end of its name in 1891, when a federal board standardized American spellings, and spent the next twenty years lobbying to get it back.
