Before the sex change of the Three Sisters Bridges is complete, might I make a modest proposal? Could we please remember the ladies and name one of them for a woman?

	Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette
	Working on their "frieze" to honor 108 women to balance the 108 men's names carved into the frieze on the Carnegie museums and library building in Oakland are, from left: Al Kovacik, co-manager of the SkinnyBuilding, Downtown; Sharon Spell and Jennie Benford, both co-researchers and members of Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails.
	Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette
	Spread out on the kitchen floor of Benford's Polish Hill home, Kovacik, Spell and Benford work on the names of women plucked from history, printed in a stone-like typeface to echo the Carnegie carvings. The work will be displayed at the SkinnyBuilding.

Built between 1924 and 1928, the Sixth, Seventh and Ninth street bridges are the country's only trio of almost identical bridges. Their arcing cables festoon the landscape with a lyrical rhythm, causing Pittsburghers to regard the sisters with great affection.

When the Sixth Street Bridge became the Roberto Clemente Bridge in 1999, the trio became Two Sisters and a Bro (if only to me). When the Seventh Street Bridge becomes the Andy Warhol Bridge on March 18, we'll be down to one sister.

Not that there's anything wrong with naming a bridge for Warhol. It makes perfect sense that the bridge leading from Downtown to The Andy Warhol Museum is named for him, and it's only fair that the arts get equal footing with sports in Blitzburgh.

But now it's time to give women and the sciences a fair shake too -- by naming the Ninth Street Bridge for Rachel Carson, the mild-mannered biologist who woke up America and triggered the environmental movement with her 1962 book, "Silent Spring."

More than 40 years later, recent studies have shown the Pittsburgh region has one of the highest death rates from diesel emissions in the nation, and Pennsylvania's coal-burning power plants are among the continent's biggest emitters of sulfur dioxide and mercury pollution. Mercury made almost half the fish sampled from Pennsylvania lakes between 1999 and 2001 unsafe for pregnant women to eat and 76 percent unsafe for children to eat.

The Rachel Carson Bridge would be a daily reminder that we must and can do better, and a signal to residents and visitors alike that the erstwhile Smoky City cares about the environment. The Ninth Street Bridge, if we need a geographic rationale, is the sister closest to Carson's birthplace, about 15 miles up the Allegheny in Springdale.

I asked Chatham College, Carson's alma mater, what they thought of the idea. Turns out they were way ahead of me. Chatham President Esther Barazzone suggested it in a letter to two County Council members in October. They're weighing it.

Naming a bridge costs next to nothing, certainly not the thousands it would take to put up a statue of Carson, another idea worth exploring.

Unless you are of the female persuasion, you may not have noticed that women are seriously under-represented on the Western Pennsylvania landscape. When was the last time you passed a statue, road or bridge honoring a woman? If you drive Route 40 in Fayette County, you've passed the Madonna of the Trail monument, one of 12 identical statues across the country honoring pioneer women. But she's a representational figure. I'm talking about women who lived and died.

I couldn't think of any statues of women here, so I opened up Marilyn Evert and Vernon Gay's 1983 book, "Discovering Pittsburgh's Sculpture," and tallied up the X and Y chromosomes. Discounting allegorical and representational figures of both sexes (where males still outnumber females by about 20), there are 32 statues or busts of men, most commemorating political leaders and industrialists. Since the book came out, we've added at least three more, of Richard Caliguiri, Art Rooney and Clemente.

Care to guess how many women are honored? Three? Two? One?

None. In Pittsburgh, real women don't rate statues. And that, friends, is pathetic.

Women by nature are not self-aggrandizing, but we need to start thinking of the messages we're sending to future generations. Putting more women on the landscape is not about pumping up our egos. It's about educating, empowering and inspiring generations into the future.

Who are the statue-worthy women of Western Pennsylvania? How about Jane Grey Swisshelm, Nellie Bly, Mary Cassatt, Willa Cather, Selma Burke?

For now, though, let's start with renaming the Ninth Street Bridge the Rachel Carson Bridge, before some fellow gets the bright idea to name it for some other fellow.

Shooting the canon
For more than a century, the frieze that wraps around the Carnegie Museums and Carnegie Library building in Oakland has been frozen in a bygone era, acknowledging the work of 108 men in the arts and sciences but not a single woman.

"We wondered if we could find 108 women who were doing basically the same thing at the same time," said Jennie Benford. "We were able to find 108 names of women doing good work in the same fields."

Alas, their names won't be chiseled in stone. But hey, they have been printed in a stone-like typeface, and today they'll go up in the windows of the Skinny Building, Downtown's scintillating sliver of cultural enterprise at the corner of Forbes Avenue and Wood Street.

"This is not a protest," said Benford, who lives in Polish Hill. "We're doing it in the spirit of celebration and inquiry."

Benford is one of the founding members of Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails, a group whose mission is to raise awareness of women's history and have a little fun and a few drinks along the way.

"We like to refer to ourselves as a guerrilla women's history action collective," said Benford, whose day job is campus archivist at Carnegie Mellon University. Several of the group's founders were librarians and archivists; now it also includes a comedian, caterer, administrative assistant and students.

Since their founding about four years ago, the LUPEC ladies have met regularly to rescue from oblivion the classic and arcane drinks of yesteryear and launch a few new ones of their own, like "The Red Velvet Swing" honoring Tarentum-born showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, whose affair with the architect Stanford White led to his death in 1906 at the hands of her mad-about-you husband, Harry Thaw. Lava Lounge bartender Don Bistarkey created the drink for LUPEC with a base of champagne, which Nesbit told the court she was drinking when White slipped something into it and seduced her.

Thus are the LUPEC ladies living up to their motto -- "dismantling the patriarchy one drink at a time."

During Women's History Month, LUPEC kicks into high gear. Last March, they staged a gallery walk at the Frick Art & Historical Center during the all-male traveling drawing exhibition, "VictorianVisions." LUPEC called the event "So Where Were All the Women, Anyway?" and showed slides of works by women artists, with the approval of Frick's museum programs director, Tom Smart.

"They were expecting 20 people. We brought in 78," Benford said.

For this show -- called "Canon Fodder!" -- LUPEC's enlightening and entertaining Web site, www.lupec.org, will have brief biographical information on the 108 scientists, artists, musicians and other women of note.

"Canon Fodder!" is the latest in a series of exhibits in the 24 windows of the 5-foot-2-inch-wide SkinnyBuilding (www.skinnybuilding.com), which escaped the mayor's headache ball with the demise of the Market Place at Fifth and Forbes project and where, ever since, Al Kovacik and Pat Clark have been making something out of next to nothing, reviving Downtown one skinny building at a time.