When I was a teenager, a day hike miles beyond our Pittsburgh neighborhood of Lawrenceville often became a wild adventure. This happened when me and my brother Skip and our friend Willy hiked north across the Allegheny River and over the 62nd Street or Sharpsburg Bridge.

One of many bridges across the Allegheny, an Iroquois word for "beautiful river," it was the gateway to our hikes through Etna along Route 8 and Pine Creek. Sometimes we would go as far as Glenshaw or Allison Park and stop for a dip in Pine Creek at a park called Locust Grove.

Crossing that rickety wood and steel bridge was the only way to get to our destinations. It got more difficult as the bridge fell more into disrepair. In bad weather, it was impossible.

The Sharpsburg Bridge was the fourth of five built there since 1856, connecting Butler Street at 62nd with Sharpsburg and Etna. Built in 1911, it replaced two others which replaced the original wooden, covered bridge. All three of these earlier bridges were destroyed or damaged by fires. The 1911 bridge, the one that we walked across, lasted 50 years before being replaced in 1962. The old bridge just plain wore out, although it, too, suffered damaging fires.

The bridge of our hikes had a wooden boardwalk on the downriver side of a two-lane roadway that included street car tracks. We approached it from Butler Street along a sidewalk that continued into a wooden boardwalk, which had many loose or missing boards. Silly Willy would point his camera down through the boardwalk holes for overhead views of boats passing in the river below

Walking across that rickety old bridge after dark was dangerous. A late-shift factory worker had one too many drinks at the 62nd Street Bar before heading across the bridge. The man fell through the missing planks and it was several days later before his body was found farther downriver. The 62nd Street Bar, however, is still there. There were at least two suicides from the bridge and several foiled attempts.

The bridge swayed a lot. The swaying and bouncing got scary when street cars rolled across on their way to Aspinwall upriver. If we were close enough to either end of the bridge before we saw the street car coming, we ran like hell to get off the main span or grabbed the nearest railing and held on tight. Being stuck out there on the middle of that swaying, bouncing bridge was no laughing matter.

A mill of the Carnegie Steel Isabella Furnaces was adjacent to that side of the bridge. From the boardwalk, we could look down into the mill and see red hot molten metal being poured into ingots. We even felt the heat, quite a blast of it some days. One colder day, hot metal pieces flew out of the mill below us and flames shot up the side of the bridge. We ran like mad as the Sharpsburg fire trucks came rushing to extinguish the ensuing blaze.

Fires caused by the adjacent mills and factories were frequent in those years, around 1945-47. Almost every summer, there were days when the bridge was closed for fire repairs. We simply had to turn around and go home or take a different hike. How that bridge and most of the ones built before it survived without burning down completely is a wonder.

By the time the fifth Sharpsburg bridge was built in 1962, the mills and factories were closed or torn down. But even the new, four-lane bridge of steel and concrete has been subjected to fires, caused by flames leaping up from below. No buildings beneath the new bridge are allowed now, although there have been many temporary closings of the new bridge, renamed after Pennsylvania Sen. Robert D. Fleming, who was born in Sharpsburg in 1903.

The city's many bridges and tunnels and their often unpredictable closings help explain the Pittsburgh conundrum, "you can't get there from here," a frequent response when someone asks for directions. What they mean is that "you can't get there from here ... unless you take ..." (a specific bridge, tunnel, incline, or steps). And, if the bridge or tunnel in question is closed that day, they probably aren't kidding.

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