I remember that bridge. My buddies and Me, we used to fish down there, anat. Neville Island Backchannel. Hippy Beach.
Q: "Hey, yinz cetchin inny catfish dahn air below da dam, anat?"
A: "Naw, nuttin but a coupla rock bass, coupla rock bass!"
Yeah, good times in the Burgh, back in the day ('60s, '70s, '80s)

Mr. Rick Seeback does a lot of these TV specials for old Pittsburgh that were once here but now are gone!!

Here's a recent snap of almost the same scene.

Although the Patterson Coal building is in the same place as the current River Rescue, it's a different building---among other things, the new one is square, and I seem to recall it having some kind of artificial-material siding on it, though I can't get a picture of it at the moment.

• Patterson Coal & Supply
• Second Pool Coal Co.
• T. Calnan
• The Laader
• Zatek

If memory serves, then the Patterson Coal and Supply building on the river would now be the River Rescue building. There was a Bruce Willis movie shot there called "Striking Distance." The picture would be taken from the spot where PNC Park now sits. The river looks wider now than it does in the pic.

The first two minutes of this well done video show the bridge in its heyday and its ultimate demolition. Very neat stuff, even for someone who has never been there -- me.

It looks as though Patterson Coal Co. had their own portapotty with a gravity flush. Can anyone say typhoid?

The train tracks in the foreground are probably those of the Pennsylvania Railroad. It looks like an old "NC" 4 wheel bobber cabin car {caboose} at the right of the photo. These were declared unsafe and illegal for mainline use by the ICC, and many were stretched into a 2 truck version.

She lived in McKeesport, PA, born in 1899, my mom was born in McKeesport in 1938.

This bridge was replaced by one that opened in 1928 and subsequently became the Roberto Clemente Bridge. The bridge pictured didn't meet War Department standards for clearance. In 1927 it was floated 12 miles downstream to a crossing over the Ohio River and reassembled as the Coraopolis Bridge. After decades of increasing decrepitude, it was replaced in 1995 by a boring truss span.