Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Article

Sunday, June 23, 2002

My optometrist, Dr. David Strattan, peered into my right eye a while ago and asked, "So, what are you writing about?"

He does this, you know, to try to divert me away from the fact that he's just told me that, yes, we have to make your contacts and glasses stronger again because, well, that happens to people as they get older.

"Well, I've been wondering why Butler's Main Street Viaduct and Wayne Street Viaduct are called viaducts and not bridges," I said. And there's the Lyndora Viaduct, too.

"Why viaducts? Hmm, it sounds like that `Why a duck?' routine from the old Marx Brothers' movie. Do you know the one?" Strattan asked.

I'm old, but I'm not that old. Neither is Strattan, but he did hunt around and find the script to "The Cocoanuts," released in 1929. Although the script doesn't even come close to explaining why the spans of Butler are called viaducts, I did relate to Chico's lamentable linguistic confusion when Groucho directed him to travel along a viaduct.

"Allrighta ... I catch on to why-a-horse, why-a-chicken, why-a-this, why-a-that. I no catch on to why-a-duck," shtick master Chico crooned in the film. Why a viaduct, indeed.

As far as I know, labeling spans as viaducts seems to be a Butler propensity. But Main Street and Wayne Street soon will lose their viaducts, in name at least. The viaducts are slated for replacement by the state Department of Transportation, and when they're rebuilt, PennDOT doesn't intend to call them viaducts any longer. They'll officially be called bridges.

Jim Struzzi, PennDOT District 10 spokesman, e-mailed me an update on the Main Street Viaduct, the first to be replaced.

"The Main Street Bridge [aka viaduct] in Butler City passed a significant milestone recently in that our environmental assessment was reviewed and concurred with by the Federal Highway Administration. It was on display in Butler for public comment through May and no objections were recorded," Struzzi wrote. The replacement plan has a few more approval hurdles to clear, but he expects construction to begin in 2004. That's at least a decade since PennDOT began talking about replacing both viaducts.

"And we are going to call this one a bridge ..." Struzzi wrote.

I asked if PennDOT's engineers knew why it was called a viaduct in the first place, but they didn't. Not that they should, mind you. The Wayne Street Viaduct, the first built, was completed in 1915, long before PennDOT existed.

If there was no PennDOT in 1915, then who built the Wayne Street Viaduct? A trip to the Butler County Historical Society provided tons of information about Butler's first viaduct. Rebekah Sheeler, retiring director of the society, and her staff looked at me blankly when I showed up with my query, but they started shuffling through books and files. It turns out that the Wayne Street Viaduct was built before the city of Butler was even a city. Butler was a borough until 1918, and the borough voted on whether a viaduct was needed and then footed most of the bill for it, according to then-borough solicitor John Wilson.

Wilson wrote a booklet in 1915 about the arduous process of funding and building the viaduct. The valley beneath the viaduct held tracks for the B&O and Bessemer railroads. Connoquenessing Creek also meanders in the valley. B&O asked for and received an injunction from the state Supreme Court to stop the local streetcars from passing over its tracks. So, Butler Passenger Railway asked if elevated tracks could be built so it could carry people from the north side of town to the south side.

Talk about elevated tracks soon turned into talk about an elevated street, and the process began.

B&O proved to be a bit of an obstacle in the process, saying the viaduct's supporting pillars couldn't be built on its land. There were many other snafus, but after five years, the viaduct was built at a cost of about $106,000. Its replacement will cost $8 million, and the Main Street Viaduct will be double that amount.

So, why a viaduct and not a bridge? Wilson's booklet offered no clue and since the engineers were stumped as well, I turned to Bruce Cridlebaugh, a guy with an affection for bridges and tunnels around here, and Jeff Kitsko, Web master of www.pahighways.com. Cridlebaugh has a great Web site at www.pghbridges.com.

"A viaduct is a series of arches or bridges spanning a valley or roads or railroads ... they don't span water or other natural-made features but instead span land and man-made features," Kitsko offered. Considering that the railroads take up much more of the valley than the creek does, that explanation makes sense.

"Typically a viaduct is a long, elevated roadway, a series of short span bridges of similar design," Cridlebaugh said. "Seems they are mostly built in relatively flat places; there are few around Pittsburgh and I can't think of any nearby which are actually named as viaducts.

"But maybe it's just a matter of the vocabulary popular at the time, or by those involved in the design. When I hear the word `viaduct,' I think of structures built in 1915-1945, but as I said, it's the series of short spans that is definitive," Cridlebaugh added.

PennDOT can rename them bridges, but I don't doubt that people in Butler will be directing newcomers across the Main Street Viaduct for the next thousand years or so. Me? I kinda like that they're called viaducts. Any old town can have bridges, but Butler is one of the few to have viaducts.