Portal Bridge - Inside Fort Pitt's Walls

Stop on Haunted Pittsburgh Walk, a free self-guided tour.

You are now walking where the walls of Fort Pitt once rose. British troops built the fort between 1759 and 1761, a five-pointed star of earth and brick with a bastion at every point, and named it for the statesman William Pitt. The town that grew up beside it took his name too.

Look across the lawns for lines of brick set into the ground. They trace the outline of the fort's bastions, and the reconstructed bastion walls nearby now hold the Fort Pitt Museum.

In June 1763, during Pontiac's War, American Indian warriors laid siege to these walls. Settlers from the countryside crowded inside, and the garrison held on until a relief army under Colonel Bouquet arrived that August.

The Portal Bridge above you was built in the early 1960s, and its name tells you its job: pass beneath it and the park opens toward the rivers like a stage when the curtain rises. On a foggy October night it is easy to imagine sentries still pacing a wall that has been gone for more than two centuries.

Getting here: Walk east from the blockhouse toward the downtown towers, about 3 minutes, and stop by the broad concrete Portal Bridge that spans the park's main path.

Did you know?: Point State Park, the site of both Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt, was named a National Historic Landmark in 1960, years before the park and its fountain were finished in 1974.

Photo op: Frame the Portal Bridge as a dark arch with the lawns and the fountain glowing beyond it, best just after sunset.