The city of Pittsburgh, also home to over 400 bridges, constructed its own Bridge of Sighs nearly 300 hundred years later, spanning Ross St. and connecting the Allegheny County Courthouse to the county jail. Five small windows on either side of the bridge gave prisoners a last look at their city. Constructed of white limestone, the Venetian version was designed by Antonio Contino, a native of the city of canals.
Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson designed Pittsburgh’s homage to the Venetian bridge using rusticated blocks of granite in the style that came to bear his name, Richardsonian Romanesque. He considered the Pittsburgh project his finest work, although he died two years before its completion in 1888. Anticipating future plans to re-grade the city and lower the streets around the courthouse and jail, Richardson dictated that finished masonry walls be installed on what were originally basement walls. When the streets were lowered 16 ft. in the early 1900s, his Bridge of Sighs was now that much farther off the ground, more closely mimicking the Italian original.
Both bridges survive, but no longer to move prisoners between court and captivity. The Allegheny County Jail was closed in 1995, renovated and repurposed as home to Allegheny County Juvenile Court. Pittsburgh is not alone in paying homage to Contino’s Venetian bridge. Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester in England each have their own Bridge of Sighs, as does the city hall in Frankfurt, Germany.
