TINA MARKOE/Courier-Post Mayor Tom Murphy speaks about the investment in the city -- and its rivers -- as the Allegheny River flows by behind him.

TINA MARKOE/Courier-Post The Duquesne Incline once shuttled workers down the slope of Mount Washington to jobs in Pittburgh's steel mills.

TINA MARKOE/Courier-Post Pittsburgh's three rivers are spanned by many such bridges.

Charl Sproat remembers when Pittsburgh's steel mills belched clouds of smoke that hung thick over the city, blotting out the daylight.

Workers who lived on the rumpled mountainsides surrounding the confluence of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers frequently couldn't see the mills below them. Street lamps burned at midday.

Although those were prosperous times, few residents of this western Pennsylvania city want to go back.

"Everybody had a good paycheck, but we didn't know we were living unhealthy," said Sproat of Pittsburgh in the 1940s and 1950s.

The rivers may have built Steeltown, providing access for raw materials and water for manufacturing. But with the demise of the steel industry in the 1970s, Pittsburgh, led by its mayor, Tom Murphy, is trying to rebuild by using its rivers in a different way, as a recreational asset to draw corporations and young professionals back to the city.

Murphy believes a similar transformation could take place along the Delaware--if someone takes the lead.

"Whatever you want to do, there's always a hundred people giving you reasons to not do it," said Murphy, who took office in 1994. "You just need to say, `We're going to do it.' Nothing happens without risk, political risk and financial risk."

Murphy's plan still has a long way to go, but Pittsburgh is clearly undergoing a transformation. And it's largely because of Murphy's singular, almost obsessive vision.

Pittsburgh's Riverfront Development Plan has helped spur more than $2 billion in new private and government investment in this city, which has lost nearly half its population--including workers 25 to 40--since most of the mills closed.

Along both banks of the Allegheny on the city's South Side, officials recently broke ground on the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Center, which will support biomedical and biotechnological research at the site of the recently razed LTV Works steel mill. Murphy's father once worked at the mill.

Upscale houses are rising atop an island that once served as a slaughterhouse and tannery. Joggers now circle picturesque paths on this island, once one of the city's most polluted pieces of land.

And mixed-income houses are planned atop a mountain of slag the mills left behind.

A key part of Murphy's plan to reconnect the public with the rivers is a 40-mile network of bicycling and walking trails, which cross the rivers on old bridges the city views as pieces of its past rather than eyesores.
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