Adventureland|Sixteenth Street Bridge — First Kiss Under the Bronze Horses

The first kiss happens in a parking lot. James and Em drive down from the park, stop under the southern approach of the Sixteenth Street Bridge where it comes to ground in Pittsburgh's Strip District, and the film gives them the least romantic setting available: gravel, girders, the river somewhere past the ramp. It works because they both know it is a bad idea.

Look up while you are standing there. The bridge was completed in 1923 to a design by Warren and Wetmore, the New York firm that built Grand Central Terminal, and four bronze armillary spheres sit on its pillars, each one flanked by winged horses cast by the sculptor Leo Lentelli. Nobody in the scene notices them. That is the point of the location — grandeur nobody is looking at, directly above two people trying to work out what they are doing.

Officially it is now the David McCullough Bridge, renamed for the Pittsburgh-born historian, though almost everyone in the city still says Sixteenth Street. Walk from the produce terminal on Smallman Street toward the water and you reach the same underside: traffic noise overhead, the Allegheny flat and brown, the North Shore across the span.

Go at dusk, when the sodium light comes on under the deck and the bronze horses go black against the sky.

Photo: 16th Street Bridge, Pittsburgh, Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed.