Steel City bridge named for Warhol

It's the second of the city's 'three sisters' bridges over Allegheny River to be renamed.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- His work spanned from prints to posters to magazines to movies to a nightclub and even shoes. He linked pop culture, business and art. How appropriate that Andy Warhol would get a bridge.
Ten years after a museum bearing his name opened in Pittsburgh, the city's Seventh Street Bridge which leads to the museum will be officially renamed the "Andy Warhol Bridge" on Friday.
A bridge honoring Warhol could signal an acceptance of sorts by the sometimes staid Steel City, which hasn't embraced its perhaps best known resident -- famous for his Campbell's soup cans and silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe but who also made experimental films of people sleeping and eating and so-called sexploitation films like "The Nude Restaurant."
Besides the culture clash, some also didn't think the city should celebrate a celebrity who apparently concealed his roots. Warhol was born in the city in 1928 and went to school in Pittsburgh before moving to New York to become a commercial artist. He seldom came back and once said, "I am from nowhere."
"What really hurts was he was criticized for not coming to Pittsburgh. He came back a couple of times but there was nothing for him to be coming back and forth like that," said John Warhola, 79, of McCandless, his older brother. "I don't know where the rumor came out that Andy didn't like Pittsburgh."
A first?
Warhola said a bridge honoring his brother, who died in 1987 at 59, was overdue but appreciated. He plans to attend the renaming with his three sons and grandson.
The bridge is the second of the city's so-called "three sisters" bridges over the Allegheny River to be renamed -- the first was the former Sixth Street Bridge named for former Pittsburgh Pirate Roberto Clemente. It could be the first in the country named for an artist.
There are bridges named for musicians -- the Duke Ellington Bridge in Washington, D.C., and the James Taylor Bridge in North Carolina. There's one for poet Walt Whitman in Camden, N.J.
Chances are there's at least one of the country's 590,750 bridges named for some artist, but bridge experts and arts groups can't think of one.
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