No, you’re not seeing triple – these are Pittsburgh’s Three Sisters, a trio of nearly identical suspension bridges erected side by side over the Allegheny River.

Rachel Carson (Ninth Street Bridge)

All three were built between 1924 and 1928 by the aptly-named American Bridge Company, and they are the only trio of nearly identical bridges, as well as the first self-anchored suspension span bridges in the United States.

Andy Warhol (Seventh Street Bridge)

The 9th and 7th street bridges are named for Pittsburgh natives Rachel Carson and Andy Warhol, whilst the 6th is named for the baseball player Roberto Clemente, who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, whose home field is the nearby PNC Park baseball stadium.

Roberto Clemente (Sixth Street Bridge)

Thanks to Google’s Street View feature, as well as being able to see what these bridges look like when you’re on them, we can also see what it’s like to cross the 6th street bridge and see the other two.

Thanks to Nitehawk. Read more about the Three Sisters at Wikipedia.

See our previous posts Double Bridge Shadow, Double Drawbridge and Three Sisters, Australia.

It’s been a whole year since Google first launched their controversial Street View service, and we posted our first Street View sight. Since then we’ve seen the rate of discovery of the most bizarre and unusual finds increase as Google has added more and more US cities to the roster.

With the service due to launch soon in Canada, Italy, Spain, Australia and Japan, we thought we’d mark the one year anniversary with a roundup of the best 10 Street View discoveries that we haven’t already posted to the site.

10) Google camera gets stuck in tree

Yes, this driver forgot he had a giant camera stuck to the top of his car, and drove it into a low-hanging tree.

9) The giant finger of doom

Arrgh! The giant finger of doom! Actually, if you pan round you can see that this is actually an image of a normal-sized man with the world’s biggest hand.

8) Working girls, working

Well, not actually in flagrante, but rather hanging around waiting to possibly um… service some customers?

7) Scuba diver on city street

Well he isn’t a Scuba diver unless he’s in the water. Walking along the road like this just makes him a bit of an idiot.

6) Segway convoy

Rubby ducky rubber ducky, come in, this is ageing geek! We got ourselves a convoy!

5) Usin publik transport: ur doin it rong

Is this the cab’s driver, or a passenger in need of some assistance? Perhaps this person has been subjected to a particularly lethal LOLcat attack?

4) Having to explain the enormously suspicious camera on the top of your car to a police officer

“Yes officer that’s right, taking photos to put on the internet!” *Click*.

3) Man with giant head stomps all over Street View car

A relative of the man with the world’s biggest hand, this man must surely have the largest head on the planet.

2) Post-it attack!

A couple of teenage girls take brilliantly surreal revenge upon somebody, and don’t blink as a car passes recording their actions forever…

1) How not to get IN a car

We’re stunned, we have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on here. Brilliantly bizarre and a worthy winner of the top spot!

Earlier this week archaeologists began excavating Stonehenge in an attempt to decide once and for all exactly when this enigmatic monument was constructed.

Stonehenge has most certainly been around many thousands of years, meaning there has been plenty of time for people to build loads of rip-offs and copies, most of them in the US.

Stonehenge II in Texas is a replica made from wire-mesh “stones” a bit like giant Papier-mâché. Strangely, the stones are about 90% the width of the originals, but only 60% the height – and if you make your way out to see the monument you’ll find it’s flanked by beer-bellied Easter island Moai. Obviously.

There’s ground level pictures on Flickr and more information at Roadside America.

Our second Stonehenge replica is found at Missouri’s University of Science and Technology is at least made of stone, this time made from 160 tons of granite carved with high pressure water jets. Sadly it’s only ½ the size of the original.

There’s also a ground level picture on Flickr.

East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania have a small replica which they apparently dubbed “Stroudhenge”.

Montana’s Stonehenge is located on a private golf course in Montana, and is claimed to be the most accurate replica ever built. But no-one’s been able to confirm that as the golf club is so exclusive.

Lastly, it’s difficult to see from the satellite photos, but Truckhenge whilst not a faithful reproduction certainly scores points through being constructed entirely in the medium of trucks. More info and pictures on Kansas Travel.

Thanks to Henderson Smith, James, FBK and others.

Previously on Google Sightseeing we’ve featured Stonefridge, Maryhill’s Stonehenge, the Segway Inventor’s Stonehenge and a little-known version in England simply called “Stonehenge“.

In 1962, a landfill site in Centralia, Pennsylvania was set on fire. The rubbish was located in the pit of an abandoned strip mine, and although it was believed to have been extinguished at the time, the fire actually remained burning in the lower depths and eventually spread to an eight-mile seam of coal, where it has now been burning for 46 years.

Initial attempts to extinguish the fire were unsuccessful, and it continued to burn throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It soon became apparent that carbon monoxide produced by the blaze was having adverse effects upon the health of the locals, but it wasn’t until 1979 that people became aware of the scale of the problem:

a gas-station owner inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 77.8°C (172°F).

A couple of years later a 12-year-old boy fell into a 45 metre-deep sinkhole that suddenly opened beneath his feet, and people began to leave this place in earnest. Centralia’s population dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to just 9 in 2007. Today, all buildings within the borough have been condemned (you can see in the satellite shots that there are hardly any left now), and the few that remain lost their ZIP codes back in 2002.

To the south we can see a section of Pennsylvania Route 61 which had to be abandoned when, despite repeated repairs, huge smoking cracks kept appearing in the highway. We can see in Google’s imagery that today the road is becoming overgrown with plant-life, and yet the cracks in the earth still belch toxic smoke into the air here every day.

In 1994, this section of Route 61 was permanently closed, and we can easily see the road block which is used to direct traffic along Byrnesville Road instead.

As you read this post the underground fire continues to burn, and it is now estimated to underlie around 160 hectares (400 acres) of land.

Furthermore, it seems that this fire will continue to burn for some time to come; there are no current plans to extinguish it and the eight-mile coal seam constitutes enough fuel to last about 250 years.

Read more about Centralia at Wikipedia, explore a photo gallery of the area, or see some before and after shots of a previously inhabited area.

Thanks to George Dorn, greg, David, Rich Holmes, Sensei Sparky and Lars Christensen.

When we first saw this sports field of a Pennsylvania high school, we reacted with “Oh, great, another crudely drawn willy, are there really no original field graffitti artists anymore?”

Unable to say anything worthwhile, we forgot about this sight and relegated it to the slow news day pile.

However, today we’ve been swamped with emails suggesting the sight, so we’re posting it now purely because we really don’t want to see it ever again.

Please, stop suggesting we look at this penis. We can’t take it anymore.¹

Many thanks to Tom, Steve, J Brett, Rich, Guido, H Dog, Mike and many, many others for thinking of us