San Antonio has the Alamo, Seattle its space needle and St. Louis its arch. And Pittsburgh?
You can't mention this city without talking about the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio.
The three rivers — recognized as a whole in the names of the city's regatta, its arts festival, countless businesses and, in the days before corporate sponsors, its former professional sports stadium — are its icons.
Yet they haven't always been treated with a lot of love.
In decades past, when the city was a hub of heavy industry so dirty that visiting Boston writer James Parton described it in 1868 as "hell with the lid off," the rivers were little more than flowing collections of sewage and pollution. They were so filthy then that the city was a global hotspot for typhoid.
That's changed dramatically enough that Pittsburgh will host the Forrest Wood Cup — the world's richest bass fishing tournament — at the end of this month.
Efforts to learn more about the rivers and how to better manage and protect them are ongoing, too.
But is the agency tasked with that job succeeding⢠That's a question being asked by some within its own ranks.
The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission established the Three Rivers Ecological Research Center in Pittsburgh in November of 2006. It was envisioned to be a clearinghouse of sorts, the state's first and only watershed-specific science center, where information about the rivers' species, habitats and commercial and recreational usage would be collected, coordinated and put to use.
"We realized we didn't have a good basis of knowledge concerning the biology of the rivers. The center is meant to create a science agenda and fill in some of those gaps," said the commission's executive director, Doug Austen, at a meeting earlier this year.
But some within the Fish and Boat Commission wonder whether it's achieving that goal.
"My concern is that we're spending a lot of money there and I'm not sure what we're getting," said Bill Worobec, a member of the Fish and Boat Commission board from Lycoming County.
"I think it's very, very important that we pay attention to those rivers. They're very important to the commonwealth. But I'm not sure what we're getting."
"I think the expectations there might have been greater than the results we're seeing," said commissioner Richard Czop of Philadelphia. "Right now, I'm not sure what they're doing or what they're trying to accomplish. I'm not sure what they're adding to the agency."
Answers to those questions should be forthcoming soon. Austen is to deliver a report on the center's costs and accomplishments when commissioners meet in Harrisburg July 13-14.
In the meantime, though, Sue Thompson, a botanist by training who serves as the center's director, defended the center, and the pace at which it's moving. She said she's been trying to create a research center "kind of from scratch here." A lot of that work to date has involved reaching out to conservancies, other sportsmen's and conservation groups and state and federal agencies.
"I think one of the big things since the start of the center has been looking at establishing good working relations with partners in the basin, not just in Pittsburgh, but all over," Thompson said.
She's been involved with the National Fish Habitat Action Plan, she said, and working with nearby universities for interns and research ideas. The Three Rivers Center has also "brought in or leveraged for our partners" more than $75,000 in grants she said.
That hasn't impressed Worobec, though.
"I'll bet that's not as much as we're paying in salaries," Worobec said.
The center has been doing some field work, too, beginning in earnest this year. Bob Venturini, the center's only other employee — a hiring freeze has delayed plans to hire a full-time fisheries aid and a seasonal assistant — has been monitoring the number of naturally spawned versus stocked walleyes and saugers in the rivers, sampled invertebrates and he is redoing a comprehensive fish survey of the Monongahela, too.
He's also in the midst of creating a first-ever comprehensive management plan for the rivers.
Doing all of that takes time, he said.
"I know people want us to hurry up and get these things done, but we want to make sure we get things done right," he said. "We don't want to just put out a piece of garbage."
That's OK, but commissioners need to know what, if anything, the center is getting done, Czop said. Right now, they don't.
"If the center is moving along, great. But if they're experiencing setbacks, they need to say so," Czop said. "I want a report listing the measurable things they're accomplishing. It's our job as commissioners to ask those hard questions."
Biology 101
The Fish and Boat Commission has newly-hired "big river" biologists for the Susquehanna and Delaware rivers.
But the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio are the only rivers to have their own biologist — Bob Venturini — and a research center. Why is that⢠Here are some of the reasons given by the Fish and Boat Commission.
• The rivers are just plain busy. Pittsburgh is the second-busiest inland port in the nation, and among counties, Allegheny is second in the country only to Dade County, Fla., for boater registrations.
• They take in a lot of country. The Ohio River basin covers 15,614 square miles and is the second-largest river basin in Pennsylvania.
• They're home to some unique species. Eighty percent of the fish species listed on the state's threatened or endangered lists can be found in the basin.
• The rivers are still at risk. They are home to the only commercial sand and gravel dredging in the state, and the region's antiquated sewage treatment lines make contamination of the rivers a real issue.
