The chief engineer of the Armstrong Tunnel was not insane or incompetent, and he did not commit suicide because he screwed up and sent his workers boring in the wrong direction in 1926. But he did harbor a distaste for dancing.
Anyone who’s driven through the Armstrong tunnel, which connects Second Avenue to Forbes Avenue, knows it takes a weird 45-degree turn near its north portal. If you do a web search on this topic you’ll learn about an urban legend blaming this turn on a mistake by chief engineer Vernon Covell. This guy was so ashamed of his goof that he killed himself. So goes the story.
Covell’s official title was chief engineer of county bridges. Truth is, he continued working in that capacity until 1933. A newspaper story says he was scheduled to be dismissed during a 1932 purging of more than 100 jobs at the county highway department, but that he’d be kept on until completion of the West End Bridge. He then lived another 16 years.
The year 1926 was filled with odd turns. In March, the civic-minded Covell joined a majority of other Wilkinsburg school board members in voting to ban dancing at the borough’s high school. Students declared they’d hold a prom anyway. Covell kept himself busy. He also served for decades as superintendent of a church Sunday school.
So why the tunnel curve? Perhaps engineers were trying to avoid existing or planned buildings at Duquesne University, which rises on the Bluff above the tunnel. Or maybe they were avoiding mines, or trying to align the tunnel with other roads, or with the 10th Street Bridge at the tunnel’s south end. Those are theories posed by Bruce Cridlebaugh on the website pghbridges.com.
Either way, the curve gives the tunnel a mysterious charm. On a recent evening, a few cars passed through, creating an occasional whooshing noise that echoed slightly off the tunnel’s concrete ceiling. Pedestrians on the tunnel walkway paid no attention. They moved quietly through a 97-year-old hole bored into a Pittsburgh hillside by a man who would have hated the movie “Footloose.”
Steve is a photojournalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he is currently on strike and working as a Union Progress co-editor. Reach him at smellon@unionprogress.com.