New signs along the GAP trail will pay tribute to history
By JEFF STITT
jstitt@yourmvi.com
Regional Trail Corporation board member Roy Bires was on a bike ride on the Great Allegheny Passage trail a few years ago when he stopped to take a break near the former site of U.S. Steel Duquesne Works.
That’s when a fellow cyclist in his 30s asked 71-year-old Bires: “What used to be here?”
Bires said he was dumbfounded.
He wondered: How could he not know of the mill’s history and impact on the region?
Then Bires remembered that the mill, which shuttered in the mid-1980s and was demolished by that decade’s end, had probably been closed for the entirety of the man’s life and was likely demolished before his birth or when he was just a youngster.
That bike ride and the encounter with the millennial set Bires on a quest to give trail users a chance to learn the area’s history while walking, running or biking the GAP.
This week, Bires announced new interpretive signs are coming to Mon Valley portions of the trail thanks to a $3,970 grant from the Rivers of Steel nonprofit organization.
Bires said RTC is one of nine nonprofits to receive funding from Rivers of Steel through its Round 25 Mini-Grant program, which supports partner organizations in the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area, an eight-county region of southwestern Pennsylvania that is one of 55 National Heritage Areas designated by the U.S. Congress and one of 12 State Heritage Areas.
The grant will enable the RTC to develop, produce and install eight new interpretive signs on the GAP Trail in Whitaker, West Mifflin, Duquesne and McKeesport.
Bires said that portion of the trail is loaded with history and follows abandoned railroad lines and an abandoned service road for the Clairton Coke Work Gas Line, which serviced the Homestead Steel Works.
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