Fingerspan Bridge

The story

In June 1987, a helicopter made six separate airlifts into a gorge in the Wissahickon Valley, lowering pieces of a 59-foot steel tube onto the cliffs above the creek. Philadelphia artist Jody Pinto engineered the pedestrian bridge out of Cor-Ten weathering steel—the self-protecting alloy designed to form a dark oxide patina rather than rust away—and shaped it into a giant, bent human finger reaching across the gap on the park's Orange Trail.

At nine feet high and four feet wide, the structure acts as equal parts trail connection and psychological test. Pinto perforated the entire steel shell with thousands of half-inch holes. Sunlight filters through the rusted metal skin in pinpoint patterns during the day, but the real trick is beneath your boots: the floor deck uses the same perforated metal grating, leaving you looking straight through the floor to a 40-foot drop to the gorge below.

Over thirty-five years later, the metal skin has oxidized to a deep reddish-brown that bleeds into the tree canopy near Livezey Dam. Framed by hand-built WPA-era stone staircases on either side of the ravine, it looks less like a commissioned piece of public art and more like a piece of forgotten industrial machinery left behind in the woods.