The Pitt Street Bridge is the surviving stub of the old crossing over Cove Inlet between Mount Pleasant's Old Village and Sullivan's Island, and its line is older than the structure. In 1777 troops under General Christopher Gadsden finished a bridge across the marsh nearly a mile long, laid on barrels and topped with iron sheets. In 1898 its decayed remains were replaced by a drawbridge for Charleston's electric trolleys, which carried passengers from a ferry landing near Alhambra Hall along Pitt Street and over the inlet to the beaches of Sullivan's Island and the Isle of Palms. On February 17, 1864, the eight-man crew of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley crossed the old bridge from Mount Pleasant for the last time on their way to Breach Inlet.
The trolley bridge was widened for cars in 1923, and its rails came up in 1927, when it became the road bridge known as the Pitt Street Bridge. By the mid-1930s it was judged too narrow, and the state planned a swing bridge about a mile east, named for Ben Sawyer. When the Ben Sawyer Bridge opened on June 18, 1945, the Pitt Street Bridge closed to traffic.
In 1950 the Town of Mount Pleasant took over the bridge from Charleston County and made it a fishing pier. A fire later burned much of it, and Hurricane Hugo, whose eye passed over it around midnight on September 22, 1989, blew most of the rest away. The remaining span ends abruptly in the middle of Cove Inlet at the end of the causeway greenway called Pickett Park.
Getting there
32.7690, -79.8619
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