American Bridge Company

Founded in 1900 as a J.P. Morgan-backed merger of 28 steel companies, American Bridge runs out of Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, just west of Pittsburgh. The firm builds and rehabilitates long-span bridges, marine structures and other heavy civil work, and it self-performs most of its field labor. It takes work as a prime contractor, design-builder, joint-venture partner and specialty sub across transportation and industrial projects. Named jobs on its own site include the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge over the Hudson River and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge; predecessor Keystone Bridge Company completed the Eads Bridge in 1874. American Bridge is part of Southland Holdings and holds AISC Advanced Certified Steel Erector status. Headcount runs in the several hundreds, with annual revenue reported around $328 million.

A company town came out of the early years. The fabricating plant American Bridge completed in southwestern Pennsylvania in 1903 was then the largest facility of its kind anywhere, and the settlement that grew around it took the name Ambridge.

The structure list reads like a survey of American engineering: the Hell Gate Arch in 1916, the Empire State Building in 1930, the Bayonne Bridge in 1931, the original San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 1936, the Mackinac Bridge superstructure in 1957. The firm held the prime contract for the cables and suspended spans of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, at the time the largest air-spinning project ever undertaken. Since the Mid-Hudson Bridge in 1929 it reports having air-spun well over half a million miles of cable.

The work has not stayed on water. American Bridge completed the superstructure of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in 1964, along with Launch Complexes 40 and 41 and more than 600 Minuteman missile sites. In 1973 it started the New River Gorge Bridge, a 1,700-foot pin-to-pin arch that was then the longest in the world, carrying a deck roughly 900 feet above the water.

Recent decades have kept the same character. The American Bridge/Fluor joint venture finished the Bay Bridge Self-Anchored Suspension superstructure in 2014, using a purpose-built 1,750-metric-tonne shearleg crane. The same year the company completed what it describes as the world’s largest observation wheel, in Las Vegas. It has also delivered the only two projects of their type – the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge deck replacement in Halifax, known as the Big Lift, and the earlier Lions Gate Bridge rehabilitation in Vancouver.

Current work includes the Summit addition to the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, roughly 21,000 tons of structural steel, and rehabilitation of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge in New York. Within Southland Holdings the sister companies are Oscar Renda Contracting, Johnson Bros. Corporation, Mole Constructors, Southland Contracting and Heritage Materials. Across its history the reach runs to all fifty states and sixty foreign countries.