Morgantown, WV
Morgantown Municipal sits on a plateau above the Monongahela River, three miles east of downtown. The town's defining institution is West Virginia University, founded 1867 as the Agricultural College of West Virginia and still the state's flagship — the football stadium holds 60,000, three times Morgantown's downtown population. Morgantown is also the home of the Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system: opened 1975 as a federal-experimental demonstration, it remains one of only two automated rubber-tired transit networks in the world (the other is at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport). Five stations, 73 small driverless cars, point-to-point routing on demand — a working glimpse of a transit future that the rest of the country never built. The airport runway is 5,199 feet on a single 18/36 strip. Field elevation 1,248 feet. The terminal is named for Walter L. "Bill" Hart, a Morgantown attorney and longtime airport board chair.
Frank Lloyd Wright's 1935 house cantilevered directly over a waterfall on Bear Run, in the Laurel Highlands southeast of Pittsburgh. Built for the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh department-store fame as a weekend retreat, Fallingwater is widely considered the finest American house of the 20th century — a horizontal stack of poured-concrete terraces that float over the stream rather than facing it. Smithsonian named it one of "28 places to visit before you die." The cantilevers were already sagging by the late 1990s; a 2002 structural restoration added post-tensioning cables to save the house from collapsing into its own waterfall.
The Blackwater River drops 57 feet over a sandstone ledge in a deep gorge in the West Virginia highlands, its water stained amber-black — not by mud but by tannic acid leached from the fallen hemlock and red spruce needles upstream, the same thing that darkens tea. The falls anchor Blackwater Falls State Park, near the high, cold twin towns of Davis and Thomas, in a corner of West Virginia that feels more like Canada than Appalachia: it sits at over 3,000 feet, gets heavy snow, and the nearby Dolly Sods Wilderness is a windswept high plateau of bog, heath, and stunted spruce that mimics a far-northern ecosystem. The amber falls plunging into the dark gorge are the signature.
The Allegheny River (from the north) and the Monongahela River (from the south) meet at the western tip of downtown Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River, which then runs 981 miles to the Mississippi. Point State Park sits at the confluence — 36 acres of riverfront with a 150-foot fountain at the very tip, marking the site of the colonial-era Fort Pitt (1761) and the earlier French Fort Duquesne (1754) that was the casus belli for the French and Indian War. The Pittsburgh skyline rises directly behind the Point — the Steel City's downtown is wedged into the triangle of land between the rivers, a uniquely compact American downtown bordered on two sides by water. The Roberto Clemente Bridge (yellow), the Andy Warhol Bridge (yellow), and the Rachel Carson Bridge (yellow) — the Three Sisters — cross the Allegheny into the North Shore, where PNC Park and Acrisure Stadium sit on the riverbank.
The crash site of United Flight 93, the fourth hijacked aircraft on September 11, 2001 — and the only one not to reach its target, brought down in a Pennsylvania field after the 40 passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers. The plane impacted at 563 mph into reclaimed strip-mine land near Shanksville. The memorial design is restrained and powerful: a Tower of Voices with 40 wind chimes (one per passenger and crew member), a curving white marble Wall of Names along the flight path, and a black slate boulder marking the impact point. Visitor center opened on the tenth anniversary.