Wabash piers have a new owner after 2 years on the market

The piers that once supported the Wabash Bridge across the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh have been sold.

What happens next to the huge, stone towers that rise about 45 feet above the river between Downtown and the South Side remains to be seen.

The all-cash sale was through a third-party intermediary. A.J. Pantoni, director of industrial services for Hanna Langholz Willson Ellis, signed a non-disclosure agreement. For that reason, the final price, the owner and their plans for the piers haven’t been disclosed.

The asking price was $300,000 for the pair, Pantoni said.

“We had multiple, bona fide offers,” Pantoni said. “We had some interested buyers ask about putting a house up there. Someone asked about putting a heliport on it. A lot of folks in recreation were interested.”

He said someone expressed interest in resurrecting the idea of putting a zipline between Mount Washington and Downtown Pittsburgh.

“Now it will be left to the new owners to explore the possibilities,” he said.

The piers are what remains of the Wabash Bridge, which was built in 1904 and spanned Downtown to Station Square. The bridge carried the Wabash-Pittsburgh Terminal Railroad from an elevated rail yard and terminal Downtown across the Mon to the Wabash Tunnel that cuts through Mt. Washington. Today, the tunnel is used by vehicle traffic.

The piers were last owned by Graydon Crain, a business owner from Cranberry who bought them at a bankruptcy auction in 1979 for $18,000. Crain died in 2020, and the piers are being sold through a trust from his estate.

They went on the market two years ago, almost to the date, on Feb. 15, 2021.

Before Crain acquired them, they were owned by a nonprofit that was trying to redevelop spaces along the waterfront, Pantoni said.

“In this case we were very fortunate to get a successful ending that the estate was happy with,” Pantoni said.