Point State Park

Point State Park occupies the 36-acre tip of the Golden Triangle where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio. It is a National Historic Landmark and one of the finest riverside parks in any American city. The great fountain at the very point — capable of shooting a jet 150 feet into the air — marks the exact confluence, and on a clear day the view upstream along both rivers, with the Pittsburgh skyline behind you, is genuinely spectacular.

The Fort Pitt Museum, within the park, covers the colonial and revolutionary history of the site with well-mounted exhibits and original artefacts. The Fort Pitt Blockhouse, a small octagonal stone building next to the museum, is the last surviving remnant of the 18th-century fort and one of the oldest buildings in western Pennsylvania. The park's riverfront lawns are busy in summer with walkers, cyclists, and people watching river traffic; the Gateway Clipper fleet runs river cruises from the nearby dock. Free admission to the park; museum has a modest entry fee.

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A story
Fort Pitt, built by the British at the confluence of the three rivers in 1764, was the largest British fort in North America at the time of its construction. Its location was considered so strategically valuable that the French had previously built Fort Duquesne on the same spot, and both the Seven Years' War and the early stages of the American Revolution turned in part on control of this triangle of land. All that physically survives is the Fort Pitt Blockhouse, built in 1764, which is the oldest extant structure in western Pennsylvania.

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